ERIN WUNKER'S NOTES FROM A FEMINIST KILLJOY
The opening of Erin Wunker’s illuminating, transformative book of essays is reminiscent of Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter.” Where he wishes that his infant will possess some physical beauty (but not “overmuch”) and, maddeningly, that she will refrain from being too opinionated, Wunker addresses her baby daughter with a powerful feminist corrective: “May you be comfortable in your body and know it is yours.” Yes. This.
Wunker’s essays explore gender violence, the healing alliances (and potential for wounding betrayals) of female friendship, and the complexities of feminist mothering. Each of these essays uses a strategy of thinking out loud—in dialogue with other writers and thinkers, with friends, with family. While deploying theory, Wunker avoids abstraction. Too often, as she points out, academic writing is about talking to, or even at, an audience. The opportunity for dialogue is lost. Similarly, in her citational practices Wunker enacts intersectional feminist theorizing while acknowledging her own situatedness. She builds on and builds up arguments; she engages, queries, and pushes observations further, and in doing so she models a critical form that feels more like collaboration, less like ritual combat.
Personal writing can be conflated with confessional writing, confessional writing with self-indulgence, and, especially, an artless narcissism gendered as feminine. Wunker pushes at this association and challenges recent dismissals of personal writing, asking what it means to write “I”—to claim the right to speak from personal experience and believe that it might matter to others, to use “I” as “a site from which we can take stock, take responsibility, and take space if space is needed” (29). Writing in a personal vein exposes the Procrustean constraints of professional norms, the valorization of the “cool and impartial professional reader, writer, teacher, and critic” that graduate school inculcates, at some cost (11). In place of this wholly cerebral writing Wunker gives us glimpses of herself thinking on the page, “holding my breath or staring at the computer screen . . . my heart racing” (67). This is vividly embodied writing, fierce and honest.
The essays on motherhood and friendship are richly memorable, offering up insights and images that have stayed with me. Although Wunker writes that the section on violence was the easiest, in some ways, to write, because she felt compelled to address the subject, I found it the hardest to read because she assesses instances where even the most determined efforts to speak out and hold assailants accountable have been met with widespread disbelief or the failure of legal or extra-judicial processes. Rates of conviction for sexual assault remain dismayingly low.
Notwithstanding the transformation of the law to be more equitable to women who report assault, including limitations on bringing up a complainant’s previous sexual history, there are continuing indignities. The most egregious examples tend to involve Indigenous women, such as the acquittal in Cindy Gladue’s murder, or the revelation that a complainant was jailed, even brought to court in shackles—in the same van as the man on trial for her assault—when there was concern she might not show up to testify. While these very recent cases are outside the scope of Wunker’s analysis, her discussion of sexual violence could be extended to attend to the race and class dimensions that render some women both more systemically vulnerable to male violence and less likely to receive effective assistance and redress from the legal system.
Wunker addresses the range of manifestations of rape culture, which informs the underlying disbelief of women’s reports of assault. I remember a Torts class, years ago, where the gender divide in the class was stark during a heated discussion about sexual violence: the women in the class feared not being believed if they reported assault; the male students feared being falsely accused. How do you discuss sexual violence across this divide?
Wunker describes how Columbia art student Emma Sulkowicz’s mattress project elicited a journalist’s effort to portray text messages that Sulkowicz exchanged with the man she accused of assault as indicators of his innocence, because Sulkowicz sought further contact with him. Trauma responses, Wunker points out, are complex, and they are conditioned by gender norms: “Freeze, Appease. Mend. Tend. Befriend” (92). Recognizing that your personhood has been disregarded, that you have been used instrumentally, can evoke a powerful will to deny and minimize; it can lead to a desire to re-connect in the wake of violence, and this impulse can be used to deny that any injury occurred.
One of the great strengths of Wunker’s approach is that these thoughtful essays exfoliate outwards, creating new connections and possibilities for how we think about motherhood, women’s relationships (literary and otherwise), violence, writing, academia. This is a rich, heady mix of ideas that invites thoughtful engagement, and I hope to have done justice, at least in part, to what she has shared.
