L Gilmore
Biographic Data
| ID | 9836 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Gilmore |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Gilmore |
| SIGNATURE | GILMORE L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wellesley College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9688-1380 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Unprecedented, Extrajudicial, Carceral: The Political Grammar of #MeToo
The Subject of Autobiography, University of Southern Maine, 1989: How a Conference Demonstrated Critical Mass
Giving an Epistolary Account of Oneself: Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy
This article reads the decades-long correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy as an account, following Judith Butler. Specifically, it argues that an epistolary subject emerges through the shared act of durational witness enacted in letter writing. Reading the correspondence as a Butlerian account clarifies why subjects choose a relational form like letter writing for the self-representation of trauma. It observes how particular form…
The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony
In The Limits of Autobiography , Leigh Gilmore analyzes texts that depict trauma by combining elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory in ways that challenge the constraints of autobiography. Astute and compelling readings of works by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dorothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeanette Winterson explore how each poses the questions "How have I lived?" and "How will I live?" in …
Desperation, Revenge, and Memoir: The Year in the US
Desperation, Revenge, and MemoirThe Year in the US Leigh Gilmore (bio) Elizabeth Hardwick told her students that the only reasons to write were "desperation and revenge." Perhaps surprisingly, neither predominates in Darryl Pinckney's memoir about his former teacher and friend, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan. Although desperation and revenge figure in Pinckney's and Hardwick's descriptions of …
MeToo Storytelling: Confession, Testimony, and Life Writing
This article argues that two discourses-confession and testimony-influence the stories survivors tell about sexual violence, the stories others tell about them, and the contexts in which #MeToo storytelling is heard. It identifies how confession and testimony crop up in several #MeToo forms within and beyond the courts, including abuser apologies, letters of support, victim impact statements, memoirs, and lawsuits. It demonstrates that #MeToo is …
Pandemic Reading: The Year in the United States
Pandemic ReadingThe Year in the United States Leigh Gilmore (bio) As the COVID-19 pandemic, protests against racist police violence, and the 2020 presidential election roiled American life, book culture, like everything else, was disrupted. Bookstores and libraries closed their doors. Some book tours were moved online, but my usual habit of browsing for newly published life writing vanished. I live in a city where local authors launch books and w…
More Than Angry: The Year in the United States
More Than AngryThe Year in the United States Leigh Gilmore (bio) Millions of women, trans people, men, and youth poured into the streets to protest Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2017. Estimates place participation in the Women's March at five million worldwide, including the largest single day protest in Washington, DC, with a crowd of over 470,000 (Waddell). In a social media follow-up in October 2017 to the Women's March, millions brok…
Frames of Witness: The Kavanaugh Hearings, Survivor Testimony, and #MeToo
This article argues that three frames of witness competed in the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings: the life story of Supreme Court nominee—now Justice—Brett Kavanaugh that was fashioned for the nomination process, the survivor testimony of Christine Blasey Ford that interrupted it, and the cultural frame of #MeToo in which her testimony and his repudiation of it were heard, which includes the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearing and the accompanying pattern…
MeToo and the Memoir Boom: The Year in the US
MeToo and the Memoir BoomThe Year in the US Leigh Gilmore (bio) In October 2017, the massive online sharing of the hashtag #MeToo placed sexual violence at the forefront of a global reckoning with misogyny and the institutions that enable it.1 Tapping into personal and cultural histories of suffering, resistance, and survival, #MeToo offered the promise of identification and affiliation to those entering self-representation through the survivor's…
Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives
In 1991, Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing brought the problem of sexual harassment to a public audience. Although widely believed by women, Hill was defamed by conservatives and Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The tainting of Hill and her testimony is part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. Hill's experience sh…
RefugeeǀCitizen: Mediating Testimony through Image and Word in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina
When journalists reporting on the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 referred to Black residents of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast as “refugees,” they claimed that the nam
Testimony
Reckoning with History, Form, and Sexual Violence in American Memoir: The Year in the US
Reckoning with History, Form, and Sexual Violence in American MemoirThe Year in the US Leigh Gilmore (bio) The weight of history lies heavily upon this review essay. The year was marked by a presidential contest and election of profound consequence. The impact of a Trump presidency becomes clearer as challenges pile up. On a global level, warming temperatures in the Atlantic promise storms of increasing ferocity as the US backs out of the Paris c…
