Writing Feminist Fictions

Instructor: Amna Chaudhary

 

How can writing help us engage in feminist world making? In A Letter to Third World Women Writers, Gloria Anzaldúa says “I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you. To become more intimate with myself and you.”

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In this workshop, we will explore the role of fiction in speaking back to patriarchal histories and building new progressive futures. We will be reading feminist fiction by writers such as Imbolo Mbue, Nawal El Saadawi, and Meena Kandasamy, and studying how their work refuses to depict women of color as passive victims of circumstance, instead choosing to tell stories in which female characters work towards personal and collective liberation.

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Writing Feminist Fictions will encourage participants to write fiction that truly expands our ideas of how women of color resist patriarchy in their everyday navigation of class, race, and gender. We will be discussing how to intertwine personal subjects and political concerns, developing nuanced and thoughtful characters, and reflecting on narrative form and style as tools that can serve to underscore our feminist storytelling. I envision the workshop as a space that supports participants as they continue the vital task of recording what has been erased, rewriting what has been miswritten, and forging intimate solidarities with others as well as with themselves.

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