Conference Proceedings & Papers

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Open Access
“You Bite It, You Write It:” Confession in Compulsory Diet Discourse
(2002-05-15) Browne, Kate
When my aunt died last year, she left behind over one hundred diet books. This inheritance, which included not only diet books but also handwritten calorie counts, food journals, marginalia, and weight tracking documents, became an archive that provided important primary sources that aided my dissertation research on confession in weight loss memoir. It also complicated my position as a life writing researcher, bringing to the foreground my own complex, multi-generational history with compulsory diet discourse. In this presentation, I focus specifically on how Weight Watchers, a commercial weight loss program, offers specific instruction in using confession in life writing as self-discipline. I will also share some of my personal archive of food journaling and weight loss blogging to show how Weight Watchers taught me how to write my fat life.
Open Access
Trauma and Testimony: Deconstructing Sexual Violence Narratives in Contemporary Memoir
(2014-05-15) Spallacci, Amanda
According to Marlene Kadar, life writing has developed from a genre to a critical practice, and as a result, “we are able to reconsider the possible functions of life writing now” (11). My paper explores how rape survivors use different forms of life writing to challenge assumptions about sexual violence. Rape myths that constitute rape culture tend to displace the blame for the assault away from the rapist and onto the survivor, using blaming tactics involving “inappropriate” dress, substance use, the survivors’ relationship to the perpetrator, and the very definition of rape. These pervasive beliefs about the culpability and guilt about women who are raped are largely responsible for the lack of respect survivors experience in the court system. As literary and film scholars, we should ask: to what extent do our narrative practices influence rape culture? Conventional narrative techniques restrict survivor’s testimony; however, life writing about trauma resists these oppressive structures, provides a creative outlet for survivors to identify and refute dominant ideologies about violence which have, in the past, prevented them from understanding or identifying with their assault, and allow the survivor to reclaim a sense of political agency within this precarious situation (Gilmore 1994; Henke; Hesford; Morrison). I will consider textual memoir and film such as: Sil Lai Abrams’s Black Lotus: A Women’s Search for Racial Identity, Aspen Matis’s Girl in the Wood, Jessica Valenti’s Sex Object, and Kirby Dick’s The Hunting Ground. Briefly, I will address how the survivor’s body influences personal testimony. This will speak to the recent criticism that scholars tend to ignore, that is to say, how the body factors into life writing and affects the types of narratives people can tell (Smith & Watson 51). Then, I will engage with both literary and clinical theories of trauma to explore how personal narratives of sexual violence resist the myths that have been used to subjugate survivors. Leigh Gilmore states that personal testimony has a “structural entanglement with the law” (Trauma and Testimony 7); historically, the law has exploited memory gaps caused by trauma (Freyd 1998), the way survivors react to trauma (Herman 2003; Lonsway 2009; Lisak; Schwab), nonlinear recollections of trauma (Herman 1997), and cultural rape myths (Hesford; Heberle; Gilmore 2001), in order to discredit survivors’ testimony. Wendy Hesford insists that “strategies of appropriation can subvert dominant rape scripts even if they establish complicity with them” (19). I will analyze the way survivors re-appropriate elements of trauma and rape culture into their narratives, as a form of resistance against the long standing practice of silencing and discrediting survivors’ testimony, and as a means of reasserting their political agency.
Open Access
Transsexuality: a lonely journey of identity
(2017-05-15) Quintana, Suely de Fonseca
The book of João Nery, Lonely Journey: memoirs of a transsexual thirty years later, reveals the author's route in all the stages of his struggle for body change. Born in a woman's body, John seeks a way that matches his gender identity, male in this case. This work investigates the relationship between body, gender and heteronormative determinations. A society, still conservative and homophobic, makes more difficult the changes in body shapes, which has consequences in civil life, since these people are prevented from changing their names in the documents, practicing the profession in which they were majored in, because they had another body and another name. The transsexuality issue will be addressed by the theoretical bias of Judith Butler in two of her books—Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity and Giving an Account of Oneself—and Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, considering not only to gender and sexuality issues, but also the related pain when narrating. The text of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the closet, will be important to discuss the acceptance of sexuality to himself and to the other, discussing the relationship between public and private, from the social changes created by the LGBT population groups.
