Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Part 4 “Transgressors and Performers of Self” includes four essays that examine the different strategies and masks that Appalachian and southern women use to construct and deconstruct a self. Whether they write from marginal positions or embrace a certain degree of marginality, these authors always transgress (generic and societal) boundaries and become performers of self. In her contribution, Carmen Rueda-Ramos discusses the transgressive quality of the life narratives written by Appalachian women writers during the memoir boom of the 1990s. Rueda-Ramos explores how some of these women writers “push the limits of the autobiographical genre to construct their selves and portray their world.” With their memoirs, they succeed in making their marginal voices heard by “subvert[ing] the conventions of a genre they often find too restrictive” and using it as a “weapon for self-representation.” Rueda-Ramos explains that the combination of the textual, visual, oral, performative and ethnographic approaches allows these women also to blend the personal, familial and collective experience, thus blurring the boundaries of genres and of self and Other. Their formal experimentation with what Caren Kaplan calls “outlaw genres” and with hybrid autobiographical narratives enables them to challenge dominant narratives and present a “more inclusive and relational view of the self, which they see as tied to family, community and region.” Their interest in crossing the boundaries of the autobiographical genre lies precisely in their power to subvert and reformulate selfhood. Rueda-Ramos centers her analysis on the life narratives of three important Appalachian authors: Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, bell hooks’s Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, and Mary Lee Settle’s Addie: A Memoir. Whether they use their memoirs as performative (and transformative) autobiographical acts, or as a way to blur the boundaries between the individual and the collective, or as examples of the so-called “relational auto/biographies” which also tell regional history, these Appalachian women writers find in hybridity “a way to channel the autobiographical impulse without being trapped by genre conventions.”