Conclusion: Joan Didion's Style
Was there ever a writer as heedless of the limits of genre, with so roving an “I”|eye and possessing a style so recognizably iconic as Joan Didion? Didion, the globe traveler, migraine sufferer, an
Public Grief: Reading Joan Didion in the Context of #BlackLivesMatter
Joan Didion and #BlackLivesMatter share the space of public grief at the beginning of the twenty-first century and, read together, demonstrate how histories of race, public accommodation, and mourn
The Life of the Body in American Autobiography: The Year in the Us
The Life of the Body in American AutobiographyThe Year in the Us Leigh Gilmore (bio) “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” A host of life writers seemingly responded to this urgent refrain sung by a multicultural cast of founding fathers at the conclusion of Hamilton. By putting the question of survival at the center of a musical about American history and futurity, Lin-Manuel Miranda joined a company of life writers whose memoirs and essa…
Covering Pain: Pain Memoirs and Sequential Reading as an Ethical Practice
Book design—including the elements of cover image and author photo—offer conceptual matter from which meanings of authorship and identity emerge. In the case of memoirs about chronic pain, these peritexts also employ a complicated visual iconography of disability that may rely on assumptions about agency and ability that pain memoirs themselves challenge within their covers. This essay explores how readers might bear witness to chronic pain memoi…
Girlhood in the Gutter: Feminist Graphic Knowledge and the Visualization of Sexual Precarity
Girlhood in the Gutter:Feminist Graphic Knowledge and the Visualization of Sexual Precarity Elizabeth Marshall (bio) and Leigh Gilmore (bio) The dream of providing girls with the means to represent themselves has long animated multiple strands of feminist thought. Yet feminist inquiry into gendered childhood confronts an elusive subject: more often represented by others than self-representing, girls (in childhood and adolescence) are known primar…
Boom|lash: Fact-Checking, Suicide, and the Lifespan of a Genre
This essay offers a new term, boom/lash, to reflect the incorporation of the backlash against memoir as a genre into the boom itself, and to interrogate the resulting relations among genre, evidence, and ethics. I examine how Lifespan of a Fact, John D’Agata's representation of fact-checking and suicide, became entangled in debates about what counts as credible evidence of truth-telling in literary nonfiction
How we confess now: Reading the Abu Ghraib archive
American Neoconfessional: Memoir, Self-Help, and Redemption on Oprah's Couch
This essay reads the scandal surrounding James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces as part of a developing brand, the American neoconfessional, and questions how memoirs, as part of this brand, present "reading in public" as a mode of civic engagement that teaches readers to consume and judge "similar others." The redemption narrative is the preferred story in this brand, with its links to the American dream, and its promotion centers normativi…
Looking Back / Looking Forward
Looking Back / Looking Forward Leigh Gilmore (bio) For many feminist academics working outside the clinical study and treatment of trauma in the early 1990s, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery offered us an absorbing, detailed, and profoundly useful analysis of past and current clinical practice, as well as unparalleled insights into the relationship between traumatic experience and the path to recovery. Her analysis of trauma emphasized how gen…
Jurisdictions: I, Rigoberta Menchú , The Kiss , and Scandalous Self‐Representation in the Age of Memoir and Trauma
The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony
Memoirs in which trauma takes a major—or the major—role challenge the limits of autobiography. Leigh Gilmore presents a series of "limit-cases"—texts that combine elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory while representing trauma and the self—and demonstrates how and why their authors swerve from the formal constraints of autobiography when the representation of trauma coincides with self-representation. Gilmore maintain…
Limit-Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdictions of Identity
One writes in order to become other than what one is. -- Michel Foucault Somewhere around 1996, in the midst of a much-remarked-upon economic boom, another pocket of extraordinary vitality emerged in the United States. As the Dow soared high in a climate of speculation, memoir boomed. Signs of growth abounded: book reviewers ritualistically cited memoir's ubiquity, more publishers expanded their lists to include memoir, more first books were mark…
American Neoconfessional: Memoir, Self-Help, and Redemption on Oprah's Couch
This essay reads the scandal surrounding James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces as part of a developing brand, the American neoconfessional, and questions how memoirs, as part of this brand, present "reading in public" as a mode of civic engagement that teaches readers to consume and judge "similar others." The redemption narrative is the preferred story in this brand, with its links to the American dream, and its promotion centers normativi…
Frames of Witness: The Kavanaugh Hearings, Survivor Testimony, and #MeToo
This article argues that three frames of witness competed in the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings: the life story of Supreme Court nominee—now Justice—Brett Kavanaugh that was fashioned for the nomination process, the survivor testimony of Christine Blasey Ford that interrupted it, and the cultural frame of #MeToo in which her testimony and his repudiation of it were heard, which includes the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearing and the accompanying pattern…
Boom|lash: Fact-Checking, Suicide, and the Lifespan of a Genre
