Heroines, new edition (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents)

by Kate Zambreno

What does it mean to be aware of one's own preservation? To preserve the self. I save myself, my days. This archive of the self. These women who haunt me, I want to save them too, to carry them forward with me.

Our posts are often self-reflective, interrogating the form itself, threatening often to quit it, worrying that it deviates from our “real” writing. The girls who cry Woolf. All these fragmented, image-strewn, public records of self which are sometimes about the disintegration of self. We are nauseous, narcissists.

For the woman is deemed as dangerous who goes out of bounds, who lacks boundaries (by writing the self, the body, the emotion). The woman writer who dares to spill out of bounds is disciplined, contained.

So, the decision to write the private in public, it is a political one. It is a counterattack against this censorship. To tell our narratives, the truth of our experiences. To write our flawed, messy selves. To fight against the desire to be erased. Why try to make these personal confessions public? Why write one's diary in public? To counter this shaming and guilt project. To refuse to swallow. To refuse to scratch ourselves out. To refuse to be censored, to be silent. Or to circle around that silence, like a traumatic scene.