Cinnabar and Alabaster

claims:
3. "the act of collaborating on texts does not in itself determine a specific or consistent ideological stance, feminist or any other"; although "all collaborations are, in some miniscule measure, challenges to the status quo at this particular historical moment in many countries and cultures," the project sets out to "theorize women's colaborations as ideological projects that harbour various ideological potentials, some more hierarchical, some more liberatory and subversive."

defining terms:
4. "for the methodological purposes of this study, collaboration will mean any overt co-authorship or co-signature of a work of art."

passage:
6. "expressions of difference in...collaborations can be...grating and uncomfortable, but they also may allow the collaboration to run, to engage the gears of dialogue and exchange. so without denying or forgetting the very real sustenance and pleasure that collaborating on texts has given literary women, i will nevertheless resist idealizing those relationships as necessarily revolutionary, sisterly, or morally superior."
10. "in the face of so much suspicion and at times, open hostility" it "can hardly be surprising" that "the unhealthy, shameful collaborative relationship has become, in reaction, an idealized lighting of torches."
13. the famous elizabethan playwrights did it too.
15. coe in ede & lunsford highlights "the association of multiply-authored works with a type of grass-roots political activism that many publishers might wish to avoid seeming to take seriously": "the real social tendency is toward collective writing. this is especially true of progressive writings. a union leaflet is rarely the work of one person"; & "the association that coe makes arguably functions within the ideological discourses of publishing, government granting bodies, and academia"
19. in nesbitt & thomas's definition, "authentic collaboration" is "a collective working arrangement that is 'naturally egalitarian rather than mediated by vigilant awareness of status difference' (32). that is, they do not regard scholarship that maintains the dominance of a senior academic as authentically collaborative; neither does research that pays lip service to various perspectives without actually incorporating multiple voices"
20. at least they acknowledge that this is impossible, but they project it as "a horizon to work toward"--ly disagrees.
22. stillinger's work is to foreground the behind-the-scenes collaborations in a lot of heretofore recognized as independent works & is "valuable as a querying of single authorship as a normative social and historical practice"
29. atwood's conception of foucault's author: "a kind of spider, spinning out his entire work from within"
37. overview: "the discourse that is contemporary women's collaborative writing has many, many placements: ways of expressing not only the moments of harmony and fusion that many of its critics have discovered, but also the differences, property issues, and negotiations of power that i find when i read these texts. when i come to the supposedly cramped and overcrowded quarters of two or more women authors 'in a birth,' i find, instead of an easy harmony, the much more absorbing cultural spectacle of women who are differently engaged."
42. cixous and clément as an example of "two collaborators inhabiting one conventionally singular author position...without ceding to a fusion theory of collectivity. this provides a space for intellectual disagreements to occur and be recorded without creating the impression that the collaboration is a failure."
47. gilbert and gubar as the flagship american duo whose "fact of friendship is of more than circumstantial interest; north american collaborators tend to see their collaborations as correlates or extensions of friendship. this is a telling sign of hot they tend to encode critical collaboration as mutuality rather than adopting a more strictly professional demeanor as the italian feminist groups do"; it also "often does suggest comfort with acknowledging difference and disagreement, but all too often...such complexities are overshadowed by the need to present a unified front," or what holly laird calls "'coalition collaborations' wherein 'women acknowledge their differences both in the immediacy of trying to write together and in their retrospective meditations, yet their more conscious aims and desires are to bridge those differences and to achieve solidarity with each other' ('preface' 15)"
53. the american academy system's "lack of respect" for collaborative efforts only encourages this, of course.
60. leonardi & pope on proper behavior: "'one of the problems with the conversation model is that conversation and dialogue, at least as they are practiced by 'good girls' seem so often repressed by social convention. one shies away from serious disagreement, one doesn't interrupt, one doesn't too obviously stake out one's territory, one tries not to digress. one never, ever screams' (267). as a result, leonardi and pope are explicitly wary of any fusion theory of collaboration"
61. (::snicker::) "this is what i have found in north american critical collaborations: a combination of institutional pressures and internalizations of conventional theories of critical authorship. the Author whose death Roland Barthes was conventionally said to have heralded is alive and well and seeking tenure and promotion at a university"
67. o'neill and limbert "suggest the term 'composite authorship' to describe" the efforts of "co-creators" whose work was begun by one author but is then picked up at a later time and added-to by another.
74. the difficulties--or playful tendencies--shown by the efforts of "michael field" to represent themselves in pronouns can also be read "as a sign of cultural anxiety, a joke which at least partly relies on a sense of two women collaboratively writing as an authorial circus trick."
184. york reflects on her own entrenchment: she delayed discussing the material with her graduate students "until [she] could ensure that [she] would complete a draft of this book, because [she] has always felt uneasy about teaching topics that [she is] currently writing about to graduate students. what if [she] were to unconsciously reflect [her] students' work in [her] own writing? how could [she] by sure, if a parallel were to arise between [her] own work and a graduate colleague's, that [she] had not clossed the line that [she's] been analysing in this book--the line between 'mine' and 'yours'?"
188. the whole project is motivated by "a persistant concern that women, in particular, not jump to the conclusion that collective work needs to be seen as productive only when it proceeds on the basis of agreement and likeness of opinion....ultimately...the fault lines that run through women's collaborations make them all the more compelling."