Ex-Centricities: Perspectives on Gender and Multi- Cultural Self-Representation in Contemporary American Women's Autobiographies

I In Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation, Leigh Gilmore argues that there is a in critical approaches to discourses of women's self-representation, and suggests that such a crisis be characterized as a kind of contractual dispute around gender and genre, in which 'terms' [of traditional autobiography studies] seek to define legitimacy within autobiography's discursive nexus of identity, representation, and (2).1 As Gilmore points out, exploration of possibilities of women's selfrepresentational writing is linked to of self-representation, and, I would add, to of representation more generally (3). What Adrienne Rich describes as a politics of reacts to a history of exclusionary politics, a vortex that has created cultural, literary, and historical vacuums that warrant current eruption of autobiography and autobiographies. Contemporary women's autobiographical fiction articulates painful position of having no to call one's own. Furthermore, women's self-representation illustrates that having to make a for themselves means having to construct a space within alienating narrative and cultural forms, even while fracturing those forms so that they might accommodate the (in all senses of that word) of marginalized self. Thus, traditional critical frameworks addressing autobiography studies are also fractured when female autobiography enters scene. The of location that arises in contemporary women's selfrepresentational narratives articulates a paradoxical position; it is not merely one of location or dislocation, but, rather, co-existence of two as marginalized subject shuttles back and forth between them to weave a sense of self within a perceived position of absence. Out of this weaving comes a reconstruction of a past perceived by hegemonics of centricity as having no history at all. It is from this position, a third place of paradoxical being, one that I describe as ex-centric, that some female subjects seek to express themselves. Such subjects are in process of mapping new cultural spaces. In autobiographies of three women's self-representational narratives I study for this project, there is no final of arrival, but rather a continual narrative enactment of journey of self-discovery, a fluid, ongoing process that, even in narratives' conclusions, opens out into yet another story of shifting terrain of subjectivity. Dorothy Allison's memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, concludes with a poignant scene in which narrator finds herselfstanding by [herself] in rubble of [her] life, at bottom of every story [she] had ever needed to know. Allison concludes her memoir with a dramatic scene of narrator pulling herself out of rubble rib by rib like a climber holding on to rock (94). This upward and outward movement is a brilliant enactment of how one's life stories can bury one or can provide a medium through which one may climb toward liberation from social, literary, and familial burial. Minnie Bruce Pratt moves through landscape of her childhood to reconstruct and then deconstruct perspective given her by her family's social position in segregated southern town where she grew up. In her collection of essays, titled Rebellion, and her short stories, titled S/HE, Pratt probes dynamics of social and economic privilege. It is a privilege that is implicitly gendered female and racialized as white; it is a privilege that, because it is given can be taken away. Writing from memory's groundlessness, Kim Chernin drops into gaps and crevices behind memory's reconstructions and discovers what resides within forgotten places. In her autobiographical novel reconstructing her years as a young Jewish woman living on a kibbutz in Israel, Crossing Border: An Erotic Journey, Chernin writes three versions of same story and in each story delves into a deeper layer of truth hidden by social and literary conventions of romantic love story. …