Writing the Body – ‘Fictional’ Autobiography as a Feminist Narrative of
Political Challenge
Abstract
Woman – who might She be?
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger argues that women have two ways of viewing the female body in art,
an image almost exclusively designed to be gazed upon by a male audience. Women can either look
at such an image though the eyes of a male, and see the woman in the picture as an object, or see
the woman in the picture as themselves and render themselves an object (Berger 1972). Liz Stanley
suggests that women can ‘stand and look from outside this particular thought system’ and become a
‘refusing female subject’ and an ‘analytically enquiring feminist subject’ (Stanley 1992:34). But there
is also the way women feel ourselves, our lived experience of our bodies. How do women arrive at
the position of the feminist subject? How do we get to the point where it becomes part of the lived
experience of our bodies rather than abstract theory?
Corporeality can be seen as the material condition of subjectivity (Grosz 1995:103)
the body becomes a human body, a body that coincides with the “shape”
and space of a psyche, a body that defines the limits of experience and
subjectivity only through the intervention of the (m)other and, ultimately,
the (language – and rule governed social order). (ibid:104).
But who is this Woman of whose body I write? Judith Butler problematises the singular
identity/category of woman ‘who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse. But
constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued’ (Butler 1990:2).
I am a woman who is very specifically situated, with a particular set of ‘issues’ around my body. I am
a woman who has spent a great deal of her life focussing on her desirability, seeing the validation of
some man or other as a signifier of my self- worth, time and energy which might have been better
spent on my education and career. When I write about ‘woman,’ I am not writing for or about all
women. I am not speaking for all women. I am speaking for and about an ‘autobiographical self’ who
will be un-packed and problematized as I progress. I am speaking to any woman who might identify
with, be puzzled by, be challenged by, or recoil from the representations of my autobiographical self
that I have to offer. Here I am asking the question ‘Can autobiography, specifically fictionalised
autobiography, offer a narrative of feminist challenge?’
Turning fifty, both in anticipation and actuality, is a watershed in a woman’s life
…….First comes the despair at the aging body, and particularly the aging face, a
despair whose alleviation can be sought by impersonating youth with the aid of
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drugs, surgery, or makeup, or by abandoning all hope of a youthful appearance
and accepting with wry humour the inevitable expanding and sagging (Miller 2002:82).
Yes, that is how I feel. My feminist consciousness would not allow me to use drugs or surgery, and I
fought the war against make-up back in the 1980s, but now I find myself wearing lipstick, (just to
brighten my face a little). There is now a struggle inside of me, a dialogue between different parts of
myself. One telling me that I am succumbing, letting the side down, and the other not wanting to
face the world without at least a little colour on my face. My sadness lies in the way I relate to my
body differently. My capacity to take pleasure in it has diminished. I feel it differently. In spite of all
the feminist literature I have read, I judge it against air-brushed images in magazines.
There must be ‘different (less depressing) ways to read the signs of change, as well as …. styles of
feminine resistance’ (Miller 2002:xv). How might feminist autobiography offer the opportunity for
narratives of feminist resistance around women’s feelings about their aging bodies?
Feminist Autobiography – A Sexual, Textual Challenge???
How might the writing and reading of Autobiography, the writing and reading of textual selves, both
arguably solipsistic acts, disrupt the way women measure their bodies against the arbitrary
standards around them in the media. How might feminist autobiography challenge the ways in
which women validate themselves through male approbation? How might we produce narratives of
effective feminist political challenge that consider the relationship between women and the cultural
narratives that arguably dominate the ways in which we understand ourselves and our bodies?
Bodies are not simply human and social, they are sexed, and the mode of corporeality assigned to
women in this culture is very different to that assigned to men (Grosz 1995). Arguably if woman’s
subjectivity, including the material condition of that subjectivity has been constituted in language,
then it can be disrupted by language, by the textual life(s) represented in autobiographical texts.
