The linguist Judith Baxter writes that “powerful speech has long been associated with masculinity and powerless speech with femininity.” The very act of women talking is fraught with considerations of agency, identity, self-representation, and power, and nowhere is the power of voice made more resonant than in the act of storytelling. The voice is as vital to the position of the author in society as it is to the story itself. Yet these divergent approaches to voice – the activist and the authorial – are rarely considered in conversation with one another.

Our purpose here will be to explore the intersection of social identity and textual form in pursuit of the radical possibilities inherent in women talking. We will consider a diversity of configurations of textual voice and ask how the form and function of voice intersect, and to what purpose. Together we will explore fiction and memoir, personal essays, poetry, film and theatre in order to delve into the poetic and political nature of women talking. To that end, we will pay particular attention to that which so often goes unspoken – to what Anna Sales, host of the popular podcast Death, Sex and Money deems “the things we think about a lot, and need to talk about more.”