Writing Women's Communities

The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies

Cynthia G. Franklin

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 1997
• Print ISBN: 9780299156046, 9780299156008
• eBook ISBN: 9780299156039
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Beginning in the 1980s, a number of popular and influential anthologies organized around themes of shared identity—Nice Jewish Girls, This Bridge Called My Back, Home Girls, and others—have brought together women's fiction and poetry with journal entries, personal narratives, and transcribed conversations. These groundbreaking multi-genre anthologies, Cynthia G. Franklin demonstrates, have played a crucial role in shaping current literary studies, in defining cultural and political movements, and in building connections between academic and other communities.
     Exploring intersections and alliances across the often competing categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality, Writing Women's Communities contributes to current public debates about multiculturalism, feminism, identity politics, the academy as a site of political activism, and the relationship between literature and politics.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Writing across Communities
• 2. Another 1981: From This Bridge Called My Back to Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras
• 3. Coming Out and Staying Home: Nice Jewish Girls and Home Girls
• 4. The Making and Unmaking of Asian American Identity: Making Waves and The Forbidden Stitch
• 5. (Un)Common Class Identities in the United States and Britain: Calling Home and The Common Thread
• 6. Around 1996: Re-Placing Identity Politics from the "Racial Paradise" of Hawai'i
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index