Women have consistently been portrayed as “emotional” and shamed into believing that their desire to bring attention to a topic that has deeply impacted them is nothing but, as many female writers call it, “Navel-Gazing.” However, the author of the book Body Work writes an entire chapter called “In Praise of Navel-G
azing,” which is meant to show how female personal essayists are treating immensely different than male essayists. Febos, the author of the book I am currently reading, goes over her experience as a personal essayist and her workshops that involve female essayists reading their own work. While Febos often gives them critiques stating that they should add more of themselves to the work, often there is a cringe of the thought about writing more about themselves, often with a statement afterwards stating, “I don’t want to come off as self absorbed, you know, navel-gazing.” Not knowing what “navel-gazing” was, I searched the definition and was met with the following statement, Navel-Gazing (n.): Self indulgent or excessive contemplation of oneself or a single issue, at the expense of a wider view; (adj.) Engaging in or characterized by self indulgent or excessive contemplation of oneself or a single issue, at the expense of a wider view.” A stereotype of female personal essayists is the fear of having their essay not taken seriously and seen as a diary. However, very few diaries are published and the people who want their work published go through multiple editors, work with publishing agency, and advertise the book. With a diary, it is descreet and hidden away from the public eye. However one may ask, why is this a feminist issue? As Febos puts it in her book:
Tell me: who is writing in their theraputic diary and then dashing it off to be published? I don’t know who these self-indulgent (and extravagantly well-connected) narcissists are. But I suspect that when people denigrate them in the abstract, they are picturing women. I’m finished referring, in a derogatory way, to stories of body and sex and gender and violence and joy and childhood and family as navel-gazing.
When women tell their stories about trauma, it is often seen that there are already too many stories telling the same thing and that there is no place for it in the seriousness of classic literary works. However, because there is trauma in the world, and because there will continue to be, there will never be enough stories about survivors to be told until violence that causes trauma is completely eradicated in our world.
There is another stereotype regarding personal essays and that is having that theraputic experience should not be the one of the top experiences of writing an essay. While, indeed, essays do not have to always be about trauma or the negative experiences one has felt, to say that writing an essay is nothing but neutral prose that cannot show that the author is still impacted emotionally from their experiences is preposterous. An essay needs that emotional interest so the reader can connect to the author just as much as an essay needs neutral prose to keep the reader and the author grounded. Febos recognizes that the resistance to published essays regarding women’s experiences and trauma caused by men is tied to fights against the acknowledgment of the social injustice because once it is acknowledged, then there is no turning back and the patriarchy reveals the problematic side of constantly being in power. Without knowing the stories of survivors, a culture cannot truly empathize and change to keep the people within the culture safe. As Febos puts it, “The resistance to memoirs about trauma is always in part- and often nothing but- a resistance to movements for social justice.”