RECLAIMING THE BODY: THE PROBLEM OF FEMALE IDENTITY IN POLISH AND RUSSIAN LITERATURE

The article aims at showing various ways in which the notions of femininity and women's writing have been locked in the stiff category of 'female identity'. The idea of 'female identity', according to the authoress of this article, works as a myth - makes the illusion of understanding and communication. The article compares the ways of categorizing and writing about women's writing in 1990s in both Poland and Russian contexts. The comparative character of this article shows the more general paradigms of thinking about femininity, beyond the specificity of one country. The Polish texts of Izabela Filipiak, Olga Tokarczuk, and Anna Nasilowska as well as the Russian writings by Olga Tatarinowa and Rada Polishchuk are analysed in this article. The authoress scrutinizes how the embodied experience is present in women's writing, e.g. following the theory of Julia Kristeva, one of the central point of these analyses is the moment of abjection, where the body become an active agent in the narration.