Vol. 1 No. 1 (2022)

Virginia Woolf had noted the need for a room of one’s own as an indispensable space for writing. As we look closer to Orlando, this need is not only of women but today’s subjects who deny binary identities, who stand outside heteronormative male identity spaces. Woolf’s claim is located in the modern writing styles where the individual emerges as the main actor.  The marginality, borderline situatedness of Woolf’s narration through bilinç akışı, with the uncertainties that it brings, and through the constitution of individualities outside the maleist borders. Her concern is one of the building blocks in our approach to feminist writing: She marks the women in history who resist the impossibility of writing unless one is male and/or prosperous.

Tezer Özlü, almost 60 years after the lectures of Woolf, hosting the origins of A Room of One’s Own  writes: ‘We write because the world is a sad place. We write because emotions surge. It is pretty difficult to overcome one’s helplessness. But once we leave it behind then we can have say in our lives. We write because we want to talk about this sort of control. … I write to   come to terms with life and death.’

And finally, Gloria Anzaldúa insists: ‘Forget the room of one's own - write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals, between sleeping or waking. I write while sitting on the john. No long stretches at the typewriter unless you're wealthy or have a patron - you may not even own a typewriter. While you wash the floor or clothes listen to the words chanting in your body. When you're depressed, angry, hurt, when compassion and love possess you. When you cannot help but write.”

Feminist Asylum: A Journal of Critical Interventions aspires to be the space where feminist, women's, queer and trans works meet for feminist knowledge production.