Conference Proceedings & Papers

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Open Access
The Affective Topographies of Geneviève Castrée’s Graphic Life Narrative
(2017-05-15) Rifkind, Candida
This paper studies two autographics by the late Québecoise cartoonist Geneviève Castrée (Susceptible and “Blankets Are Always Sleeping”) and their mobilization online by a bereaved comics community. I begin with her autographic Susceptible (2012), a memoir of coming-of-age in a dysfunctional family in 1980s Quebec. Through an avatar, Goglu, Castrée recalls memories from her early childhood to late adolescence that dwell on emotional abuse in the Montreal home of her francophone mother and stepfather, and her attempts to re-unite with her anglophone father in British Columbia. I examine what Kathy Mezei calls the “domestic effects” of women’s autobiographical practices, the significance of interior spaces to the shaping of memory and the construction of an emergent self. Castrée draws Goglu in domestic spaces that are at once punitive and protective to convey the disjunction between a desire for home and its often brutal reality. My reading of Susceptible take Smith and Watson’s image of “the rumpled bed” of contemporary female autobiography literally to explore how beds and blankets are braided throughout Castrée’s work as material, metaphoric, and metonymic sites of memory. I argue that Castrée depicts her childhood bed as an ambivalent topos of security and anxiety. The bed becomes the privileged signifier of the domestic effects that form Goglu’s subjective memories, which are filtered through cultural memories particular to the political locations of her 1980s post-Quiet Revolution, pro-separatist Québécoise childhood. Goglu’s emergence as a speaking subject is shaped by the national traumas of the 1989 Montreal Massacre and the movement for Quebec sovereignty as well as the historical effects of outmigration, the Catholic Church, and the regulation of women’s bodies on modern Québécoise identity. The paper concludes by extending this analysis to Castrée’s 2015 series of self-portraits, “Blankets Are Always Sleeping”, in order to reflect on how images of the sleeping cartoonist were mobilized on social media after her untimely death in June 2016. I conclude that the phenomenon of online collective mourning expanded the visual braiding of beds throughout her autobiographical comics to the collective biographical work of memorialization in ways that sometimes sentimentalize and depoliticize her complex relationship to the domestic effects of beds.
Open Access
Auto-Theory as an Emerging Mode of Feminist Practice Across Media
(2017-05-15) Fournier, Lauren
Joan Hawkins describes Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1998) as “theoretical fiction,” meaning not simply fiction informed by theory but fiction in which “theory becomes an intrinsic part of the ‘plot,’ a mover and shaker in the fictional universe created by the author.” In similar fashion, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) and Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008) have been described as auto-theory, though this term has not yet been defined. My dissertation seeks to define and historicize this emerging mode of feminist practice, contextualizing it in light of the history of feminist performance art and conceptualism; African-American feminist artist Adrian Piper’s durational performance piece Food for the Spirit (1971) becomes an entry point for my discussion of auto-theory as a mode of feminist practice. This paper will provide an introduction to the framework and key concepts through which I approach “auto-theory”: a trans-medial, feminist and queer feminist practice that manifests across fiction, critical writing, sound, film, video, art writing and criticism, and performance art. In auto-theory, theorized personal anecdotes or embodied actions constellate with fragments from the history of philosophy to form potent analyses of gender, politics, academia, and contemporary art. Embodied experience becomes the primary material for generating theory, foregrounding disclosure and ambivalence as that which enhances critical rigour and relevance; this move is fundamentally feminist, even as many of these writers and artists openly problematize the feminist position. These writers have internalized such feminist precepts as “the personal is political” and have adjusted them according to new contexts. As postmodern subjects working in the wake of modernism—a long century in which the male-dominated spheres of literature and theory upheld “distance” and “disinterestedness” over emotionality or transparent investment— these artists and writers trouble the tenets of both the modernist canon as well as the younger canon of postmodern feminism.
