Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

English

Advisor

Amy Wan

Committee Members

Rebecca Mlynarczyk

Mari Digangi

Subject Categories

American Studies | English Language and Literature | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Rhetoric and Composition

Keywords

working-class, queer, autobiography, feminist, anti-capitalist, memoir

Abstract

This dissertation looks at what I am calling the “autobiographical fragments” of three working-class, lesbian (or queer) authors: Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, and Eileen Myles whose writing is stylistically quite different from one another’s, but who nonetheless have all produced bodies of work that represent bits of their lives over and over and in different ways, sometimes overlapping in time and narrative detail. While there are certainly other writers whose work shares many of the same characteristics, I argue that the autobiographical fragment has special significance for marginalized subjects. Woven throughout the dissertation are many of my own autobiographical fragments and a self-reflexive approach to my academic analysis. I posit that the autobiographical fragment is not a genre in and of itself, but may appear in various forms - memoir, lyric essay, performance piece, biomythography, poem, among others. The autobiographical fragment is a strategy based on refusals: the refusal to tell just one cohesive narrative and leave it at that, the refusal to stop telling stories, to stop talking about oneself, the refusal to just shut up – all things that non-binary folks and women (especially poor, working-class, women of color, and lesbians) in a white-supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist culture are implicitly and explicitly told to do–to stop talking, to be silent, especially about themselves and their experiences. I offer analysis through close readings of the authors’ primary published texts as well as interviews, podcasts, and audiobooks, and I draw from and contribute to autobiography studies, working-class studies, feminist and queer theory. I argue that these projects are inherently feminist in the ways they deliberately challenge the dominant ideologies of late capitalism and the oppressive and repressive master narratives of white-supremacist, patriarchal culture. At the same time, I argue that these projects must also be viewed as work that takes seriously the idea of memory, experience, and self-representation as forms of art. What my research makes clear is that the act of creating multiple representations of one’s life, and of telling one’s own story over and over is far from self-indulgent; in fact, it is rigorous, intellectual, political, and artistic work.

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