April 11

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Attention Whore: Writing to Rupture

Posted by on April 11, 2021 in Academia, Criminology, Lap dancing | 1 Comment

I will start this post by thanking the formidable Mona Eltahawy for inspiring it with this essay here.

If you are not familiar with Eltahawy’s work, I highly recommend her blog, twitter feed and her book ‘The Seven Necessary Sins for Girls and Women’.

In her essay above Mona states that: “A woman who writes has power. A woman who writes is feared. In the eyes of the world this makes us dangerous beasts.” 

You know I am all about the rupture and all about finding ways to connect with other women.

I recently completed a women’s leadership training course to increase my confidence at work. In real life I am super confident, but in the academy, what I value is not necessarily prized. The course introduced me to wonderful women and it taught me the value of visibility.

We are taught throughout our lives to shrink back, to reduce ourselves. To not appear ‘too much’ or like we (horror) ‘love ourselves’. We are insulted if we stand out, if we are deemed to be excessive or hyper-visible. I have blogged before that this is placed on the bodies of working class women.

We are criticized for taking selfies, for being ‘vacuous’. A society that is happy to use our bodies to sell every product imaginable does not like it when we take delight in our own bodies. When we own ourselves, when we are the directors.

Miss Papua New Guinea was recently stripped of her crown for twerking on TikTok. It is ok when society benefits from our aesthetics and sexuality, but when we reclaim it, they punish us.

I get this judgement all the time. The classist sneers for publishing so much of my work on my blog (it is not compatible with the ‘rigour’ of the discipline *roll eyes until they fall out*).

The classist and whorephobic sneers for being so open about experience of the sex industry. I write about this here in a journal article ‘Between The Sex Industry and Academia: Navigating Stigma and Disgust’.

Women who are unapologetically visible are mocked and belittled. How dare we take up space and command attention.

Elsewhere on the blog, I quote Adrienne Rich:

“We reach her as, of course, as we meet all poetic resources blocked from us by mindless packaging and spiritless scholarship” (Adrienne Rich, 1993, p. 101).

I have written about the phenomenology of anger, and the importance of women’s anger in writing. We must unapologetically and continually write as our authentic selves and take us space.

I have written that:

“My impact will not be measured by metrics and other arbitrary middle-class measurements. It will be measured by how many others I pull up behind me. I am not an insecure mediocre gatekeeper. I long for change and a radically (re)imagined academy. Cite working-class women. Create trauma-informed practice and spaces. Platform the excluded. Have a genuine commitment to widening participation. Propose more visual and arts-based journals and books. Every time you try and shut us out we rise. We are on fire for this”.

Eltahawy writes that: “Witness the nuclear explosion in the minds of misogynists when a woman with an opinion tells the world what she thinks. It is powerful and dangerous to be an attention whore. And so we must be attention whores. Let’s blow their fucking minds”.

“The most subversive thing a woman can do is to talk about her life as if it really matters, because it does”.

I blogged here about my forthcoming (anyday now!) article in Methodological Innovations, and received over 7000 reads in 3 weeks. That’s ‘attention seeking’ apparently.

That is the point. That our lives, our stories, our knowledge, our wisdom, is worthy of the attention you so freely give to others.

We need to stop hiding away and dimming our light to placate those who fear our shine.

When I went through the experiences I interrogate in my Methodological Innovations journal article and here, I lost my shine. I was diagnosed with CPTSD and completely lost myself. I learned it was safer to dissolve and disappear from view.

Now I am back. Healing. Stronger. Surrounded by a loving husband, family, friends and community. I am not going to dull my sparkle to make other people happy.

You can read some of my self-promotion for my award-winning module here.

Thank you to all those with whom I am currently working on creative projects with. And to all of my incredible students.

Eltahawy is right. The thing that the patriarchy fears most is women who are ‘attention whores’. So let’s give them what they fear.

Solidarity as always to my messy noisy women.

Gemma x