To Read

Via CultureCat, a great post from a blog I haven't read before but surely will again. I certainly share Holly's aversion to what she calls 'graduate-seminar-speak' (although I have another four, possibly more, years of it to look forward to!). I also share her interest in the subject of personal and political writing, particularly from a perspective that holds the personal/political binary in one hand (for observation and discussion) and the tenet (which I identify with feminism) 'the personal is political' in the other hand (also for observation and discussion). Here's a taster of the piece, which is well worth a read:

It’s become a commonplace to say that the personal is political. What does this mean exactly? Do we take this to mean that one person’s story of an abusive situation, say, becomes “evidence” in the argument setting out the social/political steps that should be taken to reduce such abuse? Or is the political seen as a super-aggregate somehow (not quite sure how this works exactly) of numberless individual sets of experience and points of view? Or does some equivalence relation exist between the two realms, some set of correspondences and metaphorical connections? To what extent is this claim, “the personal is political,” used as a rationalization to legitimize the use of personal experience in social/political discourse (which, by implication, is clearly the superior mode)?

(Emphasis mine).