Conference Proceedings & Papers

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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
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
Iranian Women’s Autobiographies: Hybridity and Gender in the Diaspora
(2017-05-15) Abla, Farida
After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, many Iranian families fled to the United States. Their girl children grew up at the “border” between Iran and the US to become first generation Iranian/American women. This paper focuses on three autobiographies the latter wrote in English and examines how they have been influenced by the authors’ diasporic identities. It also considers the politics of production, consumption and reception of these autobiographies by the American public and the international audiences. Drawing from the feminist transnational and postcolonial theories that posit these texts as a form of knowledge production, the paper addresses the question of how gender shapes these representations. By analyzing how the authors represent their lives in their country of origin (i.e. Iran), experience the Islamic Revolution first hand, and portray their life journeys in the United States. This paper explores the differences and similarities in these texts across various identity markers such as religion, education, and socio-economic class. Moreover, it argues that the authors depict and attempt to rectify the political, cultural, and historical prejudices they face while growing up in the United States. It asserts that they articulate what Homi Bhabha defines as “hybrid” and “ambivalent” identities; and that they facilitate the traveling of knowledge from the First World (i.e. the United States) to the Third World (i.e. Iran). Furthermore, this paper aims to fill the gaps in the research conducted about these autobiographies by shedding light on the history of Iranian women autobiography writing and its characteristics.
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
“Photos from Hollandia N.G. 1944”: World War II Combat Nurse Beulah Johns’s ‘Everyday’ Scrapbook Testimony of War and Recovery
(2017-05-15) Heflin, Tanya
“Well, Diary, Restricted no more . . . . Hope you pass the censor to get to Alma for confidential peeping.” ~ Beulah Johns, last lines of her 1942-43 diary In July 1942, 36-year-old nurse Beulah Johns left her rural Western Pennsylvania hospital to join the ranks of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, which had enlisted only 1000 nurses prior to 1941 and exploded to 59,000 nurses—almost entirely women crossing national and workplace boundaries—during the war. While in training, Johns wrote a detailed diary of her service, and upon being sent to what she called the “Asiatic Blue Ribbon Campaign” at Hollandia, New Guinea, in 1944, she compiled a rich scrapbook of 85 photographs, 7 sketches, and numerous notes and captions—devising an alternative mixed visual and verbal life-writing document to tell her own story of trauma, healing, testimony, travel, and adventure. Represented among the images that make up this haunting scrapbook are a mix of soldiers suffering acute combat injuries, amputations, and chronic tropical fever conditions. The outdoor medical tent compound is visibly rustic, and the scrapbook is organized largely by ward numbers, indicating a nurse’s working perspective in creating the book. Mixed throughout are images of Johns and her fellow nurses caring for monkeys and stray cats, plus several joyful photos of nurses playing with local children who visited the compound. Johns’s notations and careful photographic selections tell volumes about nurses’ and patients’ experiences of war in the Pacific theater, and they simultaneously bear witness to the steely perspective that she shared with 59,000 other combat nurses, lending significant insight into the working lives of a new class of enlisted women that was created through the experience of World War II. My archival discovery of this unknown diary occurred as part of a small grant I received to study and develop an online archive repository for women’s “everyday” diary drawn from little-studied archives, and in this essay, I read this never before studied volume of alternative life-writing through a feminist New Historicist lens in order to illustrate the crossing of intersecting borders of nation, gender, genre, work-life, testimony, and archival process.