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
The Autobiographical Pack
(2017-05-15) Huff, Cynthia
This paper seeks to revisit and revise the autobiographical pact in light of current work done on companion species, especially dogs, by emphasizing that Donna Haraway’s foregrounding of becoming together and the importance of touch troubles Philippe Lejeune’s foundational concept. Lejeune postulates that the autobiographical pact presupposes that the name on the title page of a text matches the name of the author and, in so doing, assumes that the text is written and that the author is singularly constituted and human. But the co-constituting of canines and human beings as companion species call for a different theoretical approach to life narrative that will embody how co-constituting serves to get and have a life lived mutually as well as one which deemphasizes seeing in favor of the communicative touch that is central to the bond dogs and humans enjoy. The messiness of daily, tactile co-constituting challenges the distanced, looking at texts in ways that favors foregrounding mutual exchange via the touching of bodies, including their emissions, and zoe, the smallest form of life often considered as below the threshold of livable existence. To get at companion species co-constituting, I purpose that we revision and revisit the archives of our daily lives with companion species to think about how touch and the exchange of zoe between and among species necessitate a rewriting of touchstone life experiences, such as birth or death, and the narratives within which we have traditionally encased them. To do so would challenge the stranglehold of the visual on autobiographical theory and practice but it would also mean a reconceptualizing of theoretical constructs such as Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, which presupposes an easily negotiated correspondence among reader, author, and publisher with the reader’s experience paramount. However, the theory of the autobiographical pack displaces the reader in favor of co-constituting so that the reader must renegotiate his relationship to the pack.
Open Access
Autobiographical Writing of Women Professors: Between the Public and the Private, Reason and Emotion
(2017-05-15) Passeggi, Maria
In Brazil, The Memorial is written for hiring at the university or promotions within the career, even to receive an undergraduate degree. I present a historical overview of this academic genre, within a universe primarily scientific and male, which has been prone to periods of restrictions and expansions, depending on the political and educational conjunctures of the country. I discuss questions of gender from a dual perspective: in the first, as an autobiographical academic, hybrid, genre, which is characterized by its position between the public and the private, interlacing institutional injunction (evaluation), with autobiographical seduction (self- awareness); the second perspective examines the transformation of this genre through female/feminist writing and empowerment as an historical apex, due to the increase in the number of women in higher education and the use of these writings in pedagogical practices of teacher training. My observations are anchored in research that has been conducted since 2000.
Open Access
Becoming Culturally (Un)Intelligible: Exploring the Terrain of Trans Life Writing
(2017-05-15) Vipond, Evan
This paper offers a theoretical exploration of the discourses that are produced through trans life writing, as well as the convergences and dissonances that occur between the genre of trans life writing, transgender theory, and feminist theory. Drawing from prominent trans autobiographies and memoirs published between 1967 and 2014—from Christine Jorgensen’s (1967) self-titled autobiography to Janet Mock’s (2014) Redefining Realness—I trace the theoretical and ideological trends and deviations in trans life writing that produce and reproduce trans subjectivities and embodiment. Extending Judith Butler’s (1990, 1997) conception of cultural intelligibility, I argue that trans life writers make themselves culturally intelligible through adhering to, subverting, and rejecting previously established narratives and dominant tropes, such as childhood cross-gender identification and being ‘born in the wrong body.’ In constructing a coherent narrative, trans authors come into being as culturally intelligible gendered subjects. However, becoming culturally intelligible may require glossing over the complexities and slippages of realizing one’s gender. In rejecting coherence and constructing counter-narratives, some trans life writers reject cultural intelligibility in favor of a more nuanced account of their gender identity, embodiment, and transition. In doing so, new knowledges are produced that disrupt the bigender system and linear narratives of transition, and challenge the assumption that gender identity is definitive and unchanging.
