AustLit

'In the mid 1970s, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigiray (among others) famously placed a call for women to write their bodies as a way to break the bonds of patriarchal language structures and create a space for women’s writing by using the form now most commonly known as écriture féminine. For the last three years I have written a book called all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body, and what I have discovered is that écriture féminine is not enough. How can écriture féminine describe this particular body, that is genderqueer, and tattooed, and has lost its womb? What if, instead of écriture féminine, there was écriture matière? What if every body, when allowed to write, to tell stories, to speak, was able to enact a form of narrative and civil disobedience, an unerasing of the corporeal from text? This paper is the development of the concept of écriture matière, a call for all bodies to write themselves, as they find themselves, in this moment, now. It is a call to create a generative textual and material space that is anything but exclusionary: a text that matters.'

'Either I am writing my body, or my body is writing me. It’s not always clear which way around it goes. Every day I sit down at my desk, and my fingers move over the keys, and they produce text. They produce a piece of writing that is both memoir and theory, speaking and spoken, signifier and signified. Flesh made of paper–not the neat stacks you buy in blocks, so white it is blue, edges like blades. Flesh made of paper the way it used to be made: it is clear that this page was once wood. There are remnants, splinters that make my pen jump. The colour is a softened yellow, plied through with light brown. There is a pulpy smell; organic and full of mountain air, like I am breathing mist, like the words written here are cooling my lungs, then warming to match the temperature of blood, of me. Its edges invite my touch. Its edges are soft, torn things that flake away as I write. Flesh made of paper, paper made of wood; I am interleaved and dreaming of dirt and green things and blood. ' (Author's introduction)