Open Access
Collections and Collaborations for Writing Black Women’s Wellness: Narratives of Practical Research, Pedagogy, and Practice
(2017-05-15) Evans, Stephanie
Stephanie Y. Evans will discuss her online library of Black women’s memoirs from around the globe and highlight research themes of Black women’s wellness through life writing. Specifically, the curator of this database will show how creation of the digital humanities resource inspired collaborative publications about mind, body, and spirit health for Black women. Projects grounded in life writing include mental health (mind), Black women yoga instructors (spirit), and a community-based project on soup stories as cultural paths to nutrition (body). AfricanaMemoirs.net is an online resource of over 500 narratives created to encourage research grounded in Black women's life stories. This open access database enhances narrative study and broadens the scope of autobiography, memoir, and epistolary writing as a genre. Most importantly, this website inspires the next generation of authors to read and write life stories for empowerment. In the tradition of Sesheta, the Egyptian goddess known as "lady of the house of books," this library gathers together a chorus of voices from around the world and Africana women's stories are as numerous as the spots on Sesheta's leopard print dress. The main theme of these stories is what Anna Julia Cooper calls regeneration. Professor Evans teaches various topics through memoir and the collection allows students to look backward, look inward, and look forward to identify relevant historical and contemporary issues. This presentation will also discuss creative ways to engage memoir as a teaching tool for community service-learning courses that connect with high school curricula. The book Black Passports: Travel Memoirs as Tools for Youth Empowerment (SUNY 2014), provides an example of how research can enhance student learning outcomes for all levels of learning. The presentation will close with discussion of current projects including a memoir review library in the works.
Open Access
Autobiographical Genre in the Age of Complexity: A Case Study of Neuro-Autobiographies
(2017-05-15) Valente, Andrea C.
This presentation aims to explore the autobiographical genre under the lenses of an emergent interdisciplinary methodology known as ‘complexity theory’ (Waldrop 1992; Jörg 2011; Wells 2013) in order to provide new insights into non-linear interactions between an autobiographical ‘self’ and its environment. The autobiographical genre gained propulsion during the Enlightenment period as historical men influenced by Newtonian thinking recorded their life reflections and accomplishments (Kadar 1992; Anderson 2011). Since then, autobiographical genre has evolved, becoming more diverse and gendered, including ordinary people’s life stories and voices that are translated and (self)-narrated (Bruner 1987; Smith & Watson 2009). Moreover, the 21st century autobiographical accounts use a variety of media platforms, producing a ‘networked self’ (Jolly 2012) that designs narratives of performance that reverberates experiential stories, as nodes of relationality and intertextuality emerge organically in the public sphere. Hence, autobiographies become complex, undetermined, non-linear and flexible. In this view, I argue that autobiography shifts from a genre to a self-organization model with its sub-types featuring complexity and hybridity. As consequence, the autobiographical ‘self’ also becomes a complex entity. To illustrate this discussion, this presentation focuses on autobiographies of women with brain disorders, to which I use the term ‘neuro-autobiography’. I examine the case of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who survived a stroke as a young woman. She narrates and performs her story through different media formats such as a published autobiography and a TED Talk video in the internet. I study how the autobiographical self shifts into an agent category that becomes self-organized and interacts with other agents and actants, that is, humans and objects. Furthermore, I discuss interconnectivity and intertextuality as important nodes in a rhetorical ecology that allows the autobiographical agent to engage and act/react from within outward.