The opening of Erin Wunker’s illuminating, transformative book of essays is reminiscent of Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter.” Where he wishes that his infant will possess some physical beauty (but not “overmuch”) and, maddeningly, that she will refrain from being too opinionated, Wunker addresses her baby daughter with a powerful feminist corrective: “May you be comfortable in your body and know it is yours.” Yes. This.
Wunker’s essays explore gender violence, the healing alliances (and potential for wounding betrayals) of female friendship, and the complexities of feminist mothering. Each of these essays uses a strategy of thinking out loud—in dialogue with other writers and thinkers, with friends, with family. While deploying theory, Wunker avoids abstraction. Too often, as she points out, academic writing is about talking to, or even at, an audience. The opportunity for dialogue is lost. Similarly, in her citational practices Wunker enacts intersectional feminist theorizing while acknowledging her own situatedness. She builds on and builds up arguments; she engages, queries, and pushes observations further, and in doing so she models a critical form that feels more like collaboration, less like ritual combat.
Personal writing can be conflated with confessional writing, confessional writing with self-indulgence, and, especially, an artless narcissism gendered as feminine. Wunker pushes at this association and challenges recent dismissals of personal writing, asking what it means to write “I”—to claim the right to speak from personal experience and believe that it might matter to others, to use “I” as “a site from which we can take stock, take responsibility, and take space if space is needed” (29). Writing in a personal vein exposes the Procrustean constraints of professional norms, the valorization of the “cool and impartial professional reader, writer, teacher, and critic” that graduate school inculcates, at some cost (11). In place of this wholly cerebral writing Wunker gives us glimpses of herself thinking on the page, “holding my breath or staring at the computer screen . . . my heart racing” (67). This is vividly embodied writing, fierce and honest.
The essays on motherhood and friendship are richly memorable, offering up insights and images that have stayed with me. Although Wunker writes that the section on violence was the easiest, in some ways, to write, because she felt compelled to address the subject, I found it the hardest to read because she assesses instances where even the most determined efforts to speak out and hold assailants accountable have been met with widespread disbelief or the failure of legal or extra-judicial processes. Rates of conviction for sexual assault remain dismayingly low.
Notwithstanding the transformation of the law to be more equitable to women who report assault, including limitations on bringing up a complainant’s previous sexual history, there are continuing indignities. The most egregious examples tend to involve Indigenous women, such as the acquittal in Cindy Gladue’s murder, or the revelation that a complainant was jailed, even brought to court in shackles—in the same van as the man on trial for her assault—when there was concern she might not show up to testify. While these very recent cases are outside the scope of Wunker’s analysis, her discussion of sexual violence could be extended to attend to the race and class dimensions that render some women both more systemically vulnerable to male violence and less likely to receive effective assistance and redress from the legal system.
Wunker addresses the range of manifestations of rape culture, which informs the underlying disbelief of women’s reports of assault. I remember a Torts class, years ago, where the gender divide in the class was stark during a heated discussion about sexual violence: the women in the class feared not being believed if they reported assault; the male students feared being falsely accused. How do you discuss sexual violence across this divide?
Wunker describes how Columbia art student Emma Sulkowicz’s mattress project elicited a journalist’s effort to portray text messages that Sulkowicz exchanged with the man she accused of assault as indicators of his innocence, because Sulkowicz sought further contact with him. Trauma responses, Wunker points out, are complex, and they are conditioned by gender norms: “Freeze, Appease. Mend. Tend. Befriend” (92). Recognizing that your personhood has been disregarded, that you have been used instrumentally, can evoke a powerful will to deny and minimize; it can lead to a desire to re-connect in the wake of violence, and this impulse can be used to deny that any injury occurred.
One of the great strengths of Wunker’s approach is that these thoughtful essays exfoliate outwards, creating new connections and possibilities for how we think about motherhood, women’s relationships (literary and otherwise), violence, writing, academia. This is a rich, heady mix of ideas that invites thoughtful engagement, and I hope to have done justice, at least in part, to what she has shared.