Adrienne Rich argues in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-vision” that “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival ... We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently” (88). In other words, the traditional (read male) ways of experiencing texts—the ways we write, read, and interpret texts—are limiting. Men and women do not bring the same experiences with them to a text, so if women are to learn to survive as women we must first learn to look at the world with fresh eyes and find new systems for making sense of the world and its texts.
In writing my own thesis project, I found that the existing schema I had for summarizing, interpreting, and organizing my research (or what Rich might call “the writing of the past”) did not reveal the rich connections, overlaps, and gaps between each author’s ideas that I felt were important. That is, it explained the main points of each source, but it failed to explain how I experienced these texts, and it created a static representation that failed to recognize each text as being part of a larger web of meaning. The traditional construction of a literature review, which consists of discussing each work in a linear manner, seemed to go against my own internal organization system, the feminist principles I was learning in Gender and Writing, and the connective and dynamic ways in which text was utilized in the blogs on which I was conducting research. Though I had to discuss my research in a linear matter to ensure my thesis was accepted, I argue in this project that hypertext can be used as a feminist tool to re-vision texts—to depart from the linear and hierarchical, to create connections between writers and texts, and to deconstruct traditional conceptions of authorship. As such, I have turned my literature review into a webtext in order to demonstrate how hypertext enables the kind of collaborative, non-hierarchical writing that is advocated by feminists.