Rumours from the cauldron: Competition among feminist writers

Why have feminists been silent about competition among women? Most of us feel a personal distress and a political confusion when we acknowledge such rivalry. Is competition antithetical to feminism? Competition among women writers is a highly charged topic because literature is a peculiarly public project from a particularly private endeavor. This paper is written to open the issue for discussion within the larger feminist forum.Here I suggest that women cannot win by competing in an androcentric system. To clearly understand competition, we will want to distinguish between competitive feelings and the process or competition, between suffering and virtue, between criticism and conflict and between competition for patriarchal fame and status and an internal competition for artistic excellence. I suggest that many of us get caught in envy or our own fears of ambition or our skewed ideas about literary criticism. In addition, the essay criticizes the notion of art as magic. I discuss writing as labor, suggesting that writers confront publishers about wages and working conditions rather than compete with each other for limited resources.Having examined competitiveness within the androcentric system more clearly, can we find any ways for competition to serve us? Is it possible to go back to the Latin root of compete (to meet, to strive together) and develop a ‘feminist competition’ which allows for both individual and collective progress?