This essay offers a new term, boom/lash, to reflect the incorporation of the backlash against memoir as a genre into the boom itself, and to interrogate the resulting relations among genre, evidence, and ethics. I examine how Lifespan of a Fact, John D’Agata's representation of fact-checking and suicide, became entangled in debates about what counts as credible evidence of truth-telling in literary nonfiction
Unprecedented, Extrajudicial, Carceral: The Political Grammar of #MeToo
More Than Angry: The Year in the United States
More Than AngryThe Year in the United States Leigh Gilmore (bio) Millions of women, trans people, men, and youth poured into the streets to protest Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2017. Estimates place participation in the Women's March at five million worldwide, including the largest single day protest in Washington, DC, with a crowd of over 470,000 (Waddell). In a social media follow-up in October 2017 to the Women's March, millions brok…
MeToo and the Memoir Boom: The Year in the US
MeToo and the Memoir BoomThe Year in the US Leigh Gilmore (bio) In October 2017, the massive online sharing of the hashtag #MeToo placed sexual violence at the forefront of a global reckoning with misogyny and the institutions that enable it.1 Tapping into personal and cultural histories of suffering, resistance, and survival, #MeToo offered the promise of identification and affiliation to those entering self-representation through the survivor's…
The Life of the Body in American Autobiography: The Year in the Us
The Life of the Body in American AutobiographyThe Year in the Us Leigh Gilmore (bio) “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” A host of life writers seemingly responded to this urgent refrain sung by a multicultural cast of founding fathers at the conclusion of Hamilton. By putting the question of survival at the center of a musical about American history and futurity, Lin-Manuel Miranda joined a company of life writers whose memoirs and essa…
Looking Back / Looking Forward
Looking Back / Looking Forward Leigh Gilmore (bio) For many feminist academics working outside the clinical study and treatment of trauma in the early 1990s, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery offered us an absorbing, detailed, and profoundly useful analysis of past and current clinical practice, as well as unparalleled insights into the relationship between traumatic experience and the path to recovery. Her analysis of trauma emphasized how gen…
Parasitic disease control in a residential facility for the mentally retarded: Failure of selected isolation procedures
Asymptomatic infection with either Entamoeba histolytica or Giardia lamblia was found in 60 per cent of the residents in an institution for the mentally retarded one year after eradication of these parasites. The residents were then segregated into infected and noninfected groups and drug therapy was again successfully undertaken. The two groups remained separated except during periods of play. A one-year follow-up showed that both study and cont…
Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation
Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation
Last Words: Transference and the Auto/biographical Demand in Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart
American Imago - Volume 55, Number 2, Summer 1998
The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony
Memoirs in which trauma takes a major—or the major—role challenge the limits of autobiography. Leigh Gilmore presents a series of "limit-cases"—texts that combine elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory while representing trauma and the self—and demonstrates how and why their authors swerve from the formal constraints of autobiography when the representation of trauma coincides with self-representation. Gilmore maintain…
Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory . Marianne Hirsch Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death . Nancy K. Miller
Limit-Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdictions of Identity
One writes in order to become other than what one is. -- Michel Foucault Somewhere around 1996, in the midst of a much-remarked-upon economic boom, another pocket of extraordinary vitality emerged in the United States. As the Dow soared high in a climate of speculation, memoir boomed. Signs of growth abounded: book reviewers ritualistically cited memoir's ubiquity, more publishers expanded their lists to include memoir, more first books were mark…
Jurisdictions: I, Rigoberta Menchú , The Kiss , and Scandalous Self‐Representation in the Age of Memoir and Trauma
Looking Back / Looking Forward
Looking Back / Looking Forward Leigh Gilmore (bio) For many feminist academics working outside the clinical study and treatment of trauma in the early 1990s, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery offered us an absorbing, detailed, and profoundly useful analysis of past and current clinical practice, as well as unparalleled insights into the relationship between traumatic experience and the path to recovery. Her analysis of trauma emphasized how gen…
How we confess now: Reading the Abu Ghraib archive
American Neoconfessional: Memoir, Self-Help, and Redemption on Oprah's Couch
This essay reads the scandal surrounding James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces as part of a developing brand, the American neoconfessional, and questions how memoirs, as part of this brand, present "reading in public" as a mode of civic engagement that teaches readers to consume and judge "similar others." The redemption narrative is the preferred story in this brand, with its links to the American dream, and its promotion centers normativi…
Boom|lash: Fact-Checking, Suicide, and the Lifespan of a Genre