Open Access
Movie Talk: Affective Impressions of Celebrity Interviews on the Cinematic Experience
(2017-05-15) Gill, Dana Kathryn
In her 1992 account of the genre Life Writing, Marlene Kadar suggests that writing is personal, even if it is not autobiographical; a writer will leave behind hints of themselves in the piece no matter their intention. The same can be said about film. This paper is interested in interrogating the relationship between celebrity and film reception. Looking closely at the impact of celebrity interviews in the affective understanding of film, this paper will examine the ways in which personal narratives interact with the marketing production of horror films. How might these stories aid in the production of empathy, sympathy, or compassion in relation to the violent narratives on screen? Within the context of film, the autobiographical elements are scattered across those who conceptualized, produced, directed, edited, and acted in the finished product we see on screen. Auteur theory has traced the connection between directors and writers of films to their overall reception and perception. As well, the connection of celebrity to the success of a film is mostly conceptualized within the financial success of the feature. This paper explores instead the connection of the actors in the writing of the films’ story. The experience of actors is often highlighted during promotional interviews before and after the release of the film. These interviews are highly structured based on how the production team has designed the ways in which the film should be marketed. However, oftentimes these interviews reveal personal connections to the finished screen product that resonate within the experiences of those who see the film. This paper questions the compelling nature of these narratives. Further, how are the personal narratives upheld by celebrity important in not only the selling of the film and the creation of a fan culture – but also become inseparable from our ability to read the film?
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
“It’s good that I write this down”: Caribbean Life Writing by Danticat, Marshall, and Nunez
(2017-05-15) Brown, Lisa
In Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature (2010), Kezia Page considers the work of generations of Caribbean writers whose work functions as cultural remittances which posit returns of varying kinds both to the Caribbean and the wider diaspora. She writes: “Indeed, neither exile nor diaspora can be considered outside of return, despite the different subject positions that drive return in each-in one, return functions as an antidote to displacement” (9:2010). While Page’s work examines fiction as well as life writing, she does articulate the ways the texts function within the wider framework of border-crossings, travel, loss and reclamation that characterize transnational narratives. My paper considers the memoirs of three Caribbean women writers to explore the ways the texts function as cultural remittances which offer sites of possibility for reading the intersection of class and gender. The three texts are Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I am Dying (2007), Paule Marshall’s Triangular Road (2009) and Elizabeth Nunez’s Not for Everyday Use (2014). I want to explore how these texts offer new ways of reading by investigating the deployment of fundamental concepts of life writing namely performativity, positionality and relationality within the framework of the transnational text to chart shifts, changes and repetitions which might reveal the nature of the cultural remit for future generations. Smith and Watson (2009) note that and understanding of these key terms continue to: “enable more flexible reading practices and more inclusive approaches to the field of life narrative” (16:2009). By mapping the deployment of these concepts across texts, I hope to raise questions about the specific concerns of women writers from the Caribbean; the changes in strategies of self-representation and the possible readings on both sides of the cultural ‘return’.
Open Access
Lives at the End of the Line: Aging, Elegy, Comics, and Care
(2017-05-15) Venema, Kathleen
In her introduction to Extraordinary Bodies, Rosemarie Garland Thomson adds, to a long list of the different forms disability might take, the observation that “everyone is subject to the gradually disabling process of aging,” a fact, she notes, that “many people who consider themselves able-bodied are reluctant to admit” (13-14; my emphasis). My presentation proposes to examine four recent North American visual memoirs of aging, each of which deploys a range of graphic resources to i) grapple with the facts of parents’ disintegrating bodies and, especially, their disintegrating minds; ii) witness the increasingly complex demands these deteriorations make on available forms and economies of care; and iii) specifically shape comics’ aesthetics to the frequent uncanniness of dementia’s incursions. If, as Amelia DeFalco claims, aging is a vastly under-theorized site of cultural difference (xii-xvi), comics – until recently associated almost exclusively with youth- and counter-cultures – stubbornly keeps the sight and the sights of aging front-and-centre. Joyce Farmer in Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir (2010); Sarah Leavitt in Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me (2010); Roz Chast in Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant (2014); and Dana Walrath in Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass (2016) channel their own and their subjects’ creative energy in visual narratives that document their parents’ physical and mental deterioration. I focus on the artists’ deployment of comics’ resources – including its resistance to coherence (Hatfield xiii), its formal and metaphoric mimicking of “the procedures of memory” (Chute 4), and especially its capacity to represent hybrid subjectivities (5) – for their affective potential. My particular interest is the tricky territory where visualizing the increasingly “complex embodiment” (Siebers 25-6) of aging selves potentially defuses the sometimes ugly emotions that care-giving prompts, refining and re-storying those emotions as empathy and compassion.
