ed for you and to make it conform to your own wishes . . .” This observation by the editors is based on their assertion that the essay “[emerged] from a patriarchal European/white origin.” In this book, Boetcher Joeres further notes that the elusiveness of the essay, “but more [importantly] its fringe nature, might well make the essay appeal to those who are themselves on the fringe.” Essays have helped me to expand my thinking in multiple structural ways at once. I am contemplative, analytical, playful, experimental. If my writing follows any sort of process or ritual at all, it would be in the things I am surrounded by and need to see/use in order to start and complete a piece of work: dictionaries, notepads, a thesaurus, novels, biographies, newspapers, and (figuratively speaking) a few dead existentialists (Nietzsche, Marcel, Sartre, Beauvoir.) Ultimately, it’s learning how to blend my style of writing (meandering, textured, resonant) with the more “accepted” forms/language created by history’s literary doyens. A recent exchange I had with an acquaintance who lectures at a university here in England, was on the topic of inaccessible language. I’d been working on two essays—one regarding women’s body image and how our opinions about this is shaped by internal and external forces, and the other about gender as it relates to the pioneering work of Judith Butler. It was my view that the language of academia is inherently exclusionary by its very structure: didactic, pedagogic, confining. Whether or not academicians set out to construct the language of their profession in such a way that “writing like a woman” gains no truly meaningful foothold, is an area that has been debated for many years. Thus, the allure of the personal essay—the balance it strikes between the formal and informal modes of writing—is hard to ignore. Although the view of my aforementioned acquaintance was that the rigorousness of academic language is essential in challenging, developing and enhancing critical thinking skills and preparing students to undertake extremely complex pieces of work, I didn’t fully buy it. Her reasoning seemed rehearsed, a weak justification for “gate-keeping,” a way to protect some sort of secret code. (Although in fairness to the lecturer’s position, the argument articulated in the introduction to Morley and Walsh’s 1995 work: Feminist Academics: Creative Agents for Change, puts her sentiments in a slightly different context. The authors note: “In a culture where emotional literacy is discursively located in opposition to reason, feminist academics frequently have to repress pain and anger, and hide the contradictions and tensions that arise from being members of subordinate groups in powerful institutions.”)
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