In making a timeline of my writing history in the UNC
Charlotte Writing Project Summer Institute last week, I was consumed by the
story of the first writing I recall doing (writing about a Disney vacation with
my grandparents in a Minnie Mouse diary).
This got me thinking about how the writer I am today is steeped in
commodity forms, like diaries and vacations.
Images of what it means to be a good girl, a good writer, good not evil
are constructed through me, in me, as I have led a Disneyed life. Even as I intentionally resist
commercialization in many parts of my adulthood my own constructs of writing,
identity and value are knot connected to high heeled and hair bowed Minnie
dressed in so many different ways as the object of (my own and Mickey’s) pity.
Minnie, teary-eyed, done up, never the subject of her own
story, embodies my own position as writer.
To be a good girl, a good writer, I would need to be both perfectly made
up all on my own and simultaneously available as the victim-object of hero
savior fantasies. So my writing must be
very good, (no messy drafts slipping out below my hemline) and also (probably
because I am so distracted by jerking down my skirt to cover over any errors) I
must still be available to happily drown (in the ocean or in my own
tears).
As an attempt to disrupt this story, this history, I want to
remix the images of the Mouse, the ultimate logo. By mashing Minnie with voices that clang and
converge I elucidate the hidden scripts of gender at play in writing lives.
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