Let's Get TALKIN

I apologize for my disappearance. For the past two weeks, I have been touring and competing but now I am back and ready to Feminewz you all.

One of the events I competed at was the Soundbites Poetry Festival in Times Square. I was on a team (The Meta-Four) with three beautiful poets: Kerri Shaffer, Miles Sandler and James Merenda. As teammates, we write and perform various pieces together and I was lucky enough to have the experience of creating a piece with James that questions sex and gender within literature and writing. We call it “Pseudonym”.

Since it’s a spoken word piece, I won’t transcribe it for you here but I will post the video of the performance when it is put online. I do want to, however, explain the piece and dive into its social questioning, especially in relation to feminism.

The premise of the piece is that I am a woman in the 1850s that is unable to write because of society’s expectation of women during that time. Women were not supposed to be high in academia and although there were women writers during that period, there were also many women who had to take male or androgynous pseudonyms to get their voices heard (most women, of course, were just silenced) . (Not-so-fun fact, I have read that Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre was rejected five times by publishers until she changed her name to the androgynous Currer Bell). On the other hand, James took the stance that male poets (especially spoken word poets) in 2009 are expected to be hard and overly-masculine (aka REALLY LOUD); most aren’t supposed to write sappy, emotional poems and if they do the reaction is mostly “awwwwww” instead of a reaction out of respect and appreciation.

By relating these historical experiences, we came to a conclusion that both women and men, both now and then (I rhymed) have had their voices silenced. And James and I, as people who rely on our words, wanted to show how sex/gender (although it should not be ignored because there are beautiful aspects to those things when they are not used in an oppressive manner) isn’t a clear cut device on deciding what words to use and who should be allowed to say what. Most of us, whatever gender we consider ourselves to be, have logic and emotion. We have language, whatever language we consider ourselves to use, at our disposal. And, if you see the scope of it, you can see language as this entity that encompasses the masculine, the feminine and all that in between. Everyone has and can use all the words we want, not just the ones society tells us are supposed to come out of our throats due to what we have down below (and we all know even what we have down below doesn’t always constitute us as feminine or masculine anyways).

It has been said that language can be oppressive and in every community, there are words that can be hurtful and disenfranchising. Women know this very well. One example: the female genitalia being called an axe wound. There is no way anyone could tell me naming the vagina that to those exploring and getting comfortable with their bodies is a shot of confidence.
So there is of course weight in language but the majority of the time, I find that weight beautiful. I am conscious of it; I feel it heavy on my tongue as I think everyone should.

As people, as feminists, we should dive right into language and explore it from every which way we can. No one owns the sentences you are allowed to put together and even with all those things America can be criticized for, we have freedom of speech which is no doubt a magnificent privilege. And although those who live in countries without that freedom may possess the mind and capabilities to question and speak from the entire language spectrum, but it is much more difficult for them to do so openly. So I think it’s time for us who have the privilege to dialogue openly about dialogue to…well…dialogue.

We need to speak about the expectation of both women and men when it comes to language and literature. In our poem, James and I question how dangerous history can be to the stories of our women and the present can be to the emotions of our men. And I want to know what everyone thinks. How dangerous is it? How many voices have been lost? How has that shaped what women and men are expected to discuss and how they are expected to verbally carry themselves. If we all look really deep, we can see how all of these questions affect our day to day lives.

And honestly, it’s a really important topic to break down because there are people all over the world who have and still have to hide under a pseudonym. So let’s get talkin’!

Anyone can start by e-mailing me at TracySoren@gmail.com and I will get KT in on it too!