Writing the Feminist Archive: What Contemporary Feminist Essayism Reveals and Conceals

Since the 2010s, feminist personal essay writing has gained considerable international visibility. Drawing on feminist theory and movement history, these essays frame lived experience as social critique and use familial memory to show how social conditioning shapes subjectivity and intimacy. They constitute an archive of their own, made like every archive by selection and ordering: opening access to feminist knowledge while also restricting, simplifying, and concealing feminist histories. The article traces this double movement through two key texts of German-language feminist essayism: Lilian Peter's Mutter geht aus (Mother Goes Out Partying, published in 2022) and Margarete Stokowski's Untenrum frei (Liberated from the Waist Down, published in 2016). Peter makes absence and ambiguity central to her poetics yet approaches her family's history obliquely. Stokowski, working in an essayistic self-help idiom, brackets contradictions in favor of coherence yet engages personal memory and experience more directly. Read against each other, these strategies show that such essays enact different epistemic and memorial modes with direct consequences for their feminist aesthetics and politics.