Writing Otherwise

Writing otherwise is a collection of essays by established feminist and cultural critics interested in experimenting with new styles of expression. Leading figures in their field, such as Marianne Hirsch, Lynne Pearce, Griselda Pollock, Carol Smart, Jackie Stacey and Janet Wolff, all risk new ways of writing about themselves and their subjects. Aimed at both general and academic readers interested in how scholarly writing might be more innovative and creative, this collection introduces the personal, the poetic and the experimental into the frame of cultural criticism. This collection of essays is highly interdisciplinary and contributes to debates in sociology, history, anthropology, art history, cultural and media studies and gender studies.

This exciting and innovative collection presses up against the limits of what scholarship can be and its contributors are not afraid to pause where necessary to explore and describe those limits. The turn to the personal that has been so important for feminist and queer criticism is just one of the many richly varied voices and styles through which they insist on experimental writing not as a departure from scholarship but as itself a critical method. Moreover, their attention to writing offers unexpected vantage points on affect theory, including such elusive categories as sensation, mood, and atmosphere. Reading Writing otherwise feels at once enabling and deeply pleasurable.Ann Cvetkovich, Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at AustinIn this fascinating collection diverse scholars introduce readers to the imaginative resources liberated by writing somewhat aslant of conventional disciplinary guidelines. The essays highlight intense personal engagements, present intriguing visual imagery or in other ways depict the poetic and elusive resonance of emotions. It is reassuring and delightful to read these lucid essays, confirming once more the potential for working creatively in academia, especially when choosing to trouble its traditional styles and frameworks. Lynne Segal, author of Out of Time: The Pleasures & Perils of AgeingThe essays in Writing otherwise provide indispensable models for academics attempting to combine theoretical savvy with readable, inventive prose.Susan Gubar, Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Indiana University, writes the ‘Living with Cancer’ blog in The New York TimesWriting otherwise grabbed me by the collar and pulled me into a world where I wouldn’t have minded staying. In this innovative collection, ‘writing otherwise’ is always sutured to ‘knowing otherwise’, whether historically (through use of memoir and fiction), textually (through playing with form and voice), or via the body (through touch and engagement with others). Drawing on the venerable feminist and queer traditions of interdisciplinarity and intersubjectivity, this collection shows us the difference that writing otherwise makes: it keeps the writer open to new ways of knowing; pulls her back to the past to see the future anew; forces a confrontation with dislocation and mortality; and yet marries loss and optimism in shifting cartographies of difference. Writing otherwise is an invitation to respond in kind in one’s own work, an invitation I now feel better equipped to accept.Clare Hemmings, Professor of Feminist Theory, at LSE's Gender Institute

Jackie Stacey is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of ManchesterJanet Wolff is Professor Emerita of Cultural Sociology at the University of Manchester