Open Access
True Crime: The Documentary Aesthetics of Maggie Nelson and Taryn Simon
(2017-05-15) Worden, Daniel
“True Crime” as a genre traffics in gendered tropes—the murderous husband, the young woman under the spell of a charismatic killer, the manipulative wife, and the alienated male adolescent, to name a few. Indeed, in The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm found in Joe McGinniss’s relationship with the convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald evidence that journalists often rely on genre tropes to fabricate compelling true crime narratives when none may exist. In this talk, I will explore how a contemporary writer, Maggie Nelson, and a contemporary photographer, Taryn Simon, have sought to represent crime in a way that avoids the genre tropes ubiquitous in “true crime” stories. Instead, Nelson’s Jane, A Murder and Simon’s The Innocents develop modes of interrogating the often gendered and racial types that have both become concretized in “true crime” and had real effects in the criminal justice system. In so doing, Nelson and Simon both build on the history of documentary experimentation since the 1960s, and refine their documentary styles to emphasize not the closure we usually expect from “true crime” (the final sentencing or execution of the criminal), but the uncertainty and open-endedness that often results both from crime and the uneven, often unjust processes of the justice system. In their documentary works, victims, criminals, and innocents are represented not as types to be grounded in the rhetoric of journalistic truth, but as lives rewritten, overwritten, and exploited by crime.
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
Kim Thúy’s Rú and the Art of the Anecdote
(2017-05-15) Buss, Helen
The gradual female gendering of Thúy's text as it moves forward is nicely wrapped in the comfortable and seemingly simple form of the anecdote, so that the text comes to represent, in both its genre and gender, what (in Perreault words) I would call "autography that is articulating not a site or a space but an energy" and creates an "'I' that works for the social, material, and personal transformations that we know as feminism." By a close reading of the text using the development of its anecdotal style joined with a theorization of the nature of anecdote as a generic literary tool that can illuminate the concept of flashback in theories of psychology, I hope to offer a fuller reading of the relationship of gender and genre in Rú.
Open Access
Pedagogical Autoethnography: Autoethnographic Research with Graduate Teaching Assistants in an ESL Environment.
(2017-05-15) Vasquez, laura Garcia de la Noceda
In the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez campus (UPRM), the Basic English and Intermediate English Sequences are primarily taught by the by Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) who are instructors of record enrolled in the UPRM’s Master of Arts in English Education (MAEE) Program. While some GTAs come in to the program with prior teaching knowledge and experience, these GTAs are expected to teach these general education courses with a strong English as a Second Language (ESL) component with relatively minimal training in the field of education. Through the collection and study of pedagogical autoethnographies that are part of my thesis project, I am studying how GTAs perceive their own teaching of ESL students in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean by looking at how these graduate students are incorporating non- canonical literatures and texts into their curricula as a means to stimulate discussion. This presentation discusses a project I developed for GTAs to create curricular units emulating the model used in Diana Fuss and William A. Gleeson’s book The Pocket Instructor: Literature: 101 Exercises for the College Discussion. These units present a single lesson where the GTAs demonstrate the alternate pedagogy project they do in the English language classroom and a pedagogical autoethnography that they write, self-reflecting on their unit and how it stimulated discussion among their students. By looking at three of the pedagogical autoethnographies submitted by GTAs from the MAEE program in the UPRM, I am observing how GTAs self-reflect on their own teaching in these complex classrooms. Furthermore, this research looks to bring information and expand knowledge on how pedagogical autoethnographies hold the potential to help GTAs improve their teaching through self-reflection, especially in contact zones and border areas.
