Writing as a feminist practice
Hemangini Gupta and Sarah Childs discuss their approaches to feminist writing.
Where did you find joy in the writing and editing processes?
Hemangini: I found great joy in writing something after my PhD that did not have to adhere to strict rules around literature reviews and style! I felt that I could be creative, speculative, and even adventurous. After my PhD, I began reading a fair amount of feminist technoscience and so felt that I was writing for a familiar sphere, responding to existing work through my own.
Sarah: I found joy in deciding that this was the book I wanted to write. I decided to make one of my chapters co-authored, to reflect work which I had done outside of the book project with friends, meaning that I could formally recognise their impact within the book.
What kinds of emotional labour went into the writing process?
Hemangini: Much of my monograph was written as an early career researcher balancing the work of parenting a young child with many job applications and a new teaching load. Due to this, I stopped waiting for the ‘right’ time to write. I had a research postdoc position and moved into a visiting Assistant Professor position soon after, so I wrote when I could. I wrote on flights, in hotels traveling for a visa interview, at 3 am. Right now, this blog post is being written in a public park in India while my son is in a one-hour soccer class on his school holidays. Writing is not so much emotional labour for me as it is logistical: I’m writing this to the sound of traffic, a cement mixer, after a 20-minute hunt for a bench that was not broken, and mosquitoes are now testing my patience even as rain clouds gather overhead.
The question for me, therefore, is, how do we write in conditions that are far from a “room of one’s own” – through fragments, and moments of time snatched away from everything else? My approach has been to just open my laptop and start writing irrespective of whether these are ideal conditions or not. The famous story about Madame Bovary is that Balzac wrote this great book in his mother’s house, sequestered in an attic apartment, breaking only to come down for the meals she prepared and to write letters to his lover. That sounds wonderful! But most of my own writing on my monograph was more in the Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde style, on slips of paper, as poetry, and after work.
Sarah: The writing process required the intense emotional labour of critical self-reflection on work which I had done previously. It also required strict work/life discipline. I recall writing in a café during a visit to Italy while friends were enjoying a local beach. This doesn’t sound too bad, but for me, the writing process does rely on certain personal sacrifices.
What’s feminist about the craft of writing?
Hemangini: What’s feminist is the citation method and how you place yourself in conversation with others, the mode of writing that situates you within your work, and the creative and often non-linear style that marks a departure from a masculinist writing style intended to forge rational arguments!
Sarah: The whole process of writing a book can be a feminist act. It was feminist to account for my choices and the decisions that I made while writing my book. I had to lay bare what I had and hadn’t done, and consider why.
What advice would you give to fellow feminist colleagues, especially PhD students and early career researchers?
Hemangini: First off, don’t wait for the perfect time to start writing a monograph: begin when you’ve had a bit of a break from your PhD and feel excited about revisiting and reshaping it! Second, surround yourself with a strong and supportive writing group who will hold you accountable. Finally, read widely! It was reading well beyond my field that inspired the writing and methods in my book and made it a joyous process. I wasn’t just reading for a literature review, I was reading to know how authors were writing their first books, and their first books helped me hold my own work to reasonable standards.
Sarah: I would advise them to plan, and to be realistic about their timeline. I have written one co-authored book very quickly, whereas my other co-authored book took an extra year. I also suggest presenting chapters and plans of in-progress work as early as possible.
What does collaboration during the writing process look like in practice?
Hemangini: I think collaborative writing projects are very difficult projects as you don’t always know someone very well when you start a collaboration. My Madame Bovary textbook that just came out was a joy to write, as the four of us have very different approaches to work and each of us took on a different role: there was the go-getter, the pacifier, the calm and organized one, and the person who appeared most strongly when they were needed. Each of our meetings was several hours long - the book evolved over three years - and we presented the book at several conferences. Along this journey we moved several institutions, had babies, got promoted, and had new partners, but the close friendship allowed us to withstand these life events as we always maintained a running thread of messages about our lives and our calls always began with half hour catch-ups. We spent time together at conferences and made it a point to also meet to chat when there was no work at hand. I think these are some of the joys of feminist collaboration.
I have had to reflect on how to collaborate with people you don’t know well at the start of a project and who are senior to you. Some of this is much more formal than my textbook project and I think these collaborations with senior scholars need more respect than friendship, and I’ve felt the need to limit them as I find them stressful.
Sarah: You need patience, as the process takes time. The editing process of a book is slow. In 2023 I dedicated my whole summer to revising my book, as it was more important for me to get the book right than to get it done quickly. You have to expect the publishing process to slow once the book it out of your hands, which requires some level of acknowledgement that this is out of your hands.
Author Bios:
Dr Hemangini Gupta is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Global Politics at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science. Her research focuses on postcolonial and decolonial theory, feminism and labour. She is the author of Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India (2024), University of California Press, and co-editor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader (2025), Routledge.
Professor Sarah Childs is a Personal Chair of Politics and Gender at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science. Her research focuses on feminism, British politics and political representation. She is the author of Designing and Building Feminist Institutions, forthcoming with Oxford University Press.