Leaky Writing
Agnes Bosanquet and Alison Pullen (Macquarie University)
30 November 2015, TIME 10-4. E6A116, Macquarie University
To participate please email: alison.pullen@mq.edu.au by November 1st
How do we create an oppositional worldview, a consciousness, an identity, a
standpoint that exists not only as that struggle which also opposes dehumanization
but as that movement which enables creative, expansive self-actualization? (bell
hooks, 1990, p 15)
This question captures the historical tensions and future aspirations of feminist
resistance. Whilst not isolating other acts of resistance or the context of significant struggles
for social change, this workshop focuses on academic writing as a site of resistance. In the
current context of neoliberalism, with its emphasis on performance measures, research
outputs, impact metrics and funding targets, resistant academic writing is more important
than ever. This will be the 3rd workshop of a series of international ‘Writing Differently’
workshops (with Mary Phillips (Bristol, UK) and Nancy Harding (Bradford, UK). It is funded
by the Department of Marketing and Management, Macquarie University.
The particular focus of this workshop is ‘leaky writing’, that is writing that exceeds
the boundaries of convention and emerges from a corporeal place, emphasising our porous,
overflowing, fluid embodiment. Years after Vicky Kirby (1992) and Elizabeth Grosz (1992)
explored the body as organization of matter, the body’s role in writing is well placed. Yet the
body is more often than not seen as a body whole, whereas at the level of writing, the body
becomes contained within our reflexive capacity to acknowledge it. Following feminist
thinkers who exhort women to write themselves (Cixous, 1981) as leaky beings par
excellence (Clément and Kristeva, 2001), the fluids of the body are both materially and
symbolically important to writing. In this session we focus on the ways that leaky bodies defy
boundaries (Shildrick, 1997), especially of mind/body in the production of knowledge. We
perform and practice writing that conveys the leakiness of fleshy bodies; the bile, mucus,
blood, vomit, piss, shit that resist containment. But, as Longhurst’s corporeographies remind
us, bodies and their socially contingent meanings are understood within their temporal,
spacial and cultural contexts.
How can the lived body in all of its messy, leaky, and sensory corporeality become
theory and activism? This workshop continues our desire to problematise writing and the
ways in which knowledge is generated and legitimized through leaking bodies. This writing
allows the intrusion of the author into the text (Höpfl, 2007), challenges phallogocentrism
(Phillips, et al., 2014), and recognises the materiality of the writer (Pullen, 2006). For those
who pursue academic writing, the ways in which writing is cleansed, sanitized and sterilised
has been recognised (Pullen and Rhodes, 2008). Embodied writing enables that which leaks
to saturate our writing and knowledge production. Experimental writing that breaches the
norms of academia makes trouble for power regimes (Sayers and Jones, 2015). This is
writing as activism (Vachhani, 2015). How can writing and the bodies that write become
mutually recalcitrant? What is such writing capable of? How can leaky writing challenge the
institutions that render us compliant to the academic conventions that stifle creativity?
Order of the session
10.30 Writing, leaking – to resist Alison Pullen
10.45 Mucus Agnes Bosanquet
11.15 Inside/Outside Elaine Swan
11.45 ‘In deference to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve’: Virginia Woolf
and writing ‘what you wish to write’. Deborah Jones
12.15 Bottoms up! Luc Peters
12.45 Lunch
1.45 Feeling ficto-criticism Carl Rhodes
2.15 Dog writing Janet Sayers
2.45 Writing: parts, collectives
3.45 Wrap up Agnes and Alison
5pm ACSCOS Smoking Ceremony and Welcome drinks.
References
Cixous, H. (1981). The laugh of the Medusa. K. Cohen and P. Cohen (Trans.). In E. Marks
and I. de Courtivron (Eds.), New French feminisms: An anthology (pp 245-264). New York:
Pantheon Books.
Clément, C., and Kristeva, J. (2001). The feminine and the sacred. J. M. Todd (Trans.). New
York: Columbia University Press.
hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender and cultural politics. Boston: South End Press.
Höpfl, H. (2007). The codex, the codicil and the codpiece: Some thoughts on diminution and
elaboration in identity formation. Gender, Work & Organization, 14(6), 619-632.
Longhurst, R. (2001). Bodies: Exploring fluid boundaries (Vol. 11). Psychology Press.
Pullen, A., & Rhodes, C. (2008). Dirty writing. Culture and Organization, 14(3), 241-259.
Pullen, A., & Rhodes, C. (2015). Writing, the Feminine and Organization. Gender, Work &
Organization, 22(2), 87-93.
Phillips, M., Pullen, A., & Rhodes, C. (2014). Writing organization as gendered practice:
Interrupting the libidinal economy. Organization Studies, 35(3), 313-333.
Sayers, J. G., & Jones, D. (2015). Truth Scribbled in Blood: Women's Work, Menstruation
and Poetry. Gender, Work & Organization, 22(2), 94-111.
Shildrick, M. (1997). Leaky bodies and boundaries: Feminism, postmodernism and (bio)
ethics. Psychology Press.