Open Access
Becoming Decolonial: Autobiographical Art Practice as Place of Enunciation for Decolonial Selves
(2017-05-15) Rodrigues, Manoela dos Anjos Afonso
Studies on Brazilians living in Britain show that, along with loneliness, unemployment and cost of living, the lack of proficiency in English is a key problem. However, there is little qualitative information about how the host language affects their daily lives. This interdisciplinary practice-based research asks how an art practice activated by experiences of displacement and dislocation in language can become a place of enunciation for decolonial selves. To this end, this research includes not only individual practices, but also collective activities carried out with a group of Brazilian women living in London, as a research focus. The endeavour to deal with English language has engendered writing processes in my visual work, which became a place for experimenting bilingual and fragmentary voices against the initial muteness in which I found myself on arrival in London. Using photography, printmaking, drawing, postcards, and artist’s books I have explored life-writing genres of diary, language memoir, and correspondence to raise an immigrant consciousness, explore accented voices and create practices for writing life individually and collectively. Assembling words and turning their meanings became strategies for expanding limited vocabularies. Once an impassable obstacle, the host language was transformed into a territory for exploring ways to know stories about language and write life narratives through art practice. This research is informed by humanist and feminist geographical approaches to space and place, postcolonial life writing, border thinking and a context of practice ranging from transnational art, accented cinema, visual poetry, conceptual art, and socially engaged art. It provides insights about English language in the lives of Brazilian women in London and offers a view on a practice in visual arts as place of enunciation for decolonial selves.
Open Access
Between Paraphrasing and Becoming Another Self: Possible Plasticities in (Auto)biographical Narratives of People with Multiple Sclerosis
(2017-05-15) Alvarenga Sena Venera, Raquel
This presentation is part of a research in progress entitled “(Auto)biographies and subjectivities: the other of himself in multiple sclerosis”, that investigates the subjectivation processes in the life stories of people affected by multiple sclerosis, organized in the research of life stories of the Museum of the Person, SP. In this work, I aim to understand the narrative plasticities that the authors of those stories mobilize from the concept of time. Based on Koselleck (2014), I highlight the synchronic and diachronic factors of the consciousness conditioning and I perceive how plastic the narratives are in comparison to the experiences with the disease over time. About the synchronic factors, the narratives cover from the diagnosis moment to the point that they do a digression for the accommodation of the disease in life. All the experiences in this time originate from the events, both symptoms and prognosis, in synchrony with what is known about the disease and that mark the affected ones. The hypothesis here is that there are experiences common to all and that generate similar significations in the narrative consciousness. Upon the diachronic factors, the sluices of memory are extended also considering the life stories before the disease, identifications, values, religion, gender, choices. I notice that the factors that constitute the consciousness, and that appear in the narrative, present multiple fragments of the time previous to the experience with the disease, but also its effects, that continue to transform the subjectivities. A bigger narrative plasticity reveals itself against the opening of another sluice by the accommodations with the disease in life. In the experience of helplessness, between the hope for healing in the future and the fear of the loss of neurological faculties, this plasticity shows itself in the narratives as strength.
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
Black Feminist Intersectional Methodologies for Life Writing
(2017-05-15) McGee, Alexis
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
Burning the Boundaries of Political Action: Feminism, Anarchy, and Militancy in Anne Hansen’s Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla
(2017-05-15) McKenna, Emma
In this paper, I situate Canadian political anarchist Anne Hansen’s writing within the genre of feminist memoir, and her activism within feminist history. On November 22 1982, the firebombing of three Red Hot Video stores in Vancouver’s Lower Mainland made national media headlines. The nascent feminist group the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade—of which Hansen was a part—claimed responsibility for the action, declaring it an act of “self-defense against hate propaganda.” I suggest that the firebombing marks a turning point for Canadian feminist activism not simply because of the use of violence by women against the state and private capital, but because of the failure of the state to intervene on a new form of capitalism that commodifies violence against women. In demonstrating how the materiality of violence against women was undergoing a remarkable historical shift through the creation of and distribution of commercial representations of sexualized violence against women, I argue that feminists in early 1980s Canada were facing unchartered political terrain. Despite the novelty of the firebombing, the only publication that examines this event thoroughly is Ann Hansen’s memoir. I suggest that Hansen’s memoir may be overlooked within feminist literary studies due to her theorization of women as active participants in oppositional violence and criminal sabotage. Through an examination of her personal writing, communiqués, and court statements, I examine her politicization via anarchist and feminist principles. I argue for the importance of disrupting what counts as feminist agency under particular historical conditions, and for the inclusion of narratives of women’s violence within our own stories of what counts as feminism.