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
Milk Poems and Blood Poems: Autobiographical Poetry and the New Nicaraguan Woman
(2017-05-15) Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa
In 1967, La Prensa Literaria, Nicaragua’s most highly regarded literary magazine, laments that Nicaragua is “overpopulated” by “poetesses” who outnumber male poets 1,000 to 700 in the capital alone. Nicaraguan women were virtually invisible in their nation’s literary history until the future of a revolutionary “new Nicaragua” was being imagined by an idealist, nationalist, socialist, but not always feminist, Sandinista movement. Through the literary magazines founded by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, these spokeswomen and activists published transformative autobiographical poetry chronicling the aesthetic, social, and political birth of the “new woman” in Nicaragua. This poetry introduced a new voice – that of a self-reflective revolutionary womanhood. The focus of this paper is the construction Sandinista womanhood through its autobiographical depiction in a full range of embodied self-expression. This paper will examine the poetry of six influential guerilla poets of the revolution – Daisy Zamora, Gioconda Belli, Yolanda Blanco, Michele Najlis, Vidaluz Meneses, and Rosario Murillo, wife of Sandinista leader and president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega – all of whom vocalize the emergence of the “New Nicaraguan Woman” as experienced in the physical body. Unapologetically presented in cycles of menstruation, states of pregnancy, labor of childbirth, and climaxes of erotic ecstasy, these poets challenge the bourgeois chivalry of the ruling class for which graphic references to the female body are considered indecent. Depicted as well in acts of volunteerism, advocacy, and armed rebellion, these poets reveal bodies in the act of creating the New Nicaragua and defy the overshadowing masculinist content typical of testimonial poetry dedicated to the insurrection of macho rebel leaders.
Open Access
Writing through the Walls: Shirley Jackson, House/Wife
(2017-05-15) Trimble, T
Shirley Jackson’s writing career was haunted by questions of genre. The mid-century New England writer is best known for her eerie novels about women whose selves splintered under the pressure of the houses they inhabited—a story famously told in The Haunting of Hill House (1959). But she also wrote humorous sketches of family life for popular women’s magazines, selections of which she collected into the memoirs Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). As Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin (2016) observes, this supposed schism bothered critics, who regularly commented on Jackson’s split writer/housewife persona. But Jackson’s memoirs sound some of the same uncanny notes as her fictions—a new family home “insists” that the furniture is arranged just so—and her fictions derive their creeping dread from the writer’s experiences of the everyday violence of small-town life and the patriarchal family form. Shirley Jackson’s generic dexterity results in a body of work that depicts the family home as a locus of warmth, comfort, imagination, constraint, and entrapment—an undecidability mirrored in the writer’s own struggles with agoraphobia near the end of her life. Beginning with “an expanded concept of the autobiographical signature or trace” (Brophy and Hladki 2014, 6), this paper reads across the generic seams of Jackson’s writing. Articulating key scenes from her memoirs with details from her two final novels—Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)—I frame Jackson as reaching towards a new “home” capacious enough to give her multiple, conflicting selves room to breathe. Following Marlene Kadar (1992), I argue that Jackson’s writings “manifest various subject-locations for the self to inhabit” (131). By endlessly revising the story of a woman and a house, she conjures “witchy” new feminine subjectivities—and worlds inventive enough to house them.