Open Access
Masculinity and Migration: The Black Atlantic Lives of Henry Highland Garnet and Peter Thomas Stanford
(2017-05-15) McCaskill, Barbara
Rev. Henry Highland Garnet (1815-82) and Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford (c. 1860-1909) were nineteenth-century African American ministers whose dramatic lives intersected. Both descended from enslaved black southerners; both emerged as charismatic preachers in Brooklyn, New York’s radical antislavery community; and, predating the innovative work of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), both became passionate advocates for providing access for talented African American youth to a classical and liberal arts educations beyond the grammar school level. Garnet was one of Stanford’s spiritual and political mentors, and helped place him in summer jobs to finance his college education. For this meeting of the International Auto/Biography Association, I will focus on how Garnet and Stanford constructed notions of gender and race as part of a collective project of shaping a political and economic agenda for African Americans in the decades after the Civil War. They are no longer household names among Anglophone readers, yet each of their stories marked milestone moments in early African American print culture. The Sketch of the Life and Labors of Rev. Henry Highland Garnet (1865), as told by the abolitionist James McCune Smith, was in fact commissioned for printing in Washington, DC, by the US Congress after Garnet became the first black man invited to speak there. Nearly one-half century later, Stanford’s firsthand memoir From Bondage to Liberty (1889) highlighted his historic appointment as the first black minister of a church in the working class city of Birmingham, England. These texts, I argue, subvert conventional discussions of black masculinity and citizenship in order to facilitate post-Emancipation goals of educational opportunities, political suffrage, and transnational antiracist collaborations. Similarly, the hybrid forms of their stories, which challenge the aesthetics of ex-slaves’ narratives, reflect a new post-Emancipation agenda for African Americans.
Open Access
Writings of the Self through Mystical Experience within Santo Daime
(2017-05-15) Lee, Henrique de Oliveira
This presentation will be presenting partial results of the research project on “Writings of the self and mystical experience within Santo Daime”. This research is funded by FAPEMAT, a Brazilian state agency for research funding and technology development. Santo Daime is a Brazilian religion based on syncretic symbols of popular Christianity, Amazonian indigenous shamanism and afro Brazilian mediunic incorporation. During the Santo Daime´s cults ayahuasca (a indigenous brew made out by leafs and vime) is consumed producing intense mystical experience as it is accounted by the rituals participants. Whether in an anthropological approach or in a pharmacological frame, there are much scientific attention to all religion practice evolving the use of ayahuasca nowadays in Brazil. Despite of these main approaches to the phenomenon of ayahuasca consumption this research project points at other epistemological direction while it investigates how a mystical experience is built as a written account of oneself. In some cases there is a remarkable connection between having a mystical experience and being compelled to give an account of oneself. In this first stage of the research we investigate published material by two authors who have written accounts on their experiences within Santo Daime´s rituals. The first is the poet and ex-participant of guerrilla movement in Brazil Alex Polari. He has published the book “O guia da floresta” in 1992 as an autobiographical account of his first experience in the Santo Daime community in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest. The second is the Argentinian anthropologist and also poet Nestor Perlongher who lived in Brazil and took part in a research group on ayahuasca but the account of his mystical experience is mostly in the genre of essay in a book “Prosa plebéia”. My goal for this proposal is to investigate in both texts how the mystical experience is bound to an intense process of redescription of the self which compelled these two authors to give written accounts of themselves.
Open Access
In Search of the Black Fantastic
(2017-05-15) Ards, Angela
In Search of the Black Fantastic, Richard Iton’s theorizing about the “anticolonial labor” of cultural actors who disassemble and reimagine the nation in a post-colonial era resonates with Edwidge Danticat’s essay collection Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Writer at Work, where she outlines her own philosophy of the artist’s social role. In this paper, I draw on both Iton’s cultural theories and Danticat’s essay collection to argue that her memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, performs such political work as it explores the diasporic dimensions of contemporary black cultural formation. The memoir chronicles a triad of events: the author’s unexpected pregnancy; her father’s terminal diagnosis; her uncle’s tragic death while in U.S. Customs. On the one hand, Brother, I’m Dying is a testimonio, a collective story that speaks out against injustice to gain agency through narration, as her uncle’s death in detention provided the original catalyst for this protest against imperialism. But the memoir is also a creation myth, a myth of origins, in which Danticat contemplates the influence of her uncle and father, her “two papas,” on her formation as an immigrant writer. This paper demonstrates that, as much as this memoir is about mourning her father’s and uncle’s deaths, and Haiti’s travails since independence, it also revisits Danticat’s own immigrant odyssey. The story of the black nation and subjectivity has traditionally been the story of men, with women serving only as mothers and mates that created male heirs. In creating subjectivity through nonlinear, dialogic structures in the vein of black feminists writers such as Mae G. Henderson and Audre Lorde, Brother, I’m Dying joins an intellectual tradition of black feminist writing on diaspora. Chronicling her subject formation at the hands of her father and uncle, all the while positioning herself as a mother-to-be, Danticat creates a black diasporic subjectivity beyond gender and nation.
