Showing posts with label jackie wang. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jackie wang. Show all posts

Friday, 14 November 2014

advice

The more I come into contact with these spheres of legitimacy or respectability, the more I feel a disjunction between how I identify and the contexts that I exist in.

[...]

I guess I do have a confidence or a level of trust in myself and in my writing that enables me to write in a way that sounds self-assured even when I feel like I'm overwhelmed by self-doubt. I don't acknowledge the validity of anything I do and constantly cut myself down and beat myself up and feel unfree. I should be freer. I think that I have an unconscious willfulness.
Self-doubt is usually the point of departure for a lot of my work. I always have to write through that doubt. Sometimes I sit down with an idea for an essay, and I'm so paralyzed by self-doubt and that I have to incorporate the doubt into whatever I'm working on in some way, or else I can’t move beyond it. I resent that I have to do this, but I also question the motivations for bracketing that experience because the excision of self-doubt is political (in that it’s gendered and racialized). And a lot of women are plagued by self-doubt and specifically anxiety around writing or asserting any kind of authority in their writing. Owning that doubt can be a political gesture.

[...]

Oh my gosh. It's totally crazy-making, the world, the writing world, especially as a woman. I feel like the only way to not let it corrode you psychically is to not be embattled with these patriarchs and gatekeepers, to not seek recognition from the white male literary establishment. That's a lot easier said than done. There's an erotic dimension to this power dynamic, and the women who are embattled with these patriarchs sometimes have intimate relationships with the men who are in positions of power. The closer you get to that power, the easier it is to be taken advantage of. Proximity can destroy you. It’s easier for me to maintain distance because I'm not very interested in men romantically.
I don't really put my hopes in the literary world. I'm never surprised when it comes out that there's all this sexism in it. I have one foot in the literary world and one foot in another world, the political world maybe. I've never really felt that the forms of life that I am looking for or that I'm trying to create will emerge out of the literary world. Oftentimes I feel like it's full of people who only care about social capital. There's nastiness in any world or subculture but I never really felt that the people in the literary world are my people even though I probably spend more time in a literary context than anywhere else. Maybe my disidentification with the literary establishment enables me to maintain healthy distance.
What has enabled me to maintain my sanity over the years is being part of a strong feminist friend group, especially since living in Baltimore. I really don't know where I would be without that grounding in my life. If it weren’t for my feminist crew there would be no way for me to confirm that what I think and experience is valid or real. It must be really hard for people who don't have that because the psychic isolation can drive you insane, make you feel that you don't exist and that none of your problems are real.


Jackie Wang - Interview 



also, cf. the glosswatch: 'It’s no justification for telling the rest of us to keep ourselves under wraps. It’s hard enough finding a way to speak to begin with.'