Writing Gender Writing Self

Memory, Memoir and Autobiography

Aparna Lanjewar Bose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367534493
• eBook ISBN: 9781000164343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Gender & The Law
• Index: Law

Life Writings/Narratives and studies in gender have been posing critical challenges to fetishizing the manner of canon formations and curriculum propriety. This book engages with these and other challenges turning our customary gaze towards women especially marginal, enabling us to interrogate the established pedagogical practices that accentuates the continuing denial of their agency. Reproduction of the cultural modes of narrativization based on memory and experience becomes a mode of reclaiming the agency. These challenge the homogenising singularity of communitarian notions besides dominant gender constructs using visual, textual, popular, historical, cultural and gender modes enabling one to rethink our received theoretical frameworks.

This edited volume brings together 21 essays on life writings produced by both well-established and emerging writers in the field of literature written by scholars from countries like India, Pakistan, China, USA, Iran, Yemen and Australia, to name just a few. Many of the essays in this book focus on how the progress of the self is often impeded by the society it finds itself in. With an enlightening foreword by Dr. E.V. Ramakrishnan and a detailed, critical introduction by Aparna Lanjewar Bose, this anthology is useful for all those who wish to learn more about this genre of writing.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. (Re) Positioning the ‘Other’: Perspectives on Marathi Dalit and Black Women Writings
• 2. What the Text Does not Say: Significant Absence and the Self in Arathi Menon’s Leaving Home with Half a Fridge
• 3. Retracing the Discourse of Referential Truth in Claude Cahun and Alison Bechdel’s Visual Narratives
• 4. Humorous Women’s Memoirs in the Entertainment Industry
• 5. A Case for Homosexuality: Reading Anchee Min’s Red Azalea as a Political Autobiography
• 6. Self, Time and Death as Autobiographical Elements in Performance Art
• 7. Intersecting Terrains of Personal and Politics: A Feminist Reading of Fadwa Tugan’s A Mountainous Journey
• 8. Subverting Literary Space: From [His]stories to [Her]story in Writings of Kamala Das, Sally Morgan and Melba Pattillo Beals
• 9. Daughter of the East and Perils of (Self) Idealization
• 10. Identity and Self-Representation in Taslima Nasreen’s My Girlhood
• 11. Sexuality, Self and Body: Reading Michèle Roberts’ Memoir Paper Houses
• 12. Vocalizing the Voiceless: Struggle for a Personal Voice in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
• 13. Lifting ‘the Quilt’: Ismat Chughtai’s A Life in Words and the Subversion of the Normative
• 14. Indian Nationalism and Hindu Widowhood: Contesting Margins in Indira Goswami’s Adha Lekha Dastabej
• 15. Veiled Voices: Semi-Autobiographies of Yemeni Writers Nadia al-Kawkabani and Shatha al-Khateeb
• 16. Breaking the Silence: Tehmina Durrani’s My Feudal Lord
• 17. Re-Reading Azar Nafisi’s Memoir Things I’ve Been Silent About
• 18. Rational Femininity and the Mode of Hijra Autobiographies: The Affects of being a Gendered
• 19. Marginalized Sexual Identity: A Flash Point of Body/Desire/Politics
• 20. Self-Narratives of Working-class Women: Voices from the global South
• 21. Of Being Ants amongst the Elephants: Anecdotes and Antidotes
• List of Contributors
• Index