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In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (1988), Shari Benstock views autobiography as a genre that mediates “between ‘self’ and ‘life’” and also as “a meeting of ‘writing’ and ‘selfhood’” (11). Her collection of essays includes a seminal article by Susan Standford Friedman entitled “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice” that questions Gusdorf’s individualistic paradigm of the autobiographical self because it cannot be applied to women and minorities, as it “ignore[s] the role of collective identity and relational identities in the individuation process of women and minorities” (35). Her notion of autobiographical selves applies Nancy Chodorow’s and Sheila Rowbotham’s theories of women’s relational identity to women’s autobiographical texts. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s essay in the same collection, “My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women,” focuses on the markers of race and gender as an element of difference in women’s autobiography to examine the distinctiveness of the African American female literary tradition and the autobiographies it has produced, claiming Zora Neale Hurston as part of that tradition. Another important contribution to feminist readings, which incorporates postcolonial theory to question the universal validity of male self-presentation in autobiography, is Françoise Lionnet’s Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (1989). Lionnet uses the “subversive . . . idea of métissage” or hybridization to challenge the discourses of (patriarchal and colonial) power (12). Including Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou in her discussion of African-American, Caribbean, and Mauritian women’s autobiographies, the Mauritian-born author focuses on the sociocultural constructions of race and gender to contest discourses of power.