Leena van Deventer is contributing to feminist writing that’s not exploitative of the author’s suffering under patriarchy. They aim to explore the long term plan for such writing that de-centres the author. They don’t want to be paid to open a vein for your publication in order to get published. They want to write about more than just their pain and their anger, and shopping those stories around is a really hard slog right now. Those stories are important, but they’re by no means all we’ve got. Leena takes very seriously their responsibility to write to serve the movement. The feminist movement requires we never make it All About Us, but as writers, in order to make a living doing this work there is an element of audience-building and follower-courting that some publishers and publications insist upon in order to make it worth all the trouble. Making it All About Me is in direct tension with their feminist praxis. They don’t know where else to hash out this constant tension between their craft and their feminism. What does feminist non-fiction look like when it de-centres the author? What will we do as feminist writers once the wells of their veins have been tapped dry? They’d like to use this platform to explore those questions. – Leena van Deventer
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