Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography

Writing Selves was first published in 1995.Why “autography”? Because there really is no genre for feminist self-writing. This is the territory, between autobiography and feminist thought, that Jeanne Perreault marks out.Writing Selves retheorizes ideas of self, identity, and community as embodied and textualized forces of change. In the writers under study, “selvings” intersect the discourses of history, the law, and the sexual and racial body. Looking to Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals, Kate Millet’s The Basement, Adrienne Rich’s later prose and poetry, and Patricia Williams’s “diary,” among other works, Perreault compellingly examines writing as a significant element in the processes of self-making. Exploring the shifting boundaries of feminist communities, Perreault demonstrates how an intense reciting of “I” and “we” allows the reconception of an ethically informed subjectivity. Scholarly and powerfully argued, Writing Selves and the concept of autography make a major contribution to the questions informing the poetics and politics of identity.