F(r)ictions: Women Writing in Working Class Contexts. (Research Articles/Rapports De Recherche)

This paper engages with working class women's discussions about cultural production. A beginning place for this project explores the gaps and absences whose narratives are produced and whose stories are taken up cultural contexts. As an example of narratives that take working class women into account, I read Dorothy Allison's memoir for what she contributes to stories about young girl's experiences with growing up and learning. Cet article se penche sur les discussions des femmes de classe ouvriere sur la production culturelle. Un aspect de ce projet examine les lacunes et absences savoir quels recits sent produits et quelles histoires sont placees dans differents contextes culturels. Je prends comme exemple de recits tenant compte du vecu des femmes de classe ouvriere le memoire de Dorothy Allison, afin d'y prelever ses contributions aux recits de I'apprentissage et de la jeunesse d'une jeune fille. ********** Literary histories and theories still regularly appear which women writers as producers of culture remain invisible... (Friedman, 1998, p. 32) In her book, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, Susan Stanford Friedman calls attention to gendered gaps cultural theorizing: women's cultural production continues to be marginalized within literary and historical frameworks. Feminist theory has, however, concentrated on women's roles as cultural producers, recognizing the importance of this work for thinking through questions about gender, subjectivity, power and oppression. As Friedman goes on to argue, it is important that discussions about narrative not be foreclosed while there are still so many who have been denied the authoritative voice and position of the storyteller by the dominant symbolic order (Friedman, 1998, P. 233). Taken up as a critical form of women's cultural production, Friedman's work positions narrative within contexts that engage with race and ethnicity complicating feminist discussions about gender. In this paper, my focus is twofold. In one way I question (as work such as Friedman's on gender, race and cultural production prompts me to do) how socially and culturally produced notions of working-class women function ways that tend to restrict some people and not others from participating as producers of culture. And, another way, this paper takes up working class women's discussions about what it means to participate as producers of culture within socially confining contexts. Dorothy Allison's narrative, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995), characterizes a way of thinking through both of these concerns, and so I read her work for what she says about the barriers to and possibilities of working class women's cultural production. Thinking through critical perspectives about class social and cultural contexts, Valerie Walkerdine examines dominant social theories as a way of explaining how working class perspectives have been culturally undermined. In her book, Daddy's Girl, Walkerdine identifies one of the crucial problematics the way that class has been constructed within binary terms. She elaborates that in a number of domains, middle classness has become synonymous with normality and working classness has been viewed as a deviant pathology, to be corrected if possible by correctional strategies that will make working-class subjects more like their middle-class counterparts (Walkerdine, 1997, p. 29) (1) This kind of theorizing treats the proletariat [as having] some lack or defect (Walkerdine, 1997, p. 31) and seeks to ground the reasons for making working-class lives invisible to and from cultural perspectives. But, as Dorothy Allison writes Skin: Talking About Sex. Class and Literature (1994), the push for such polari zed understandings of subjectivity, through the presumptions underlying dominant narratives, needs to be challenged. Allison's critical writing connects authority to a question about gender, class, and power so that there might be a way to think through complicated and multiple subject positionings literature. …

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