About ‘Claiming Sisterhood’

FROM CONCEPTION to birth, my name was Bert. My parents and my older brother, T, were convinced that I was going to arrive as a boy, and so it went that I was named after a Sesame Street character. Being the bohemian parents that they were, my parents arranged for T (at that time 4 years old) to cut my umbilical cord, and for a multitude of reasons, none too benign, when T saw me shriveled, screaming in the midwife’s arms—not exactly the fuzzy yellow Bert he had been imagining—he dropped the surgical scissors and ran.

Twenty-four years later, I am a recent college graduate and an even-more-recent grad student, pursuing an MFA in creative writing. Equipped with enough brains and know-how from a liberal-arts institution to connect the dots on the most random of topics, and with no pressing domestic plans on the horizon (i.e., homeownership, husbands, Huggies), I’m setting out to find and claim* sisterhood on my own terms.

The cosmos never handed me a sister of the biological, family-resemblance sort, and so sisterhood takes a rather abstract shape in my mind. While it is ever-morphing, sisterhood is always inextricably linked to the concepts of feminism—perhaps simply because sisterhood and feminism are both gendered terms—though also because I think that a search for sisterhood, at its base, is a negotiation of women’s connection to a collective female identity. I’m not claiming* to have a treasure map (yet) for the intangible meaning in sisterhood (or feminism), but through this blog I’m exploring the facets of sisterhood, from identity politics to pop-culture.

A writer of fiction, I have spent years plotting out other people’s stories in my imagination. In 2008 I packed up my things and moved to Paris briefly; I was alone, looking at the world through a stranger’s lens, thinking that perhaps the muddy border between imagination and reality would be more salient there. No such wanderings for now, though, except mental ones to conjure stories for The Sister Project and my graduate work. I have grounded myself in North Carolina, and we shall see what comes.–Anastasia Smith, Autumn 2008

*A word about the word “claim:” It can be described as two different verbs, “to take as the rightful owner,” but also “to assert in the face of possible contradiction.” I plan on claiming sisterhood in both these senses—not only to possess it and make it my own, but also to hold my definition of sisterhood up in the face of contradiction.

Comments on this entry are closed.