Textual experience represents one of the most daring explorations the subject
can allow himself, one that delves into his constitutive process. But at the same time
and as a result, textual experience reaches the very foundation of the social.
(Kristeva 1986: :117).
While any autobiography relates to the lives of a specifically situated individual, it is probable that
aspects of that life at least will relate to other women in similar settings or situations.
Understandings are socially shared and ‘reworked in different ways within particular cultural
settings, although given a particular twist by the specificities of the life and work of a particular
biographical subject’ (Stanley 1992:9). Nancy Miller writes that she came to see her life as ‘an
unwitting but irresistible collaboration between other texts and other lives’ (Miller 2002:xiiv).
Another’s story can bring memory to the fore and prompt us to challenge ourselves in
uncomfortable ways. Nancy Miller writes how the girl in an autobiography she read reminded her of
the girl she once was and of ‘the part of my story I would prefer not to tell. I don’t especially like
being reminded about her but I can’t deny her either’ (Miller 2002:19). Laurel Richardson suggests
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that writing the narrative of self, acts as a method of inquiry and discovery for the writer
themselves, evoking deeper parts of the self and altering our identity (Richardson 1997).
Epistemological Concerns and Ontological Challenges
How can material from my life be appropriate for both academic study and a feminist challenge? The
very practice of a reflexive feminist autobiography as an academic discipline is subversive. For Liz
Stanley, the study and practice of autobiography relates to a feminist sociology which ‘encapsulates
a determination to re-make the discipline of sociology from the standpoint of feminism (Stanley
1992).
Laurel Richardson’s postructuralist feminist stance problematizes the boundaries between the social
sciences and the humanities in relation to styles of writing and epistemological positions, seeing the
formal, impersonal style of social science writing as a socio-historical construction, which, along with
claims to objectivity, generalizability and truth, have been subject to the postmodern challenge
(Richardson 2005).Thus, the personal and the subjective inherent in autobiographical writing
become valid within the postmodern epistemological paradigm. Conventional methods of knowing
and telling are opened to question, and new methods are introduced. Knowing becomes partial
without claims to generalizability. Richardson suggests that the crystal is the most appropriate image
for the validity of the postmodern text, reflecting and refracting the position that there is no single
truth, that any understanding can only ever be partial, and that there are multiple understandings
around any given issue (Richardson 2005). Autobiography as a method of knowing and telling is
explicitly partial. I make no claims to absolute truth about myself or about women in general.
As with all knowing, the knowing of the self is problematic. There are issues around accuracy of
recall, of psychic defence mechanisms (Anna Freud 1936), of mythologizing, of idealising myself
(Thompson 2006). Lacan problematizes the possibility of self- knowledge by positing the subject as
‘the subject supposed to know’ (Lacan: 1975/1982:56). Totalised in the language of the symbolic
order, the infant’s misrecognition of himself in the mirror is followed by endless subsequent
misrecognitions. Postmodernism problematizes the humanist/romantic view of identity as stable,
coherent, and abiding.
How can feminist autobiography take account of these issues around the self? Nod Miller defines an
autobiography as ‘a continuous process of conducting a dialogue between different selves over time’
(Miller 2007:183). We need to be up front about the fact that when we write ourselves, we
construct ourselves rather than reflect ourselves. The autobiographical self is therefore arguably a
fiction (Stanley 1992, Anderson 2011). Is it justifiable, appropriate even, to ‘fictionalise’
autobiography?
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Women’s Bodies in Culture
Miller asks
If learning to see oneself – as a woman – aging can’t be separated from how we’ve
learned to see ourselves as women in the first place, part of how to find new ways of
perceiving ourselves as aging bodies and faces is to construct a narrative in which these
images can be read, otherwise (Miller 2002: 88).
How have we come to see ourselves as women, how are our bodily desires constituted, and what
might that alternative narrative be? Which theoretical positions are most helpful for underlining this
feminist challenge and what are the problematics of these?
