What happens when a woman writer decides to write with a male gaze? How does she do it?
Must writing the male gaze be a male writer’s prerogative alone?
Virginia Woolf said once that androgyny is essential for good writing. She felt that it liberates an artist from several social constraints and frees writing because the individual does not operate through the cognitive organising principle of gender. I have always believed that idea, and have observed that combining the feminine and masculine can be truly liberating in writing.
In fact, I have often wondered about the possibilities of taking it further and writing in a way where the masculine and the feminine are unrecognisable. What if there is a kind of writing that is able to traverse from one to the other with ease? What if the reader cannot tell whether it’s a male or a female kind of writing?