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
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
Creating Disabled Birth, Curing Capitalism: Reading Ina Mae Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery as Memoir-Meets-Manual
(2017-05-15) Day, Allyson
In the 1970’s, the contemporary home birth movement began to take hold in the United States through a back-to-the-land counter culture movement and the feminist health movement, perhaps most inspired by the work of Ina Mae Gaskin and her bestselling book, Spiritual Midwifery (now in its Fourth Edition and widely used internationally in doula and midwife training). This paper proposes reading Spiritual Midwifery as a memoir-meets-manual, applying life writing theories of testimony, autopathography, autographics alongside feminist and disability bioethics. The first half of Gaskin’s book, Spiritual Midwifery, is composed of individual birth stories written by parents who have had midwife-assisted births. These stories work to demystify a bit of the birth process while also emphasizing the safety of home birth; more important, perhaps, than the safety is the focus on how low-intervention home birth provides a form of spiritual healing for parents who have been mired in a capitalist post-industrial world. As Gaskin writes in her introduction, “This is a spiritual book and at the same time it is a revolutionary book. It is spiritual because it is concerned with the sacrament of birth—the passage of a new soul into this plane of existence. The knowledge that each and every childbirth is a spiritual experience has been forgotten by too many people in the world today, especially in countries with high levels of technology. This book is revolutionary because it is our basic belief that the sacrament of birth belongs to the people and that it should not be usurped by a profit-oriented hospital system” (12). Indeed, home birth is framed through these birth stories as a cure for capitalism. In this paper I propose that medicalized birth is understood as a symptom of capitalism; capitalism is understood as a spiritual sickness; medicalized birth is indeed a disabled birth. The second half of Spiritual Midwifery works as a manual for home birth practitioners; here, if normal birth is considered a cure, or a form of rehabilitation, for capitalist medical systems, then it should be no surprise that bodies already disabled prior to pregnancy are entirely absent from Gaskin’s book. In Gaskin’s presentation of home birth we can understand that disabled bodies, with their reliance on “too much technology”, to use Gaskin’s terminology, are incurable. With this framing of home birth, the movement for midwife-assisted care in the United States has become unnecessarily unidirectional and problematically utopian.
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
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.
Open Access
Disruption: Maya Angelou and the Singing Body
(2017-05-15) Burnett, Kimberly
This presentation will provide of brief overview of the singing body in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), and All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). I examine how Angelou’s focus on the singing body allows a critical re-imagining of black female embodiment in which the body and the mind are interconnected. I contend that the singing body is itself, as Spillers suggests, a form of writing— a “hieroglyphic” that speaks as much to the experience of black female being as the literary text. In this presentation, I will share selected recordings of Maya Angelou’s own singing to consider questions such as: What does it mean to consider music as an archive in Angelou’s work? Specifically, what does the singing body mean for a construction of black female identity or black feminist identity? In addition to exploring challenges of the process itself and what they reveal about our values and assumptions as scholars, I will examine the significance of re- thinking the boundary lines of the body (lived experience) and voice (the expression of the mind) and what lies at the intersection. In particular, I am interested in questioning what remains troubling about the mind/soul or body/spirit connection in the re-telling of one’s life and what it proffers to discussions about gender. I argue that the singing body in Angelou’s writing disrupts normalized narratives of black female subjectivity and internalizes a discussion of boundary and dislocation within the black female body.
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.