Like hypertext, experimental women's writing -- from Mary Shelley's gothic birthing to current experiments in written and electronic forms -- is concerned with altering traditional structures as a means of speaking against the realist tradition and the mainstream. Barbara Page (in agreement with Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs in Breaking the Sequence) identifies experimental women's writing as "discourses of resistance" (Page 1). In the same way, hypertext embodies a swarm of discourses of subjectivity because--by its very nature--hypertext is an interactive "irritant" (Moulthrop, 1997, 666). It stings our expectations. It exists in opposition. Its open-ended nature makes explicit the edges of expected form. By escaping out from between the walls of unexpected places in unexpected ways, it automatically creates a phantom metatext of our own expectations as readers. Through privileging our own subjectivity as readers, hypertext speaks the language of sensation as a primary voice.

    Joan Retallack in ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM:" talks about how postmodernism aligns itself with elements that have traditionally been relegated to the 'feminine' sphere:

An interesting coincidence, yes/no? that what Western culture has tended to label feminine (forms characterized by silence, empty and full; multiple, associative, nonhierarchical logics; open and materially contingent processes, etc.) may well be more relevant to the complex reality we are coming to see as our world than the narrowly hierarchical logics that produced the rationalist dreamwork of civilization and its misogynist discontents (qtd, Page 9).

In this context, feminist thinking is at one with hypertext for these are its primary concerns as well. Literary hypertext is a discipline where key critics use titles for their articles like "Making Nothing Happen" (Moulthrop, 1991), "How Do I Stop This Thing?" (Douglas, 1994), and "Beyond Next Before You Once Again" (Joyce, forthcoming). Is this not the art of indeterminancy at work in the field itself? Hypertext as a literary form is potentially inexhaustible from a reader's perspective (Douglas, 1994, 164) existing as it does in a perpetual state of potentiality--poised for flight. Add a feminist agenda to this mix and hypertext becomes an intensely subversive political tool for speaking social criticism for, as Patricia Seaman says in her hypertextual tribute to Kathy Acker, Requiem for Pussy: "Every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of putting to question the established order of a society" (13).

Carolyn Guertin