For me, writing is a gesture of the body, a gesture of creativity, a working from the inside out. My feminism is grounded not on incorporeal abstraction but on corporeal realities. The material body is center, and central. The body is the ground of thought.

Gloria Anzaldúa, “Preface: Gestures of the Body-—Escribiendo para idear”, Light in the Dark / Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality

Let me begin by saying that I came to theory because I was hurting-the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.

bell hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice”

“Life Writing as a Democratizing Practice” project looked at life writing as a democratizing genre: an activist genre that has a higher potential for generating and performing transformative agency from the social margin, due to its accessibility and openness. We engaged with hybrid feminist and queer writing, which crosses boundaries between life writing, fiction, and theoretical writing, and explored its relevance for the Western socio-political discourse on democracy and social justice in the 20th Century. Thinking of literary writing as cultural activism, we looked at the interplay between political structures and hierarchies and social activism performed from the margins through activities such as life writing and theorizing from personal experience.

We focused on queer and feminist writing of the period of Second-wave feminism and the time of its “transformation” to Third-wave feminism, between the late 1960s to the 1990s. This period was chosen for its theorizing of the importance of the personal narrative for the political existence, reflected in the tenet “The personal is political”, as well as its particularly marked contribution of feminist and LGBT political-activist movements to the democratic changes and progress in the Western sphere. We analyzed selected writing within the political context of the period and in connection to the specific movements and the achievements made in the political and legal spheres in terms of gender, sexuality, race and class equality and visibility. Through individual and group work we explored connections between the pressing social issues in the second half of the 20th century and the current discourses on gender, queerness and race.

Within the project, the participants conducted independent and group research work on the topics of their own interest, engaging with examples from either their own context or from the context they are working in or wish to learn more about. They present the results of their research applying the life writing strategies we discussed in a creative and personalized way. This blog is our group’s final product that features a collection of the individual projects’ outcomes.