A pesar de haber escrito una de las verdaderas obras maestras de la ciencia ficción, The female man, Joanna Russ es una autora casi desconocida. Uno de esos casos de un reconocimiento público muy inferior a los logros.
Quizá su caso podría considerarse un ejemplo de lo que la propia Joanna Russ contó en How to Suppress Women’s Writing, una lúcida y extraordinaria visión de lo que significa escribir siendo mujer. Lo leí cuando estaba en la universidad (por suerte la biblioteca tenía un ejemplar), me impresionó mucho y quizá ha llegado el momento de releerlo.
Mientras How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ, un comentario con muchas citas que sirve para hacerse una buena sobre el contenido del libro:
The cover of How to Suppress Women’s Writing captures its heart perfectly: much like the image above, Russ provides a smart and witty analysis of all the variations of “she wrote it BUT” people fling at women’s creative work, and which intentionally or not erase and belittle it. She lists eight interconnected forms of suppression (bad faith, denial of agency, pollution of agency, the double standard of content, false categorisation, isolation, anomalousness, and lack of models), all of which were familiar as soon as Russ elaborated on them. I felt jolt after jolt of recognition as I read this book, which was both comforting and not. Comforting: this problem has been named, which is an important step towards defeating it. Not: all these years later, here we are still. I haven’t been in spaces where women’s writing is discussed in depth for all that long, and already I’ve seen all the issues feminist critics identified over thirty years ago. It all goes way back, and all we can do is hope that the circles these conversations move in are slowly becoming more and more encompassing.