Feminine positions are produced by the responses of pleasures offered us,
our subjectivity and identity are formed in the definitions of desire that
encircle us. These are the experiences that make change such a difficult and
daunting task, for female desire is constantly lured by discourses that sustain
male privilege (Rosalind Cowards in Weedon 1989:151).
For Irigaray, the sexual power relations in society which constitute the ways women experience their
bodies and their sexuality give all power to men, leaving women in a situation where the only way
they can challenge these ways of being would be to remove themselves from male society and learn
to live with women, to rediscover who they truly are. The only other way would be to go back
through the mirror to discover who they would have been before the structuring processes of the
symbolic order ordered them. Femininity is ‘a role, an image, a value imposed upon women by male
systems of representation’. It is a ‘masquerade’, in which woman loses herself. She is an object of
consumption or desire to be chosen by masculine “subjects.” And there is no other place or way for
woman to be within this signifying economy (Irigaray 1977/83:84).
For Irigaray, the female body, female sexuality itself, exists to serve the needs of men. Woman is cut
off from her own sexuality, her own desire and the desire she does feel has been constituted to
respond to the desire of the male rather than to her own, essentially female desire. She has learned
to find her pleasure in responding to his desire. She is his object. She is a commodity, a use value, an
exchange value among men. Woman’s role is to be the beautiful, passive ‘object of contemplation.’
(Irigaray 1977/1985:250).
Sexuality within culture is not necessarily as straightforward as Irigaray suggests. The sexual
dynamics within a heterosexual relationship are more complex than that. I can remember from my
teenage years that my body was mine to give or keep as I chose and boys experienced that as female
sexual power. The objectification of female bodies through pornography or lap dancing clubs turns
men into consumers rather than partakers of sexual pleasure.
Liz Stanley sees autobiography as important for presenting the contradictions and complexities
around the issue of sexual power
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Biography in its feminist form can show us as quite no other kind of writing can
that ‘power’ and powerlessness are complex matters, most certainly not two
poles of a dichotomy but often co-existent in the same piece of behaviour by
the same person at exactly the same moment in time (Stanley 1992:165).
She cites the letters of Anna Culwick, a Victorian working class woman who had a sexual relationship
with a man who was much more powerful than she was in the social hierarchy. Stanley found that
these diaries expressed a situation where there was a complex relationship in terms of power, ‘a
complete interdependence….in which both had and used different sources of power vis-à-vis the
other.; For Stanley, power stands for, ‘the multiplicity of ways in which one person can control,
confine, compel, constrain, influence another into being, doing, saying (Stanley ibid: 168).
Judith Butler argues that prior to being culturally constituted as a particular gender, the body is a
‘set of possibilities, with no gendered ‘interior essence’ (Butler 1997:403).The gendered body
reproduces a historical situation in the world by doing, by acting, by dramatizing its gender in such a
way that this appears as natural. Gender is, ‘performative,’ just as acting in a theatrical setting is
performative. (Butler 1997). Does the suggestion that gender is performative imply that women
could undo our gender by simply performing differently and that individual women learning to
perform differently might have an impact on gendered social relations in general? The ‘personal is
political formulation of feminist theory’ supposes that ‘the life-world of gender relations is
constituted, at least partially, through the concrete and historically mediated acts of individuals’.
(Butler, 1997:406).
Butler sees as her task the examination of the specific corporeal acts through which gender is
constructed in order to consider what the possibilities might be for cultural transformations through
such acts (Butler 1997).
Might not autobiography, which reveals the arbitrary and often self-destructive nature of these acts
of gender around the body, go at least some way towards disrupting the acceptance of these acts as
‘natural,’ or perhaps by offering a subversive or hyperbolic interpretation of femininity challenge
women to see ‘natural’ femininity as a fiction?
Aging is a personal experience, but also a collective one. Miller cites Jo Spence who produced a
photographic record of her body after cancer surgery and wrote her feelings about the results
The results were very painful, particularly those prints which showed the ways
in which my body is not only badly scarred and damaged, but also aging,
overweight and deteriorating.
