Narratives and social meanings: Saying subjectivity as political experience

Abstract

This work is framed within a series of previous inquiries that contribute to thinking about the knots and threads of the shared common sense of an era, as expressed in narratives, discourses, and representations. In this particular case, we focus on a specific type of written narratives: poetic or lyrical ones. The hypothesis underlying this paper draws on the idea that feminist discourses and representations exhibit particular modulations concerning the connection between experience and language, where sexual difference emerges as a fundamental dimension in the production of meaning. The article proposes an analysis of a corpus of thirty poems by nine authors and one collective of women writers. Each poem, as a unit of meaning, weaves together with the others to form a fabric in which a generation of women speaks—constructing thematic and genealogical intertextuality and engaging in dialogue with the transformations and continuities of a historical moment. These are experiential scriptural narratives through which one can trace the core nodes of meaning and the themes that, from the intimate and personal, speak of the collective—and, in doing so, become political.