I agree with Audre Lorde when she asserts that “it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes” (854). It is incredibly rarely that you encounter a straight man speaking out about gay rights, or a mother speaking out for Fathers for Justice! The role of the oppressor is incredibly passive in this sense, which reminds me of Cixous’ argument that maleness is associated with activity, and femaleness is associated with passivity. If the oppressor is guilty of being passive, surely the female is also guilty of the same charge? The readings this week have lead me to think about the relation of activity and passivity, and of writing and how it relates to feminist considerations. The act of writing is in itself active, and historically it has been incredibly hard for the female voice to be heard and listened to. It is funny to think about how many women writers have chosen to write under a male name, for example Mary Anne Evans writing as George Eliot, yet I wonder how many male writers have written as women? As I say, the act of writing is in this sense active, yet does publishing under a male name mean Evans was passive in her approach? In publishing under a male pseudonym ensured her work was taken seriously, but did she have a duty to feminism to insist upon a position in the literary world? It continues today – I think I mentioned in a previous blog post about how J.K Rowling has recently published under a male pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. I wonder what her motivation was for renouncing any association with feminine authorship. Gilbert and Gubar mention how “until quite recently the woman writer has had (if only unconsciously) to define herself as a mysterious creature who resides behind the angel or monster” (812), yet obviously the woman writer is still hiding behind something. The issue of self-definition is clearly not resolved, then, I would argue.

One final point I would like to pick up on is that, as Lorde points out, it is not our differences that separate us, but “our refusal to recognize those differences” (855). Differences in society, not just gender relations, can only be resolved if the participants are able to accept difference and work through it. Lorde also talks about “a fear of lesbians, or of being accused of being a lesbian” (858), and in a similar way, Cixous also talks about the inversion of the same fear in men who are “terrified of homosexuality” (352) and that man “fear[s] being a woman” (352). From this point of view then, perhaps we should also be talking about not the things that separate us, but the things (fears) that unite us.