I opened the gown and wrote ‘monster’ across my chest, because that’s how
I experienced myself as a cancer patient: monstrous to other people (in Miller ibid: 89).
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Spence sees the issue of the older woman’s body in a culture in which women are valued for their
appearance as a “collective dilemma” and her objective is for her images of an aging, an older
women to be understood as “an act of solidarity” with other women in this situation (Miller ibid:89).
Thus, it is not only language in relation to words that can challenge through autobiography, it is also
images.
The Gendered Psyche
Gender however, is not simply a surface behaviour, a body inscribed with characteristics. The body
has psychic and biological drives and a gendered psyche constituted in this symbolic order. In later
texts, Butler begins to consider the relevance of psychoanalysis to this process. She refers to
Lacanian psychoanalysis which suggests that identity can never be totalized by the symbolic order
and theorises the imaginary as a psychic space where that which has not been ordered by the
symbolic emerges as a disorder (Butler 1997). The imaginary is seen as a site where identity is
contested. She suggests that to theorise psychic resistance to the totalisation of identity, we must
consider psychoanalytic theories which suggest that multiple identifications coexist producing
conflicts, convergences, and importantly, innovative dissonances (Butler 2007). Feminist
autobiography might explore such multiple identifications, might present a dialogue between the
contradictory aspects of self that exist within us.
Freudian psychoanalysis is problematic for feminists in terms of its phallocentricity, but arguably, if
women want to understand themselves and their responses to men within this symbolic order, there
is value in studying Freud. ‘How else but by becoming aware of patriarchy’s often unconscious
inscription can we overthrow its law? (Sayers 1995:7). Sayers draws on Freudian psychoanalysis to
suggest that women in patriarchal culture idealise men, seek their validation, imagine that obtaining
a man is the solution to their ills, the only way to fulfil themselves. According to Lacan it is penis envy
in relation to its symbolic representation that makes the girl court her father’s and other men’s
desire. She cites Elizabeth Grosz who describes how, in’ Lacanian terms, the vainglorious, narcissistic
woman spends hours primping, titivating and beautifying herself (ibid).
Jacqueline Rose suggests that there is a
“vacancy and excess at the heart of symbolic, paternal law” (in that nobody
can be or have the phallus symbolising men’s rule) and women have a fantasy
about filling the void with epic male figures, especially when our ideas cannot
be grounded in reality (ibid:10).
As Sayers suggests, psychoanalysis cannot reveal any single phallic truth, just a host of different
ideas about men produced by overlapping narratives. We need to challenge the social myths, the
defensive fantasies that make women idealise men. Men’s social dominance must be exposed,
challenged and overthrown ‘a matter not so much of therapy but of politics’ (Sayers 1997:213),
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while alongside this feminist academics must continue to deconstruct the myths of masculinity,
another project to be explored through fictionalised autobiography.
For women to become ‘whole,’we have to go through the emotional pain of accepting that the
ideal man does not exist to cure our ills ‘we have to grieve the man who never was’ (Sayers
1997:215).
Accessing and Representing the Autobiographical Self
How then can I write autobiography that reaches deep into the psyche, into the unconscious, both
mine and that of the reader while also accepting that I cannot find an absolute truth about myself,?
Hunt and Sampson suggest that to imbue their writing with life writers need to write from the
unconscious and the felt body, enter feeling mode rather than thinking mode, to ‘suspend their
reason until they gain access to their deeper selves’ (Hunt and Sampson 2006:59). The writing
should then be objectified and developed into art. They cite Peter Elbow who advocates a chaotic
writing stage, where the writer suspends their critical faculty allowing thoughts and feelings to
emerge spontaneously unimpeded followed by a critical editing stage where crafting takes place.
(Hunt and Sampson ibid). For Hunt and Sampson, reflexivity is about accessing the personal in order
to imbue their ‘material with felt life’ but also ‘doubling the self’
It involves creating an internal space, distancing ourselves from ourselves, as it were,
so that we are both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ ourselves simultaneously and able to
switch back and forth fluidly and playfully from one position to the other, giving ourselves
up to the experience of ‘self as other’ whilst also retaining a grounding in our familiar
sense of self (ibid:4).
