The Voice of Women Writers in the Development of Literary Studies

The “voices” of women writers in the development of literary studies are still crucial issues for women’s and gender studies today. It is only in the last few decades, and mostly thanks to the lively dialogue between second and third wave feminism(s), that women’s and gender studies have been retracing and examining women’s genealogies and contexts. They have been looking for a multifaceted women’s tradition that is not only an “act of survival” but a radical revision of the (western) canon and its “holds over us”. Women’s and gender studies teach us that even when we deal with female genealogy and literature there may occur the risk of producing a totalizing narrative, favouring a process of “theorization” which would silence the differences among women themselves, as well as their differences from us, from the present day. According to an intersectional methodology in which the use of gender interacts with other paradigms of interpretation such as class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, national origin and age, they have shown how the subject and the self are dynamically construed through the intersection of different and sometimes opposed cultural formations. Hence to read women’s “voices” and “genealogies” is to disclose a series of debates, negotiations and even contradicting viewpoints, which still deserve to be explored, since literature, and we believe women’s literature in particular, continues to be a fruitful means of education, knowledge, criticism, and public engagement.