Ex-Centricities: Perspectives on Gender and Multi- Cultural Self-Representation in Contemporary American Women's Autobiographies

TLDR: In this article, the authors of three women's self-representational narratives, Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey, and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, were studied.

Abstract: I In Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation, Leigh Gilmore argues that there is a "crisis in critical approaches to the discourses of women's self-representation," and suggests that such a crisis "can be characterized as a kind of contractual dispute around gender and genre, in which the 'terms' [of traditional autobiography studies] seek to define legitimacy within autobiography's discursive nexus of identity, representation, and politics" (2).1 As Gilmore points out, "exploration of the possibilities of women's selfrepresentational writing is linked to the politics of self-representation," and, I would add, to the politics of representation more generally (3). What Adrienne Rich describes as a "politics of location" reacts to a history of exclusionary politics, a vortex that has created cultural, literary, and historical vacuums that warrant the current eruption of autobiography and autobiographies. Contemporary women's autobiographical fiction articulates the painful position of having no "place" to call one's own. Furthermore, women's self-representation illustrates that having to make a "place" for themselves means having to construct a space within alienating narrative and cultural forms, even while fracturing those forms so that they might accommodate "the subject" (in all senses of that word) of the marginalized self. Thus, traditional critical frameworks addressing autobiography studies are also fractured when female autobiography enters the scene. The politics of location that arises in contemporary women's selfrepresentational narratives articulates a paradoxical position; it is not merely one of location or dislocation, but, rather, the co-existence of the two as the marginalized subject shuttles back and forth between them to weave a sense of self within a perceived position of absence. Out of this weaving comes a reconstruction of a past perceived by the hegemonics of centricity as having no history at all. It is from this position, a third place of paradoxical being, one that I describe as ex-centric, that some female subjects seek to express themselves. Such subjects are in the process of mapping new cultural spaces. In the autobiographies of three women's self-representational narratives I study for this project, there is no final "place" of arrival, but rather a continual narrative enactment of the journey of self-discovery, a fluid, ongoing process that, even in the narratives' conclusions, opens out into yet another story of the shifting terrain of subjectivity. Dorothy Allison's memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, concludes with a poignant scene in which the narrator finds herself"standing by [herself] in the rubble of [her] life, at the bottom of every story [she] had ever needed to know." Allison concludes her memoir with a dramatic scene of the narrator pulling herself out of the rubble rib by rib "like a climber holding on to rock" (94). This upward and outward movement is a brilliant enactment of how one's life stories can bury one or can provide a medium through which one may climb toward liberation from social, literary, and familial burial. Minnie Bruce Pratt moves through the landscape of her childhood to reconstruct and then deconstruct the perspective given her by her family's social position in the segregated southern town where she grew up. In her collection of essays, titled Rebellion, and her short stories, titled S/HE, Pratt probes the dynamics of social and economic privilege. It is a privilege that is implicitly gendered female and racialized as white; it is a privilege that, because it is given can be taken away. Writing from memory's groundlessness, Kim Chernin drops into the gaps and crevices behind memory's reconstructions and discovers what resides within the forgotten places. In her autobiographical novel reconstructing her years as a young Jewish woman living on a kibbutz in Israel, Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey, Chernin writes three versions of the same story and in each story delves into a deeper layer of truth hidden by the social and literary conventions of the romantic love story. …