“Who Gets to Speak and Why?” Oversharing in Contemporary North American Women’s Writing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18996705 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rachel Sykes (0000-0002-0229-4888, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 151-174 |
| Publication date | 2017-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/692482 |
| OpenAlex | W2745764922 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 12 |
This article asks how oversharing, the revelation of “too much” personal information, functions as an experimental literary practice in contemporary North American women’s writing. I provide a brief history of oversharing as a cultural term and discuss how the label oversharer is what Michael Zimmer and Anthony Hoffman term an “ideologically charged accusation” that is primarily associated with women. I argue that women are more likely to be accused of oversharing than men no matter what the content of their self-disclosures. Through brief analysis of popular texts by Lena Dunham, Emily Gould, and Sheila Heti, I contend that many mainstream women writers are derogatively labeled as literary oversharers by their reviewers and critics. However, rather than reject oversharing as a critical term, the second strand of this article turns away from the popularity of Dunham and Heti to ask whether experimental writing by women can embody a poetics of oversharing that is characterized by an excess of autobiographical, sexual, and embodied confessions. Through an analysis of Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel I Love Dick, the final part of this article asks to what extent oversharing constitutes a mode of dissent in contemporary culture and, if so, whether oversharing can ever transgress patriarchal norms. Kraus’s experimental writing parodies the act of self-disclosure to a much greater extent than that of Gould, Heti, or Dunham. This article thus reads Kraus’s novel as a reclamation of the right to share whatever and, perhaps most important, however much the female subject desires
Aesthetics · Art · Dissent · Foregrounding · Ideology · Literary criticism · Literature · Mainstream · Pejorative · Poetics · Poetry · Politics · Popularity · Postmodernism · Sociology · Theology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Social Psychology
The Culture of Connectivity
Can You See How Happy We Are? Facebook Images and Relationship Satisfaction
Writing Women's Literary History
Self-disclosure and liking
New Media in Black Women’s Autobiography
Manic Impositions
The Laugh of the Medusa
Self-disclosure and new communication technologies
Extended Self in a Digital World
Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,75 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2026 (9) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |