Black Feminist Intersectional Methodologies for Life Writing

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.

Alexis McGee argues rhetoric and Black feminist scholar Elaine Richardson’s autobiography PHD to PhD: How Education Saved My Life (2013) represent a corpus of collective knowledge(s) built on African diaspora traditions of Black Language. Richardson presents discursive nuances to develop the practice of testimony into a transnational performative identity. Thus, she signifies (on) the importance of Black linguistic strategies to interrogate her intersectional identity of Black woman, street scholar, student, professor, mother, and daughter.