Writing Women Across Borders and Categories

Book excerpt: " Generally held to be rigid, borders and categories are nonetheless expanded when those bounded by the demarcations of hegemony, challenge its strictures. Significant instances of this constructive transgression can be found in the women's writing with which this collection of essays by international critics engages. Whereas in travel writing by women (Sarah Hobson, Dervla Murphy, Jan Morris) `transgression' is seen to have settled into a familiar strategy, in autobiography (Ann Fanshawe. Margaret Cavendish, Christine Brooke-Rose), cultural analysis (Virginia Woolf, Marianna Torgovnick, Donna Haraway), and fiction (Michelle Cliff, Jeanette Winterson, Ellen Galford, Fiona Cooper), women have succeeded in creating an innovative space for themselves. "