Contesting Representations
Life-Writings and Subjectivity in Postmodern and Feminist Autobiography
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20401382 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mark Zuss (City University of New York, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1997 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 653-673 |
| Publication date | 1997-10-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Theory & Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0959-3543 • E-ISSN: 1461-7447 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0959354397075004 |
| OpenAlex | W1965453517 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 12 |
Autobiographical and `life-writing' genres provide textual sites for representing aspects of experience and the articulation of relational selves. This paper investigates contemporary, postmodern feminist assays of identity that both question and challenge the limits of modernist representations of subjectivity. In life-writings by Helene Cixous, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde and Maya Angelou contestations over representation, agency and resistance. to fixed identity categories are made explicit. Postmodern textual and interpretative practices, including autobiographical `metissage' and non-synchronous analyses of raced, gendered and classed subject positions, replace essentialist representations of subjects in a politics of hybridity and difference. These texts offer pedagogic expressions of resistance to the enduring legacy of modernist authorship as an act deriving from a coherent self-present writing self. The practice of metissage and the disruption of temporality in these contemporary writings is regarded as an alternative representational poetics and politics founded on a non-foundational feminist and materialist ontology
Aesthetics · Epistemology · Feminism · Hybridity · Linguistics · Poetics · Politics · Postmodernism · Sociology · Subjectivity · Temporality · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Irish and British Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
'Talking Back' in Post-Colonial Discourse in Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise
Annual Bibliography of Works about Lifewriting, 1997-1998
The conceptualisation and categorisation of mixed race/ethnicity in Britain and North America
Mixed race', 'mixed origins' or what? Generic terminology for the multiple racial/ethnic group population
| Citations per year | 0.14 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1998 - 2015 (18) |
| Highly cited | No |