For Cixous, the act of writing itself can be transformational, but in order for it to be
transformational, we have to be able to ‘reach this lightening region that takes your breath away,
where you instantaneously feel at sea and where the moorings are severed’ (Cixous 1993:73). This
place takes us beyond the cognitive, into the depths of the psyche.
Does the lightning region relate to Lacan’s imaginary (Butler 1997), to the something that remains
after symbolisation, the place of resistance? Kristeva theorises that which remains after
symbolisation as the semiotic chora. The semiotic chora exists before symbolisation, when the
ecosystem of the subject is formed of the pre-Oedipal psychic drives as theorised by Freud and Klein,
a drive economy underlain by metonym and metaphor – a state of pre-symbolic functions,
ambiguous fantasies simultaneously destructive and assimilating, a place of scission and conflict, a
kinetic state. After symbolisation something of the semitotic chora remains and it is thence that the
early symbolisations come to subvert the signifying chain of the thetic to produce poetry.
Grammatical rules are transgressed, the syntactic relations disturbed, signification and denotation
are pluralised, language is pulverized. Poetic language, especially the language of modern poetry,
confronts signification and denotation and hence all meaning, thus challenging the social world,
entering into the ideological debate, challenging dogma (Kristeva 1986).
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Writing ‘creatively’ can also enhance the ways in which lived experience can be conveyed. The use of
a poetic and aesthetic imagination allows the writer to embody a greater sense of the emotionality
of the situation conveyed (Froggett, in West 2010). The use of fiction allows the writer to import
experiences from a number of occasions or events and to create a narrative that might relate to a
number of readers. The use of fiction allows the writer to reveal that which might be too exposing as
a referential narrative (Clough 2002:9). Personally I have found it so much easier to write revealing
narratives about sex and emotions for example when writing ‘fictionally’ even when using the first
person singular.
How else but by writing creatively can we convey how our lived experience felt? Laurel Richardson
suggests that the ways in which we theorize lived experience and the ways we actually experience it
are at odds. The standard conventions for writing actually conceal the lived, interactional content.
There needs to be a way of representing this (Richardson 1997). Richardson suggests that poetic
representation, in terms of its rhythm particularly, can touch us where we live, in our bodies
(Richardson 1997).
How do I reach the imaginary, the semiotic chora, the lightning zone? I simply sit and see what
comes, let my mind roam. I have no idea which part of me I have reached, but I am aware of writing
that which is difficult and showing aspects of me I am not terribly comfortable displaying. When I
write, it seems I never present a strong, coherent, in control self. When I read what I write, when I
read my ‘autobiographical self’, what do I come to understand about her, and through her, about
other women perhaps?
This ‘I’ that I write upon the page, this ‘I’ that I write as fiction seems more full of pain and need than
I am aware of being. How much of a feminist challenge could this possibly present? I certainly don’t
seem to be offering women more positive ways of being in the world. The selves I write are by turn
sardonic, ironic, pathetic, muddled, incoherent. How do I turn them into readable pieces? I turn a
piece into a short story of sorts. I write so much about the loss of my young, ‘desirable self.’ Below
are some extracts from the text. I am imagining myself wearing the lingerie worn by a dummy…………
The legs are cut high to expose the smooth hardness of her buttocks. I rather fancy myself in it. It
would have to be several sizes larger of course to accommodate my more than ample bottom. But still,
it would look well draped artfully over my still full bosom. And its lace edging would draw the eye
away from the ripples of fat that adorn my stomach. High-heeled shoes would help of course.
Elongate the leg, sharpen the calf, raise the buttocks.
