We Continue Each Other

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a well-structured and interesting paper, which attempts to disperse the authorial voice through the use of three intersectional female voices. The inclusion of images is welcome, although I do feel they could be utilised in a more muscular way - at present they feel a little like illustrations. 

Author Response

We are pleased with your positive reading of our essay and agree with your suggestion on the placing of the images. Our intention for the images is to use them in a way to acknowledge the process of how we encounter and experience those things we cite, in their original physical form. Our feeling is mostly that when citations are made, they operate homogeneously within the text. We feel  the way we encounter these in the world, be it on a screen, in a book, as a photocopy has an impact on how we perceive and borrow from them. What happens in the margins feels important to the narrative origin of a text. That these other dialogues we have, be it one sided, are potentially part of the WE. We wanted to express this somehow through the use of images. Perhaps we haven't successfully used the constraints of the academic formatting to subvert it. We hope that whilst some of the images do refer to moments within the text, that they operate as echoes or shadows to the writing.

Reviewer 2 Report

For me, this essay doesn't do/say enough about the potential value of writing or thinking in the collective, and I'm not sure if the problem lies with the method or the message. There's very little, for example, to distinguish the lives of the writers who make up the "we" voice from one another, so it's difficult to ascertain the import of coming together to speak as one. In the early pages of this essay, you write that this is intentional, but I would advise reconsidering that choice. Without much to distinguish this writing practice as intersectional, it just feels sort of essentializing--some lives or the textures of their days feel the same, therefore they are the same. That doesn't feel intimate to me; it feels reductive. There isn't much evidence in the essay to demonstrate the claims in the conclusion are in fact true--no scenes of carrying one another's baggage or taking things more lightly, etc.

Here are some more specific notes and queries:

There are several moments throughout the abstract and article where the word "female" is used when I think what might be more accurate is "women" or "women's" or "feminine." This is clear, for instance, on page 2, but elsewhere it feels a bit muddled to me.

I don't think the second "WE" on p. 2  and going forward should be capitalized; or, at least, I don't understand why it is continually capitalized throughout the essay once the initial inversion of "ME" is established.

There are a number of comma splices and sentence fragments throughout, and while I don't think you necessarily need to eliminate them all, stylistically speaking, several don't seem to be doing any work in the essay, and so they're just sort of disruptive. (I like the fragment at the bottom of p. 4, for example, about the location of the lost book, but not the splice at the top of p. 3).

The claim on p. 6 feels unearned by what precedes it. That material is about creating time and space for one's thoughts, not really about feeling unheard or silenced.

The thesis at the top of p. 9 feels similarly in need to some setting up and clarifying. You mean that one particular aspect of your lives is similar to the lives of women in previous generations and centuries, but to say that your "situation" is similar feels to me too vague and capacious to be that valuable as an insight. Plenty of differences between women's lives now and women's lives in the 16th, or 19th, or 20th centuries--plenty of differences between women's lives that are not just generational. You qualify this statement in the paragraph that follows, but in ways that feel clichéd rather than unexpected or fresh. Some of the "roadblocks" described here are material, not just mental.

Author Response

Thank you for your thorough reading of our essay and constructive comments. We respond to your specific notes and queries section, point by point.

Please allow us to clarify our intentions:

• is indeed an intentional choice. Our goal was to write this essay as a collective voice even when including quite personal passages stemming from our individual lives, but we explicitly want them to be untangleable because in the text they are combined into a new voice. The underlying material that this voice is edited from are the encounters/struggles/insights we have each had in thinking about and working towards a ‘turning from I to WE.

You are right it is not intimate, at least not on the outside. We deliberately kept the intimacy indoors. It worked as a method during the process of writing this essay, but we did not intend to write an intimate text, as we hope to create resonance with other lives. The choice for not distinguishing our separate lives in the text is not to reduce them to the ‘same’ but to focus on the overlaps in between the differences: the things we share instead of the things that set us apart.

The difficulty of that position is what we address in the conclusion. The WE can only be a construction, not a reality, but it helped to create a real union and a different level of understanding of each other’s practice as we wrote.

Your remarks did however spark the discussion on this topic again and we feel it is true that in the several stages of editing, we might have eliminated the space for the individual in the collective. We have therefore rewritten the script comments in section 2 to include a singular “she” to incorporate an individual perspective.

We are aware of the delicate nature of the distinction between using feminine/female/woman. We have carefully weighed the usage of these terms and feel that they are used appropriately here. For instance, the ‘group of female voices’ in the middle of page 7 includes a person who identifies themself as female, but were born male. This was not explicit in the performance but we draw attention to it here as a reference. We were influenced in our thinking by the quote by Audre Lorde in this instant that “You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other...we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.” P142 Audre Lorde Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984

2. The capitalisation of the WE is to separate it as a different pronoun from ‘we’. Ours creates a new WE, an ambiguous and confused pronoun that is slippery and intentionally awkward. We believe that this should remain unchanged yet have added a reference to the section (which with hindsight we should have done in the last edit) to explain this idea and it’s lineage (with thanks to the editors for pointing us in the direction of this essay).

A second reason for this choice is that it, just like the photographs are intended to operate, disrupts the reading of the text to reflect the way in which the writing process happened to be disrupted by things that operated outside the WE.

3. Thank you for this comment about comma/splicing. We have amended some of these within the text. We hope it now reads better.

4. In reference to your comment on p6, we moved around with this material, deleting out passages and changing the order of the paragraphs several times, thus (unintentionally) cutting off the connection between the paragraph at the top and the one on the bottom of page 6 (collective voice speaking out loudly versus personal voice hesitant to speak up). Thank you for pointing this out. We will address this in the re-edit of the manuscript.

5. This section was not only inspired by the content of Virginia Woolf’s text, but also by her tone of voice. We use a cliché here to address the clichéd feelings that are evoked by a situation that is supposed to have moved beyond the cliché by now. But of course we would not want it to lead to the wrong interpretation. We will rewrite and clarify this in the re-edit of the manuscript.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I find this version much more satisfying and recommend publication, though I do advise making the use of "WE" grammatical from pages 10-12, wherever this collective pronoun is not preceded by an article (ie: "The WE is" vs. WE are, as in "WE hinder," "WE scaffold," etc. This delineates the essay's commentary on the plural pronoun as part of speech/writing vs. speaking voice, and I think that's probably important here. In the earlier parts of the essay, this WE is plural, used to represent a polyphonic voice, so it makes more sense to me that it would be so consistently throughout.