Open Access
From Rationing to Ravishing: Crossing Lines in Vancouver
(2017-05-15) Ingram, Susan
From September 17, 2014, to March 8, 2015, the Museum of Vancouver played host to an exhibition that staged the city’s transformation in the immediate post-WWII years as it went from a war-based economy to a burgeoning consumer society. Based on the collections of guest curators Ivan Sayers and Claus Jahnke, it featured 85 garments plus accessories that traced how the female experience in the city went from coping with austerity to showing off the availability of conspicuously sumptuous clothing to their best advantage. Approaching the exhibition as a material form of life-writing, I situate the exhibition both in terms of Sayers’ and Jahnke’s work as collectors and the museum’s as a public institution with the capacity to contribute to Vancouver’s globalizing image. This presentation thus pushes the conceptual boundaries of what constitutes life writing and expands its interdisciplinary methods of study by looking at a display of material artefacts from Vancouver’s immediate post-war period, and specifically at their styling, which I argue infuses some of the city’s current style into the usually staid or gritty representations of Vancouver’s past. By comparing the exhibition with both other exhibitions that the curators have put on in the city and other contemporary cultural productions, I show how “From Rationing to Ravishing” provides the boutique metropolis that Vancouver has become with a backstory that draws attention to key aspects of the present, including the role of fashion in the growth of the city’s retail sector and its ability to cross the lines of gender, class, and race that continue to mark the city’s imaginary.
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
On Photo-graphy and Teacher (Self)Education
(2017-05-15) Brandão, Cláudia Mariza; Lenzi, Teresa
In the current imagistic context, the photographic image has taken on a different role due to its large-scale production and dissemination. As a consequence, contemporary approaches to teacher education in Visual Arts have emphasized Image as one of the main objects of investigation. It results from the significant and complex range of meanings that it raises, as a cultural and symbolic product of humanity. Considering this reality, this paper discusses the importance of (trans)forming photo-graphy, by making images and memories present in us, according to Gilbert Durand’s idea of memory as a reservoir of human imaginary. Therefore, the discussion addresses photo-graphy as a non-verbal text and support for the (re)presentation of personal symbolic universes of learners and teachers-to-be, as well as autobiographical narratives which result from the poetic reverie theorized by Gaston Bachelard. Thus, I consider photo-graphy the booster of two fundamental instauration movements: the internalization of externalities, through revisited memories; and the externalization of interiority, through the exercise of photographic language based on dynamic changes between everyday relationships and the environment. The exercises of reading the world through signs and of analyzing and producing images as visible supports for subjectivities enable us to reveal things and reveal ourselves by transgressing presence and absence limits. It broadens the human capacity of symbolization by capturing the photographic language in its structural and pragmatic articulation which enables imaginary manifestation. Results show that relationships established between the past and the present create a relational circuit in which the imagining action of photo-graphy is enhanced, thus, providing feedback to self-education processes and enriching college students’ experiences.
Open Access
Passing Out: How Space Functions in the Politics and Performance of Masculinity On and Offstage
(2017-05-15) Broomfield, Mark
Perhaps no artistic form unsettles American masculinity more than the Western theatrical dance tradition. Men who pursue professional dance careers quickly learn that their chosen occupation not only carries the stigma of homosexuality and effeminacy, but that it also reduces their masculine status. This reduction in status, whether perceived or real, carries unique compensatory strategies by those within the profession to assuage a consuming public. Strategies to this effect often depict the male dancing body conventionally, in which traditional signifiers of (heterosexual) masculinity are emphasized, praised, and rewarded. Indeed, straying from this script risks suspicion and rejection not only within the presumed queer space of dance, but it also reveals the narrow definitions of gender performance allowed for male dancers. Gender norms and the policing of the male dancing body expose a fundamental contradiction in American concert dance: its embrace and simultaneous rejection of gay men that “fail” to look or act “straight.” Unlike their heterosexual counterparts, gay male dancers routinely face discriminatory practices that underscore their oppressed status in contemporary dance. To this end, my presentation examines the institutional practices of the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation (AADF) that account for the production of an internationally recognized branding of the black male dancing body. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the AADF during the summers of 2005, 2006, 2008, I expose the politics between on and offstage performances of masculinity in two sites—the studio and the Ailey Gala. Within this framework, I highlight how space becomes an important marker for the legitimatized and legible body, and how the embodied resistances of the queer male dancing body disrupts those boundaries.