Goulimari Pelagia

This essay marks the centenary of 1922, annus mirabilis of modernism but also the year when my grandparents became child refugees in the Asia Minor Catastrophe. In Mrs. Dalloway and her Diary, Virginia Woolf offers a figuration of modernity, which Toni Morrison critically revises in her master’s thesis and in Sula. I aim to show that Sula displays a fine-grained, pervasive and dispersive intertextual relationship with Mrs. Dalloway: a multi-form critical repetition, centred around the figures of shredding, burning and tunnelling; I then connect these figures to the lives of my grandparents. The figures that Woolf and Morrison develop anticipate and might indeed have influenced poststructuralist theory, particularly Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome.

Pelagia Goulimari interviews Talia Bettcher on core issues and concepts in Women Writing Across Culture, both in relation to Bettcher’s work and in the context of wider debates in feminist, queer and transgender theory. How to theorize “woman,” “trans woman,” “trans woman of colour,” “trans feminism”? How to put together experience, local knowledge, and communication across worlds? How to amplify experiments crossing the boundaries between theory, literature and life-writing? How to pursue an intersectional ethics of intimacy and “interpersonal spatiality”?

This essay attempts to address the crucial relation of feminist philosophy to minorities inside and outside of feminism. To do so it turns to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, focusing on their concept of “becoming minoritarian” and related concepts. Aided by close readings of two canonical but ultimately negative assessments of Deleuze and Guattari, Alice Jardine's “Woman in Limbo” and Rosi Braidotti's Patterns of Dissonance, the essay outlines and argues the merits of a “minoritarian” feminism.