Special issue Dutch Journal for Gender Studies (Web); Ed.: Mineke Bosch, Marijke Huisman and Monica Soeting

Abstracts by 1 February 2016

Since the introduction of the term ‚life writing‘, the input of gender studies has been of great importance for the development of life writing research. Genderstudies initially considered it their task to disclose the ‘forgotten’ lives of women. However, when – thanks to the linguistic turn – it became obvious that life writing texts like diaries, autobiographies, memoirs and letters are all but an objective source for researching ‚lived lives‘, gender studies has been focussing on analysing the way in which authors express their identity not in a purely ‚individual‘ sense, but within the context of conventions, linguistic and otherwise.

Gender studies thus have made it clear that within the western world several ’scripts‘ or ‚plots‘ determine the form in which autobiographies have been and still are written. Jill Ker Conway, in When Memory Speaks (1998), calls these plots ‚archetypical life scripts‘: narrative ‚forms‘ which serve as templates which people use to mould their lives and their life stories, such as the classical, Christian and secular plot of the hero and the script of the Napoleonic hero, the proletarian rebel or the self-made man. Depending on the historical context, different, more ‚passive‘ scripts have been available for women, like the mystic or the romantic life story, and the ‚I don’t know myself how I became who I am today‘-plot women leading ‚public lives‘ in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The focus on life narrative plots and scripts has led to the insight that identity is the effect of ‘performance’, and that life stories play an important role in the modelling of a ‘self’ or an identity. Identities, like life stories, bear the traces of the context in which they have come into existence in a process which is both collective and rational. ‘Doing gender, performing identity’, as Jo Burr Margadant calls it, cannot be disconnected from time and place, nor from the discours which protagonists use to create an identity for themselves. In some cases, self-fashioning, or the creation of an identity, is a more or less necessary part of a specific function or profession, which can be reached by taking part in a particular socialisation process. Exemplary life stories, like biographies or obituaries, may play an important role within the process of acquiring these specific, professional identities, as do presentations of these identities to the outside world through autobiographical texts.

In this special issue ‘Life stories, gender and identity’, we want to bring the development and ongoing discussions concerning gender and the creation of identity to the fore by presenting different themes and perspectives in which gender and life stories are closely connected.

Papers are invited to explore one of the following issues:

• Narratives which create inequality, or at the contrary, initiate ‘against the grain’ reading and writing.
• Life writing text as culture plots for identity in context: obituaries, eulogies, interviews, cv’s et cetera.
• Life stories and the culture of memory.
• Personal archives as life stories.
• Specific life stories like illness narrative, stories of deprivation, anthropological studies et cetera.
• Auto/biographical fiction and gender.
• Auto/biographical writing as a form of emancipation and liberation.
• Material aspects of non-published documents and visual objects as forms of life stories.
• Visual aspects of life writing, e.g. photographs and drawings in diaries, albums, biographies, autobiographies and memoirs.
• Life writing and ‘gendered’ bodies.

Submission of abstracts (+/- 450 words) to tvgarchief@gmail.com
Deadline submission of abstracts: 1 February 2016.
Deadline first version papers (max. 6000 words incl. references and bibliography): 15 April, 2016.

Click here for Author Guidelines in Dutch/ Click here for Author Guidelines in English (PDF).

The Dutch Journal for Gender Studies (Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies) is an interdisciplinary journal. It is primarily a platform for authors who conduct research on or are located in the Netherlands and Flanders but also invites contributions from and about other areas. Articles may be written in Dutch or English. For further information see: http://www.tijdschriftvoorgenderstudies.nl

Source: FEMALE-L@jku.at