Women's Contemporary Experimental Life Writing

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My thesis will examine what I term 'co-construction', a bricolage technique introducing theory, multimedia, and secondary references, in women's contemporary life writing. I will argue that co-construction is used by contemporary authors forming a new canon, proliferating multi-farious conceptions of female identity and producing a truth effect previously unavailable to marginalised women. It will focus upon the inclusion of archival ephemera as key to the technique and the influence of technology in extending the potential for these referential acts and expanding participation. It will crucially interrogate the invalidation of this writing through the term 'oversharing,' a misogynistic expression connoting inappropriate female accounts of personal experience, and the enduring grand narratives these subjects are read against. Key research questions:- How does co-construction produce 'believable subjects'?- How is new technology creating the conditions for co-construction? - Why is co-construction particular to subjects identifying as women?- Which subjects remain beyond the margins of representation in this movement?- How significant are counters like oversharing in the curtailment of previously unrepresented identity categories?My primary authors will be: graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel, memoirist Maggie Nelson, blogger Jackie Wang and auto-fictional novelist Chris Kraus. Each author is significant for unconventional presentations of female subjects, intersecting with race, sexuality, aging, gender, and mental illness. Together they provide culturally significant American representations of experimental forms that produce 'believable subjects' from outsider positions, creating a coherent literary movement. I will analyse them through close readings and in light of intersectional feminist theory. My research will build on recent studies in life writing, alongside subversive theories of truth. Writers on co-construction and oversharing are emerging and span concepts of gestural online self-presentations, and collage providing double meaning through referential origin and additional new use. I use 'co-construction' to provide an umbrella term for these gestural and collage techniques as a narrative device specific to my identified movement. Identity will be read as self-constituting through discourse and temporal and cultural conceptions of truth, with representations formed of performative acts displayed in co-construction. Feminist and digital theory will also be considered alongside female-centric technologically driven populist movements gaining traction via co-construction, such as #MeToo and Everyday Sexism.