The significance (or insignificance?) of graffiti on women's washroom walls

Looking through my copy of the Marchessault reading, I noticed that I wrote a lot of notes next to the part about graffiti on a woman's washroom wall. She draws a substantial amount of meaning out of the quote: "Now that women can be authors, the author is dead." I don't know about you, and I don't know how things are at York University, but I've never seen anything this "deep" on a bathroom wall. Most of the things people write while on the toilet, whether in Sharpie or lipstick or carved painstakingly with a pocketknife, are usually far less profound. All that aside, though, I don't necessarily think that gender has anything to do with the death of the author (at least not as Barthes defined it). It seems that the dead author is gender-neutral. If one believes that in the modern era the author becomes displaced by his or her language and essentially becomes his or her language, it should not matter whether this displaced author is a man or a woman, at least not in Barthes' terms.

Nevertheless I found many of Marchessault's other points interesting. While I don't agree that the dead author is a woman, I do agree that woman authors have been marginalized throughout history and that the discussion of women authors can be a sticky subject, since this groups all women together as a single entity, therefore negating their uniqueness as individuals. In that sense I guess woman authors could be seen as "dead," since they lose their individuality in this process. Maybe that's what Marchessault means by all of this. Maybe she even said that in the essay. Maybe it's too late for me to be thinking about all of this... Maybe I should go to sleep and let all this sink in overnight.