Open Access
Mar and Me: Following the Traces
(2017-05-15) Warley, Linda
In this paper I will trace the influence that Marlene Kadar's scholarship has had on my own thinking, while making more general comments about personal writing and collaborative research as feminist practices. . Marlene and I, along with Jeanne Perreault and (for the first volume Susanna Egan) co-edited two books and one special issue of a journal together. But it was not until I read her essay for our first book, Tracing the Autobiographical (2005), that I really saw how much Kadar could stretch the idea of life writing even further and find even more lives, vulnerable lives, in the most unexpected places. Kadar adds traces and fragments to our understanding of autobiographical practices. The expansiveness of her thinking cuts a path for others to follow.
Open Access
Crip Intrusions: Affect-ive Readings of Disability
(2017-05-15) Neuman, Syndey
I will engage with affective experiences of disability that are silenced within dominant discourses of disability theory. In order to tease out the particularities of the silences and absences I aim to address, I will examine various instances of life writing/life narrative, focusing on the tellings of disabled, queer, and/or racialized writers. Within my research, there is a great deal of motion and overlap between primary and secondary sources, creative and scholarly texts. Much of the theory I engage with writes and/or performs affects and sensations at the same time as it explores their content and form (or lack thereof). Likewise, much of the life writing I engage with has explicitly theoretical implications. In keeping with a feminist tradition of appreciating the situated-ness of bodies of/and knowledge, my research engages with work exhibiting forms of embodied situated-ness that is mobile, shifting, and prone to slippage. With this commitment in mind, I explore various forms of “life writing” or “life narrative,” understood as attempts to communicate bodies and selves within and perhaps beyond particular social, political, economic contexts. I focus on the ways in which processes of meaning making, communication, and engagement are themselves affective encounters among bodies. While dominant processes of life writing often function as means of communicating, and in the process constructing, a particular self, I will read these texts for the moments where affects erupt into the text—where any search for a stable self to tell is abandoned and the complicated, messy aspects of corporeal experiences emerge.
Open Access
Crossing Borders with LGBTQ Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Life Writing: History, Trauma, and the Queer Autobiographical
(2017-05-15) Evoy, Jacob
This paper investigates the intersecting roles of sexuality, gender, race, and nationalism within the life writings of LGBTQ children of Holocaust survivors. While much work has examined intergenerational trauma within the writing of descendants of the Holocaust, only a few have acknowledged and interrogated the importance of sexuality within the lives and writings of these individuals. My paper utilizes queer theory to read and situate these authors’ works in new contexts. Drawing upon queer theoretical concepts of trauma (Ann Cvetkovich), history and temporality (Heather Love and Scott Bravmann), and reparative reading practices (Eve Sedgwick), I unpack some of the common and alternative themes of the pieces written by LGBTQ children of Holocaust survivors. Texts in this study include (but are not limited to): Lisa Kron’s Two and a Half Minute Ride (2001), Lev Raphael’s Dancing on Tisha B’av (1988), Journey and Arrivals (1996), and My Germany (2009), as well as Sarah Schulman’s Rat Bohemia (1995), People in Trouble (1990), and The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation (2012). My paper situates these works within larger narratives of (queer) history, trauma, and activism as these works traverse from the individual to the collective. Of particular note, this paper examines how trauma is present within the everyday lives of queer folk while simultaneously interacting with other traumatic events and their legacies. My paper investigates the everyday aspects of trauma as they are situated alongside and within homo- and hetero- normative life scripts. From Kron’s retelling of her sibling’s wedding to Raphael’s sexual encounters with uncircumcised Jewish men, to Schulman’s witnessing of lost cultures and counter publics, these texts bring together legacies of sexuality, gender, race, and nationality that are tied to larger traumatic events such as the Holocaust, homophobia, and the AIDS epidemic.
