Opening the Doors of Adjacent Rooms

Written by Sloan

In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf tells her reader that the catalyst for the piece was her being tasked with giving a lecture on the topic of ‘Woman and Fiction.’ She considers the possibilities of what such a topic could mean.  “....woman and what they are like; of it might mean women and the fiction they write; or women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean somehow that they are all inextricably mixed together and you want to consider them in that light.”  Given that these lines appear in the first paragraph on the first page of A Room Of One’s Own it should not be surprising that it draws the reader in and begins to challenge the reader to think or ever overthink the topic. Change women to any other recognizable group or identity and consider that these same questions still arise. They multiply in complexity. Then consider these various perspectives as they intersect. The intersectionality of compounded identities. Now replace fiction with any other style of writing. Move out of the literary and into the humanities, the social sciences and the liberal arts. Ask again, is it a question of taste, or is it investigation of self-portrayal; or a critique of the popular perceptions written by the outsider.  It is the inextricable mix of the three which underscores the power of interdisciplinary work and the need for intersectionality in academia. While Woolf writes from the focused perspective of a white woman in 1928 she touches on the truths of what any individual or group requires as the prerequisite of a voice. Elevation from poverty and a certain level of esteem from those louder voices. Yet missing in the model is that women are not a monolith. Genres are not determined by who writes them but by the content inside.  Feminism and feminist theory, whether in history or political science or anthropology or sociology or theology do not represent a singular style of writing or style. The same must be said of critical theory or post-colonial models.  It is insufficient for us to create rooms of our own if we will not invite others in. Nor can we choose to spend our whole lives in our own rooms, lest they become echo chambers. So we must seek dialogues where we aren’t experts or enthusiasts, but simply curious or unsure. We should ask to be invited into other rooms and appreciate them rather than looking around thinking how would have arranged the furniture instead.  In a later passage in her, book Woolf muses that that certainly had the equal educational opportunity been extended to them it is likely that many women could have produced works as good as Shakespeare. What she leaves unsaid is that these hypothetical writers would not have produced the same works as Shakespeare did. Experiences shape the questions we ask and the interests we pursue. When academic disciplines embrace cross-pollination of ideas and perspectives it goes beyond just including more people in the category of esteem or intelligencia, rather the content of these categories expands, grows more nuanced and can offer better solutions to the conflicts in our pluralistic world.

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