New Genres, New Subjects: Women, Gender and Autobiography after 2000

Abstract

This essay presents three theoretical concepts —performativity, positionality, and relationality— for exploring how autobiographical acts and practices intersect with gendered positionalities and relations. It then applies these concepts to six domains of women’s life narrative since 2000: Transnational Lives; Graphic Lives; Online Lives; Modernist Citizen Lives in the nation state; Vulnerable Lives; and Embodied and Material Lives. It concludes that, although feminism has become commodified in new ways under global capitalism, it can be energized and adaptively reoriented by acts of personal narration. As these domains of life story production intervene to theorize the contested grounds of experience and identity, they indicate how contemporary feminism, in Ella Shohat’s words, continues to be “a polysemic site of contradictory positionalities” (1-2).