Open Access
Black Feminist Intersectional Methodologies for Life Writing
(2017-05-15) Moody, Joycelyn
This panel is comprised of three black feminist presenters whose research topics and intersectional methodologies are inspired by recognitions of the same gender and genre provocations that drive the work of Canadian auto/biography theorist Marlene Kadar. For the 2017 meeting of the IABA Americas, we present three papers that explore how and where blackness, femaleness, interlocution, Rhetoric Studies, qualitative interviews, gendered cultural studies, and black print culture studies intersect with life writing. Our papers individually and collectively theorize outcomes of life writings by, about, and for black women developed through interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches. Moreover, we analyze ways black women’s life narratives are crafted and/or collected. Our papers investigate diverse processes of generating life writing when auto /biographical subjects are as resistant, elusive, and/or dissident as they are obliging.
Open Access
Poder e representação em histórias de vida: entre ausências e presenças
(2017-05-15) Szymczak, Maureen Bartz; Alvarenga Sena Venera, Raquel
This article is a cutting of the in-progress investigation called Life Histories and Cultural Heritage: challenges of Museum of the Person, which arguments that life stories of ordinary people may be valued and affirmed as cultural heritage. The research analyzes the senses life histories have at the Museum of the Person and purposes to discuss those histories considering them as cultural heritage on the memory and identity recognition in the contemporary context. In this paper, we use Michel Foucault’s thoughts (2004) to notice the power operation as the exercise that passes through all the subjects horizontally, including the power of the narrator about its publishable history, the witness’ incontestable power. Based on the book The order of things (FOUCAULT, 2007), we intent to realize how the representation of life works on the related stories. The construction of the presence of a life absent from history is questioned. Does the narrative have the representative function of a life? Agreeing with the biographic illusion idea, we ask if the narratives are representations or creations of absent lives. The Museum of the Person is a virtual and collaborative museum that objectives to record and preserve the life histories of ordinary people, making those histories available in archives. We understand the contemporaneity presents changes on identity formations in a displacement flow on the memory political game. Then, we interrogate this place, which is able to proportionate to the subjects the construction of life narratives more or less coherent, with organized memories in a stability illusion. In this perspective, we also ask the Museum of the Person as a space that leads to the subject’s empowerment and audibility in the contemporaneity. Would the museum be a political place of ordinary subjects?
Open Access
“Don’t Freaking Act Here! This is Reality!”: Reality Web Series Ultra Rich Asian Girls as Digital Autoethnography
(2017-05-15) Law, Harmony
Kevin Li’s reality YouTube series Ultra Rich Asian Girls, featuring a cast of extraordinarily wealthy young Chinese Canadian women in Vancouver, British Columbia, has garnered controversy from its inception in 2014. The four young women featured in the first season of the show – Chelsea, Florence, Joy, and Coco – offer a tantalizing glimpse into the daily lives of the second generation of Canada’s Chinese model minority: one that has reaped the rewards from their parents’ efforts in Asia’s economic boom and earned criticism for its conspicuous consumption during a period of fear of potential backlash against Canadian multiculturalism. Although Ultra Rich Asian Girls falls outside the conceived scope of racialized or immigrant life-writing, this article argues that it still functions as a form of autoethnography, albeit within a new digital realm. Through its utilization of techniques and tropes from reality television, the series reveals the audience’s own voyeurism as consumers of an exoticized raced and gendered subject. Far from being a simple form of satire and objectification, Ultra Rich Asian Girls is also an example of subjectivity and agency, as the cast members work to create avatars of themselves to both each other and the viewers. However, as the series progresses, incongruities and discrepancies in a number of the women’s carefully tailored self-representations come to light: Florence’s family’s wealth is investigated for potential links to criminal activity, while Coco is accused of being a fraud by her fellow cast members. With these controversies, therefore, Ultra Rich Asian Girls serves as an example of the tensions between truth and fiction prevalent in today’s discussions about digital and television media. Thus, by understanding the series as a form of autoethnography, this article will also question assumptions of authenticity and veracity within the genre of life writing.
