WOMEN, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, THEORY

A Reader

Edited by

Sidonie Smith
and

Julia Watson

The University of Wisconsin Press

Contents
Acknowledgments

xi

N^ Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women's

Autobiographical Practices

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson

Y Part I. Experience and Agency

1. Experience (1993)

57

Joan W. Scott
2. Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice
(1988)

72

Susan Stanford Friedman

3. On Confession (1989)

83

Rita Felski
4. The Narrative Self: Race, Politics, and Culture in Black
American Women's Autobiography (1995)

96

Nellie Y. McKay
5. Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance
(1995)

108

Sidonie Smith
6. Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial
Condition (1992)

116

Sara Suleri

Part II. Subjectivities

7. Autogynography: Is the Subject Different? (1984)

131

Domna C. Stanton
8. Authorizing the Autobiographical (1988)

145

Shari Benstock
9. Mothers, Displacement, and Language (1988)
Bella Brodzki

va

156

Contents

10. The Politics of Subjectivity and

The Ideology of Genre (1989)

160

Felicity A. Nussbaum
11. First-Person Plural: Subjectivity and Community in
Native American Women's Autobiography (1996)

168

Hertha D. Sweet Wong

Part III. Modes and Genres

12. Autobiographies (1994)

183

Leigh Gilmore
13. Autography/Transformation/Asymmetry (1995)

190

Jeanne Perreault
14. Sacred Secrets: A Strategy for Survival (1995)

197

Doris Sommer
15. Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and
Transnational Feminist Subjects (1992)

208

Caren Kaplan
16. Introduction to A Day at a Time: Diary Literature of
American Women, from 1764 to 1985 (1985)

217

Margo Culley
17. A Feminist Revision of New Historicism to Give Fuller
Readings of Women's Private Writing (1996)
'

222

-Helen M. Buss
18. Female Rhetorics (1988)

232

Patricia Meyer Spacks

Part IV. Histories

19. Stories (1986)

243

Carolyn Kay Steedman

20. Literary Domesticity and Women Writers' Subjectivities
(1992)

255

Mary Jean Corbett

21. The Literary Standard, Working-Class Autobiography,
and Gender (1990)
Regenia Gagnier

264

Contents

22. The Construction of the Self in U.S. Latina

Autobiographies (1991)

276

Lourdes Torres
23. Autobiography, Ethnography, and History: A Model for
Reading (1995)

288

Anne E. Goldman
24. Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of
Definition and Approach (1991)

299

Sau-ling Cynthia Wong

Part V. Voice and Memory

25. The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers
(1980)

321

Mary G. Mason
26. The Politics and Aesthetics of Metissage (1989)
,_

325

Francoise Lionnet
V?'. Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound (1980)

337

Assia Djebar
28. Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black
Woman Writer's Literary Tradition (1989)

343

Mae Gwendolyn Henderson

29. The Recovery of Memory, Fantasy, and Desire in
Women's Trauma Stories: Feminist Approaches to Sexual
Abuse and Psychotherapy (1996)

352

Janice Haaken

Partvl. Bodies and Sexualities

/

30. Introduction to Bodies That Matter (1993)

367

Judith Butler
31. Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference(s)
(1988)
Biddy Martin

380

Contents

32. Unspeakable Differences: The Politics of Gender

in Lesbian and Heterosexual Women's
Autobiographies (1992)

393

Julia Watson
33. Mystical Bodies and the Dialogics of Vision (1993)

403

Laurie A. Finke
34. Autobiography, Bodies, Manhood (1991)

415

.Shirley Neuman

Parj^VIII. Politics and Pedagogy

/

35. writing autobiography (1989)

429

bell hooks
36. Autobiographical Manifestos (1993)

433

Sidonie Smith
37. Semiotics, Experience, and the Material Self: An Inquiry
into the Subject of the Contemporary Asian Woman
Writer (1988)

441

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

38. From the Women's Prison: Third World Women's
Narratives of Prison (1986)

453

Barbara Harlow
39. Teaching Autobiography (1991)

461

Nancy K. Miller
40. The Way In (1989)

471

Nancy Mairs

A Selected List of Women's Autobiographies

477

Contributors

485

Sources

491

Index

495

Titles in Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography

525