This essay offers a new term, boom/lash, to reflect the incorporation of the backlash against memoir as a genre into the boom itself, and to interrogate the resulting relations among genre, evidence, and ethics. I examine how Lifespan of a Fact, John D’Agata's representation of fact-checking and suicide, became entangled in debates about what counts as credible evidence of truth-telling in literary nonfiction
Covering Pain: Pain Memoirs and Sequential Reading as an Ethical Practice
Book design—including the elements of cover image and author photo—offer conceptual matter from which meanings of authorship and identity emerge. In the case of memoirs about chronic pain, these peritexts also employ a complicated visual iconography of disability that may rely on assumptions about agency and ability that pain memoirs themselves challenge within their covers. This essay explores how readers might bear witness to chronic pain memoi…
Girlhood in the Gutter: Feminist Graphic Knowledge and the Visualization of Sexual Precarity
Girlhood in the Gutter:Feminist Graphic Knowledge and the Visualization of Sexual Precarity Elizabeth Marshall (bio) and Leigh Gilmore (bio) The dream of providing girls with the means to represent themselves has long animated multiple strands of feminist thought. Yet feminist inquiry into gendered childhood confronts an elusive subject: more often represented by others than self-representing, girls (in childhood and adolescence) are known primar…
Conclusion: Joan Didion's Style
Was there ever a writer as heedless of the limits of genre, with so roving an “I”|eye and possessing a style so recognizably iconic as Joan Didion? Didion, the globe traveler, migraine sufferer, an
Public Grief: Reading Joan Didion in the Context of #BlackLivesMatter
Joan Didion and #BlackLivesMatter share the space of public grief at the beginning of the twenty-first century and, read together, demonstrate how histories of race, public accommodation, and mourn
The Life of the Body in American Autobiography: The Year in the Us
The Life of the Body in American AutobiographyThe Year in the Us Leigh Gilmore (bio) “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” A host of life writers seemingly responded to this urgent refrain sung by a multicultural cast of founding fathers at the conclusion of Hamilton. By putting the question of survival at the center of a musical about American history and futurity, Lin-Manuel Miranda joined a company of life writers whose memoirs and essa…
Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives
In 1991, Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing brought the problem of sexual harassment to a public audience. Although widely believed by women, Hill was defamed by conservatives and Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The tainting of Hill and her testimony is part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. Hill's experience sh…
RefugeeǀCitizen: Mediating Testimony through Image and Word in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina
When journalists reporting on the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 referred to Black residents of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast as “refugees,” they claimed that the nam
Testimony
Reckoning with History, Form, and Sexual Violence in American Memoir: The Year in the US
Reckoning with History, Form, and Sexual Violence in American MemoirThe Year in the US Leigh Gilmore (bio) The weight of history lies heavily upon this review essay. The year was marked by a presidential contest and election of profound consequence. The impact of a Trump presidency becomes clearer as challenges pile up. On a global level, warming temperatures in the Atlantic promise storms of increasing ferocity as the US backs out of the Paris c…
Frames of Witness: The Kavanaugh Hearings, Survivor Testimony, and #MeToo
This article argues that three frames of witness competed in the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings: the life story of Supreme Court nominee—now Justice—Brett Kavanaugh that was fashioned for the nomination process, the survivor testimony of Christine Blasey Ford that interrupted it, and the cultural frame of #MeToo in which her testimony and his repudiation of it were heard, which includes the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearing and the accompanying pattern…
MeToo and the Memoir Boom: The Year in the US
MeToo and the Memoir BoomThe Year in the US Leigh Gilmore (bio) In October 2017, the massive online sharing of the hashtag #MeToo placed sexual violence at the forefront of a global reckoning with misogyny and the institutions that enable it.1 Tapping into personal and cultural histories of suffering, resistance, and survival, #MeToo offered the promise of identification and affiliation to those entering self-representation through the survivor's…
More Than Angry: The Year in the United States
More Than AngryThe Year in the United States Leigh Gilmore (bio) Millions of women, trans people, men, and youth poured into the streets to protest Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2017. Estimates place participation in the Women's March at five million worldwide, including the largest single day protest in Washington, DC, with a crowd of over 470,000 (Waddell). In a social media follow-up in October 2017 to the Women's March, millions brok…
Pandemic Reading: The Year in the United States
Pandemic ReadingThe Year in the United States Leigh Gilmore (bio) As the COVID-19 pandemic, protests against racist police violence, and the 2020 presidential election roiled American life, book culture, like everything else, was disrupted. Bookstores and libraries closed their doors. Some book tours were moved online, but my usual habit of browsing for newly published life writing vanished. I live in a city where local authors launch books and w…
Sociology (20 works) · Art (18 works) · History (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Literature (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Memoir (10 works) · Narrative (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works)