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In Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (1994), Leigh Gilmore offers the term “autobiographics” as an alternative to the traditional model of autobiography and the “philosophical definition of the self derived from Augustine” (153), which reproduces a universal selfhood and therefore is not apt to represent women’s life stories. Gilmore believes that autobiographics allow women to transgress the boundaries of the genre and to move from the position of object to subject with “self-representational agency” (12). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson are also outstanding scholars in the study of autobiography. Their co-edited volume Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (1998) includes most of the relevant critical and theoretical contributions to women’s autobiography by leading scholars in the field over more than twenty years. In their lengthy introduction, they provide a theoretical overview of the development of the genre, and it is a must-read volume for anyone interested in autobiography. In Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (2003), they have moved from their exploration of autobiographical acts in textual modes to the “self-representational acts” in visual modes (7), with an emphasis on performance art and the different forms of self-portraiture. In Before They Could Vote: Autobiographical Writings, 1819-1919 (2006), they offer a selection of twenty-four autobiographical narratives written by American women, focusing on what they call the “forgotten century” (19), a period of suffragist reform that took place in domestic spaces. They avoid the black and white binary and instead present a multicultural and multiethnic selection of autobiographical narratives by unknown women.

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