Open Access
Talismans and Fragments of Enslaved African Muslim Women in the Americas
(2017-05-15) McHeimech, Zeinab
Between 1809 and 1835 approximately twenty slave revolts took place in Bahia, Brazil; the most substantial uprising was known as the Malê revolt of 1835, or the Muslim revolt, where as many as 500 rebels were involved (Gomez 103). Although women were involved in the rebellion, their role remains largely indiscernible in historical documents since, as historian João José Reis contends, “[w]omen were conspicuously absent from Malê rituals” (1993, 107). Despite the underrepresentation of the black female Muslim slave in the archives, her presence can still be illuminated through traces and fragments. This paper takes as its site of inquiry a few of those fragments found in runaway slave notices (compiled by Lathan A. Windley) and transcripts of the trials of Conceição da Praia, Brazil (cited in Reis’s Slave Rebellion in Brazil). I will focus on the complex and fraught roles of black female Muslims in the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade and in the wider Islamic community. Indeed, in the face of violence, exploitation, dispersal, and separation, enslaved African Muslim women turned to their faith to contest the risk of erasure. More specifically, I suggest that these remarkable women deployed an Islamic epistemology—evident in their dress and distribution of Islamic talismans—to retain a sense of identity and to counter a system that negated their personhood.
Open Access
“The keenest, most intimate analysis”: Profiling Female Stars of the Silent Screen in Photoplay Magazine
(2017-05-15) Podnieks, Elizabeth
In 1911, Photoplay Magazine was launched in the U.S. as one of the first two periodicals devoted to fans of Hollywood silent cinema, and within a decade became recognized as the leading publication for celebrity news. Photoplay emerged within the broader context of modernism, the period from around 1880 to 1940 defined by a series of movements and manifestos dedicated to artistic, cultural, and political revolutions. While there has been an increasing body of scholarship at the nexus of modernism, cinema, and celebrity culture, to date the relationship between modernism and fan magazines remains surprisingly unstudied, a lacunae this paper redresses. In particular, I draw on Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s mapping of the “new modernist studies” that aims to expand our theoretical and methodological approaches to modernism to include, among other areas, popular culture, mass media, and women’s contributions—points of intersecting relevance to Photoplay. This paper discusses the new genre of the fan magazine as a specifically female space affording historically unprecedented auto/biographical inscriptions of women as professional and public figures via star profiles, interviews, auto/biographical narratives, and photo spreads. Based on archival studies of the original magazines published in the 1910s and 1920s as accessed through the online Media History Digital Library, this paper also foregrounds the “new modernist” turn to digital humanities, one that expands the possibilities for life-writing scholarship today.
Open Access
Jane Rule and the Archive: New Models for Researching Women’s Lives
(2017-05-15) Morra, Linda
Marlene Kadar's injunction to expand the conceptual framework of autobiography had implications not only for the study of the genre, but also for research about and by women more generally. The strict boundaries by which autobiography had been governed were thus expanded to include genres that had been more readily accessed by women, not simply a matter of their preference but also the result of restrictions and expectations related to gender. Taking Kadar's work as a cue, this paper calls upon my own investigation of how archival research for women necessitates moving radically beyond formal institutions and beyond understandings of what constitutes an archival document.
