An Inclusive Litany

7/7/94

From Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual Poetics, Temma F. Berg et al., eds.:
By writing with and about that which was once unmentionable—menstrual blood, breast milk, wombs, vaginas, the lips of the clitoris—women's language writes the body. The woman's body, no longer idealized, conventionalized, as in men's writing, is apprehended in all its physical difference and is able to disrupt discourse as we know it. Personal and open, the language of woman ... seeks to achieve the fluidity it writes about by making the meanings of words elusive.