In The Body and the Book, Julia Kasdorf examines her ethnic identity as a Mennonite writer. In her essay, "Bringing Home the Work," Kasdorf explores what it means to be a Mennonite writer writing for a Mennonite audience. She states, "I began to get migraine headaches...It didn't take much for me to realize that they were related to the prospect of publication, especially to the fear of my work being read by my family and the Mennonite relatives about whom I'd written" (Kasdorf 39). Kasdorf details the anxiety many ethnic writers have, and perhaps in general what writers of marginalized groups have about their work. The nature of marginalization often forces its members to bear the burden of representing their entire group, even if such an act is impossible to do. The anxiety Kasdorf has surrounding her published work as a Mennonite writer stems from the fear that she's getting it "wrong," and that the Mennonites in her audience will claim that what she wrote is not representative of their experience. She states, "It is essentially a fear of abandonment and dislocation that reaches back to the time when an outspoken dissenter––whether she was forced to leave or to conform to the community's will––lost dearly, either in terms of her context in the world or in terms of her own voice" (Kasdorf 43).
I am also familiar with this anxiety. Most of my poetry focuses on themes of reclamation in terms of my sexuality, body and gender. While I have some fear of what people who are heterosexual and/or male-identified will say about my work, most of the anxiety about my work stems from a fear of representing lesbian and queer women in an inaccurate way. I, like Kasdorf, have a fear that showing my work to other members of my communities will end up in isolation or otherwise some kind of anger with my work. However, my anxiety doesn't exactly mirror Kasdorf's experience; although I have this fear, it has yet to reach fruition. Where Kasdorf has been met with some anger, I've been met with support from my community.
I agree that expecting one person to represent a whole group is not realistic or fair. Sometimes I think (a little naively) that the best way to combat that is to get a lot of people from the same minority group to share more frequently, but of course there are issues surrounding that as well, not to mention that it takes a lot of courage to speak up sometimes. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
ReplyDeleteI feel this way too sometimes. I think this feeling is natural and important, because it forces one to think about the whole, and to used restraint at points.
ReplyDeleteBut I also think it's important not to let these feelings stop you from saying how you feel. In the same way an individual has responsibility to represent the group has a responsibility to acknowledge and listen to the individual.
Hayley--very interesting connection you make between Kasdorf's anxiety about representing Mennonites and your own anxiety about representing lesbian and queer women in an inaccurate way. It seems that there are several layers of audience for these kinds of works--and in-group audience who is very sensitive to the nuances of the representation and a broader audience who is just interested or curious, with many stereotypes of their own. Artists need to think first of what they want to express, but as Jacob points out above, all artists are part of a community, too, though the ethnic writer is much more keenly aware of it. Sometimes it's really tough to find a balance between personal and group identity.
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