The connection between the private—often considered as the realm of the intimate—and women’s writing has long preoccupied feminist criticism. Recent feminist criticism has revealed the social impact of the connection between intimacy and women’s writing. This also raises the question of how women have negotiated these nuances and positions. Were there any strategies, any coping mechanisms with regard to employing intimacy in their writing? In this review article, we provide a brief overview of how censorship, gender and intimacy have been intertwined throughout history. Building on Sue Curry Jansen’s view which regards censorship as “the knot that binds knowledge and power” we further claim that we could regard censorship as the knot that binds intimacy and women’s writing. We also corroborate our assertions with examples from prominent studies focusing mainly on Western European literatures and add further examples of encounters with various forms of censorship, as experienced by Zofka Kveder, a writer who actively participated in Slovenian, German, Czech, and Croatian literary systems.
Taking on Jonathan Flatley's concept (2008), my stance is that the affective mapping of Romanian space at the turn of the 20th century emphasizes women's self-fashioning their identity through intimacy. I am examining the narratives of three Romanian-born French women writers to trace the developments of intimacy as a key tool of identity construction: from its traditional perception as a private sphere matter, to a public cultural category which permeates social roles and determines social judgements. The challenge is that when applied to specific contexts configuring a map requires a route, as well as boundaries, peripheries and fringes. What is the gendered reaction to all this, especially in the context of transnational mapping? In all three cases, the writers' (self)narratives of intimacy become transient spaces where both gender and political emancipation discourses are intertwined, an in-betweenness which underlines the subtle transfer of the paradigm of (French) modernity into the Romanian culture, via women. Thus, the contours of a politics of intimacy appear on the less defined boundaries between the personal and the public, between the masculine/ public and the feminine/ private divide, where intimacy shapes and is shaped by space -from the domestic to the national and beyond.
Keywordsaffective mapping -intimacy -fringe -public -private -gender -cultural transfer -transnational Ever since Critical Inquiry issued the inspirational volume on Intimacy (edited by Lauren Berlant), this concept has been regarded as one that "builds worlds, it creates spaces and usurps places meant for other kinds of relations", closely associated with particular affects (Berlant 1-8). In Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (2008) Jonathan Flatley
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.