ThinkingDaughters is a text-based narrative written in and for the digital medium. The multivocal, interactive and imagistic opportunities of this form are pivotal to expressing the meanings that draw me: our increasing comprehension of the relational interdependence of all life; the deepening of our understandings of gender; the shift from print to cyber as the carrier and keeper of our stories and meanings. What is literacy now?
Every screen requests user participation. “SpineOfTellings” screens drive the narrative progression in vertical scroll. Horizontal screens elaborate on the meanings broached in the vertical flow: “Authortorials,” lyrical musings on my life of womanhood; “Narratorials,” an aggregate citational chorus of “Ancestress Literates,” women writers influential to my thinking. Additional voices are confessional “whispers”; “keyword” popups on our language genome; “Correspondents,” emails between me & other ThinkingDaughters.
All gather to contemplate the role of spoken and written language in the creation of human meaning entwined with the cultural & familial permissions, given and taken, to be and speak one’s Being in the world as a subject, the “I”.
I write into the overlapping seams where the literacies of print and cyber meet, collide or align. I seek accident, imperfection, voices speaking over one another because in this synthesis of literacies and consequent shifts of subjectivity, the wild, unframed germinations are found.