Open Access
Can I Be a Witness? Reflections on Witnessing and Ethics from a Stó:lō Text
(2017-05-15) Beard, Laura
In Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson note that “acts of witnessing propel a variety of life narratives” (286). While we find acts of witnessing propelling a variety of life narratives, the act of witnessing itself is culturally specific and attentiveness to that cultural specificity and the ethics it compels pose challenges for autobiography scholars eager to propel themselves into a variety of life narratives. Memory Serves: Oratories (2016) brings together seventeen speeches and lectures from the acclaimed Stó:lō author and orator Lee Maracle into one published text. While each oratory- turned-essay can stand on its own, when read together, they help readers to understand how knowledge is contained in story, indeed, how governance, knowledge, memory and story intertwine in the Stó:lō worldview Maracle shares. Maracle presents herself as a respected witness, or si’yam, and discusses the reciprocal recognition of her witnessing and the responsibility that imposes. In this brief paper, I discuss both the culturally specific presentation of witnessing in Maracle’s oratories and writings and the ways in which we, as life narrative scholars, might learn from this Stó:lō worldview.
Open Access
Childhood Exile: Memories and Returns
(2017-05-15) Arfuch, Leonor
In the context of contemporary forced migrations, my paper tackles the problem of political exile. I will take as my main area of concern a unique experience—that of children whose parents were obliged to escape the repression of the Chilean (1973-1989) and Argentinian (1976- 1983) dictatorships and for whom living “outside the lines” was often a matter of life and death. I am referring to children born in exile and who were affected by family trauma, or exiled-children who moved with their parents toward an uncertain destiny, carrying with them only a few objects as vestiges of home. Some of these children were later sent to Cuba to live in the care of “social parents,” caretakers who took responsibility for the children when the children’s militant parents decided to return to their countries of origin to fight against the dictatorships. My analysis will focus on recent works by four women who have lived through these experiences and whose narratives lie “outside the lines” of canonical genres: Verónica Gerber-Bicceci and Laura Alcoba (Argentina), who have written autobiographical and self-fictional novels; Macarena Aguiló (Chile) and Virginia Croatto (Argentina), who have produced autobiographical and testimonial films. Despite differences in style, we find in their cultural production some undeniable marks of gender –looks, images, assessments- that reveal unique subjectivities. In all of these narratives, personal experience interfaces with collective memory and, for that reason, has an important ethical and political impact.
Open Access
Curumin: Bíos and Thanatos in Brazilian contemporary movies
(2017-05-15) Da Silva Barcellos, Sergio
Biopics have found a promising market in Brazil. In the last twenty years, approximately fifty long feature movies were biographies of singers, actors, politicians, athletes, and musicians. The majority of the productions is canonic regarding narrative choices and depiction of their biography subject. One example seems to escape the formula and has stirred the attention and opinion of viewers, critics, and society. Curumim (Prado, 2016), a documentary by Marcos Prado, is a hybrid of auto/thanatography, testimonio, and biography of Marcos Archer, a middle- class Brazilian drug dealer arrested in Thailand and sent to prison in Indonesia for eleven years. During his time in jail, several attempts were made by the Brazilian government to avoid the death penalty; a sentence usually applied to cases of drug trafficking in Indonesia. In January of 2015, Archer was finally was executed. The movie is a joined effort of the filmmaker and the drug dealer. With a hidden cell phone and memory cards sent to him unbeknownst by the guards, the narrative created by Archer, aka Curumin, defies strict categories of a genre in the autobiographic realm. While exposing the life behind bars, Archer examines himself and his life and believes he will be pardon. A movie diary? An auto/thanatography, in the sense that Susanna Egan understands it as a narrative that “focus[es] on illness, pain, and imminent death as crucial to the process of that life” (Egan, 1999, p.224)? Or a cautionary tale despite the unexpected outcome? This paper will reflect on the biographic temptation in Brazilian movie industry and the particulars of Curumin, as a paradox of this trend.