In Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn Heilbrun cites Nancy K. Miller to assert that “women’s lives, like women’s writing ‘have a particularly vulnerable relation to the culture’s central notion of plausibility.'” This is certainly more than true for feminists’ lives especially at a moment when the “f” word can only be uttered in a whisper. Heilbrun’s definition of “feminist” again includes some phrases of Miller’s (the book is dedicated to Miller and is a testament to their intense conversations, and to the dialogues and collaborations that feminist life and work exemplify). “Feminist,” she writes, is “‘the wish to protest against the available fictions of female becoming.'” Have those “available fictions” changed significantly for our students, who, amazingly, are no longer feminists, and not even sure they are “not feminists, but . . .?” As one student said in a recent class: “Our mothers are feminists. Why do we need to be?”
When Jean Howard and I conceived the topic of this conference in honor of Carolyn Heilbrun, who herself had recently protested against available fictions by ending her own life, we wanted to explore the parameters of feminist lives, to be sure. But, more urgently, we wanted to push against the limits of feminist academic writing by looking at “academics and their memoirs.” Why have so many late 20th-century academic feminists turned to the memoir, we wondered? In what ways is the genre of the memoir suited for feminist appropriation? What is its relationship to feminism’s politics of the personal? At a moment when, as Carolyn Heilbrun herself observed in several of her last essays, feminist literary criticism and even feminist theoretical writing seemed to have lost some of their urgency, we wondered if the memoir might be providing a space for feminist reflection and theorization of a different sort. At the same time, we were anxious not to create a dichotomy between theory and autobiography, or to see one as an alternative to the other.
We invited our speakers to read from their memoirs and thus we invited them as “writers,” not as “academics.” But we also enjoined them to reflect on the relationship between their academic writing and their memoir writing. Does the memoir offer feminists another way of writing theory or feminist historiography? Or are these different forms, addressing different audiences? What narratives of feminism, more specifically, do these memoirs tell? These are the questions we hoped would be addressed in commentary and discussion, giving the conference some amount of coherence and even some scholarly weight.
Moderators posed these questions, some audience members reiterated them, but the speakers curiously resisted and even bluntly rejected them outright. From the first panel on, I began to have the feeling that they would not go anywhere and this inkling, accompanied by a knot in my stomach, was more than confirmed by the end of the day.
Right from the start, Deborah McDowell went right into reading from Leaving Pipe Shop, eschewing all prefatory comment but explaining later that this gesture was in itself a response, with no disrespect intended, to the questions we had posed. “All writing assumes its form,” she insisted, and whether writing the memoir, or writing criticism, she was “just writing.” Later in the day, when I posed the question to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, she did not hesitate to express her “impatience” with its very premise: “I think of myself as a writer. I’ve always thought of myself as a writer.” In utter frustration, she added, “the idea that you turn off half your brain when you write anything seems just . . ..” And Shirley Geok-lin Lim stressed that she would be mortified to have Behind the White Moon Faces read as the memoir of an academic: to her it was the memoir of a poet.
