ResEarcha-ching: 01/02/09

Virginia Woolf -Anon-Women Writer - Sandy Jeffs

Virginia Woolf has an interesting tid bit on anon's in A Room Of Ones Own.

The book is an investigation of Women Writers and Fiction. Woolf imagines what the life of Shakespeare's sister would have been like - "who shall measure the heat and violence of the poets heart when caught in tangles in a woman's body?" (p. 48)...

The guise of anon is a place that women writers have found the ability to speak beyond the limitations of other's perceptions and societal norms-

Woolf writes, "Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." (p. 49)

"And undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chasity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century...publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still posses them." (p.50)

Poem By Sandy Jeffs from The Wings of Angels A Memoir of Madness--SAndy Jeffs has lived with schizophrenia and all its moods for twenty-five years----2004 (Pinifex) p. 75

Cyber-Journey

I, Sandy, cybernaut

traveller of old

surf the net

born again in cyberspace

avatar & idol

clone of many alter egos & cyber-selves

at home in my cyber-neighbourhood

I, Sandy, cyber-student

procurer of cyber-knowledge in my cyber-world

of dot com, dot net, dot edu

drown in acronyms

I cyber-babble in a chat room

of disembodied cyber-friends

move in a virtual community write Slash ficition &

watch cyber portn

I, Sandy cyber-hacker

infiltrate NASA, the Pentagon,

the FBI, the CIA & ASIO

the new Everest to conquer

with my comrades Electron & Pheonix

craving kudos & infamy

the computer my only friend.

I Sandy, cyber-priestess

practise cyber religion

worship cyber-spirits & cyber-gods

exorcise cyber-devils form my cyber-soul

I send cyber-message to

God@heaven.com.uni

I seek the protection of cyber-angels

& the intercession of cyber-saints

At the end of my cyber-odyssey

awaits cyber-death, cyber-apocalypse

cyber-paradise, cyber-utopia

&cyber immortality

I, Sandy, cyber-mother

made love in cyberspace

& gave birth to cyborg twins

Mozart & Hitler

Hypertext And Feminism

Bitch magazine's Spring 2008 did a piece on Anons--taking an overwhelming negative tone they focused on attacks to feminist blogs. ASsuming - (rightly, wrongly, ?) that Anon's are white sexist racist males they generally condemned the groups--their is no live link to the article but you can see some blogs about the issue that highlight the general perspective.

The internet has been widely theorized as a blank space - a white male space. But what about the damned parts of the internet? Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl is a prime example of the possibilities of hypertext literature that explores the feminine and its hysterical connections to a hyper-texted logic.

Jackson on hypertext,

"She's not what he says she is. The banished body is not female necessarily, but it is feminine. That is, it's amorphous indirect, impure, diffuse, multiple, evasive. So is what we learned to call bad writing. Good writing is direct, effective, clean as a bleached bone. Bad writing is all flesh, and dirty flesh at that: clogged with a build-up of clutter and crud, knick-knacks and fripperies encrusted on every surface, a kind of gluey scum gathering in the chinks. Hypertext is everything that for centuries has been damned by its association with the feminine (which has also, by the way, been damned by its association with it, in a bizarre mutual proof without any fixed term). It's dispersed, languorous, flaunting its charms all over the courtyard. Like flaccid beauties in a harem, you might say, if you wanted to inspire a rigorous distaste for it. Hypertext then, is what literature has edited out: the feminine. (That is not to say that only women can produce it. Women have no more natural gift for the feminine than men do.)"