Clashing forms of feminist ritual in Miriam Toews’s Women Talking
Location
SU-214
Department
English
Abstract
CLASHING FORMS OF FEMINIST RITUAL IN MIRIAM TOEWS’S WOMEN TALKING Timothy Garrison Department of English, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, IL 60625 Miriam Toews’s novel Women Talking, loosely based on real events, details the consensus-building discussions held by a group of women in a high-control religious sect. Because the women who gather have suffered years of terroristic rape by others in their isolated community, they meet to discuss and decide what action they will take in order to end their victimization and/or separate themselves from the environment in which it might recur. This paper locates a fundamental question underlying their struggles to confront their confessed lack of knowledge about themselves and the world: just as they lack maps and the ability to read them, they are not yet sure who they themselves are. Therefore, their consensus-building process is not simply a project to decide their next move. It is also a project of gender mapping, a sometimes collective exploration of identity formation. This paper analyzes the clashing forms of ritual that their methods employ in this project. They hold some of their rituals more or less as a whole, while some elements of ritual become dispersed to tangential elements in a broader network. Some of the rituals are rhythmic and therefore have the effect of regulating uniformity, while some of their possibly unilateral decisions threaten to expose them to patriarchal blowback. Applying the work of Judith Butler on performativity and Pellegrini and Saketopoulou in Gender without Identity (2023), the theoretical framework of this paper advises a careful reading around trauma, fluidity, and “gender exploratory” models, concluding that the novel is largely about gender mapping. A more superficial reading of the novel might lead to an understanding that the women are deciding whether or not, and how, to stay, fight, or leave. While that is accurate, this paper asserts that the rituals employed by the women are more fundamentally about them working out who they are.
Faculty Sponsor
Ryan Poll
Clashing forms of feminist ritual in Miriam Toews’s Women Talking
SU-214
CLASHING FORMS OF FEMINIST RITUAL IN MIRIAM TOEWS’S WOMEN TALKING Timothy Garrison Department of English, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, IL 60625 Miriam Toews’s novel Women Talking, loosely based on real events, details the consensus-building discussions held by a group of women in a high-control religious sect. Because the women who gather have suffered years of terroristic rape by others in their isolated community, they meet to discuss and decide what action they will take in order to end their victimization and/or separate themselves from the environment in which it might recur. This paper locates a fundamental question underlying their struggles to confront their confessed lack of knowledge about themselves and the world: just as they lack maps and the ability to read them, they are not yet sure who they themselves are. Therefore, their consensus-building process is not simply a project to decide their next move. It is also a project of gender mapping, a sometimes collective exploration of identity formation. This paper analyzes the clashing forms of ritual that their methods employ in this project. They hold some of their rituals more or less as a whole, while some elements of ritual become dispersed to tangential elements in a broader network. Some of the rituals are rhythmic and therefore have the effect of regulating uniformity, while some of their possibly unilateral decisions threaten to expose them to patriarchal blowback. Applying the work of Judith Butler on performativity and Pellegrini and Saketopoulou in Gender without Identity (2023), the theoretical framework of this paper advises a careful reading around trauma, fluidity, and “gender exploratory” models, concluding that the novel is largely about gender mapping. A more superficial reading of the novel might lead to an understanding that the women are deciding whether or not, and how, to stay, fight, or leave. While that is accurate, this paper asserts that the rituals employed by the women are more fundamentally about them working out who they are.