PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This essay asks what role (literary) genres play in negotiating affective relations. In pursuit of that aim, it builds on feminist elaborations of gender and genre and on Joan Scott’s – early intersectional – claim that “gender must be redefined and restructured in conjunction with a vision of political and social equality that includes not only sex, but class and race” (Scott 1986: 1075). It will discuss the strategies applied by marginalized authors in “life-writing” genres such as the slave narrative, neo-slave narrative, and recent forms of auto/body/geography – writing the self and the geography of the body – as pursued by Chicana and Latin American feminists. The focus is on questions around how the texts depict individual experience as collective and how they negotiate the “factual” and the “fictional”/poetic. It is also interested in how these texts create imaginative spaces for voicing things that are not yet or no longer “speakable” and for the emphatic-aesthetic identification with (the pain of) Others marked by gendered violence, migratory experiences, coloniality, etc. The chapter seeks to outline the critical potential of such life-writing texts with regard to experiences of intersectional inequalities. In addition, it examines their potential for genre theorizing in relation to life narrative texts and/as readings of relation, asking which constructions achieve political relevance and how the choice of a genre marks the performance of intersectional gendered experience and thus, in different contexts, creates differing forms of self-authorization.