The shoes are placed seductively in line along shelves dressed with folds of dusk blue silk. And such
shoes: supple, slender, streamlined, strapped, pointed, bowed, buckled, bejewelled, lace edged, suede,
silk, velvet, soft, soft leather. High arched stilettos, modest kitten heels, sling-backs, backless, open
toed. I want to hold each of them in my hand, try them on, totter round the room, knowing that I could
not wear any of them. No, my feet are now for sensible shoes only. All I can do is look wistfully. It was
not always this way. As a girl I balanced on high heels, ignored pinched toes and blisters, aching
calves and throbbing arches - sashayed across the dance floor feelings men’s eyes on me as I moved.
Now I must pay the price. I wish I had listened to my mother.
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Has this woman anything to do with me? I write of hunger, of need, of compulsive shopping,
compulsive eating, a perceived sexual lack at the centre of my being, a struggle with a less than
‘ideal’ body. I address the reader, assuming that she will relate to my position.
You know what I am doing as well as I do. Any modern reader of women’s magazines or Sunday
supplements will know that I am sublimating my need for sex and love into retail therapy. There is no
Mr Right in my life, nor is there, to coin a cliché, any Mr Right now. Here I sit on an island of
boredom, no ship of desire in sight. Who will get to see me in my rose-pink teddy? Who will slowly
slip its straps from my shoulders or softly slide their hand up its high cut leg. No-one. That’s who.
What kind of feminist am I? Yet should this be read with pathos, self- mocking, or biting irony? What
is actually going on here? I have to remind myself that this is but a fictional text. There is no referent.
There is no truth behind it. Those same words read with a different tone, a different emphasis have
very different meanings. I am all of them by turns and really none of them. I am being playful. I am
playfully expressing pain. I am mocking myself, mocking women who fall for this, understanding such
women, in sisterhood with them. I am one of them. I am never like that. That is not me. If I saw you
reading it, I would need to explain the socio-cultural context for this pathetic behaviour. I am so
exposed, but this is not me. Is it? This is fiction. Isn’t it?
I take out a small plate containing a chocolate éclair. I hold it under my nose, savouring for just one
moment its mingled smells. I turn it over and slide it through my parted lips, cream and chocolate
moving gently along the length of my tongue. I pause, responding slowly to the familiar tastes. I
slowly pull back, teasing myself, until, unable to wait, I thrust, sucking hard on the cream and
chocolate until I gag, then bite rudely at its length, chewing and swallowing, as the peristaltic waves
lead it to my waiting stomach.
This next section though, towards the end of the piece. Can this be playful? It is obvious that this
food is a metaphor for sex, or that sexual metaphors are used to describe the eating. But what am I
saying here? What does this say to you? As I read and know that you are reading, I feel that I am
being observed in a deeply intimate activity, a brutal self- pleasuring, and I wonder why I want you
to watch me. Is this some sort of self-indulgent exhibitionism?
My hand feels its way back to the chocolate box and grabs fistful of chocolates. I lap them from my
palm: turkish delight, coffee cream, montelimar, strawberry, orange, partially masticated, enter my
gullet as pinkish brown liquid dribbles down my chin. My breath becomes laboured as my stomach
distends.
I kneel on the bathroom waiting for the convulsions, now deep in my gut, to bring relief. Spasms of
clenching and releasing, pushing and squeezing, bringing the swill of pastry, chocolate, caramel,
cream and fondant upwards and upwards until finally the retching brings a burning release and the
cool water from the toilet bowl splashes my face in response to receiving the contents of my stomach.
I wipe my mouth on my sleeve and remain on the cold tiles, knees, shins and feet chilled by the
ceramic floor, bent double at the waist, chin on knees. In dying swan position.
The final orgasmic vomit makes it clear that this is not a celebration of ‘femininity.’ This hunger, this
emptiness, this attempt to fill the void which results in painful expulsion of the contents of my/her
stomach is a response to the lack at the heart of patriarchal culture.
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None of this happened to me quite like that. But all of it has some truth. This hyperbolizing of my
behaviour, my feelings, has given me a glimpse of a woman I can pity, a woman I can understand, a
woman who needs to change. But I have already read the theory. I can place her in context. I can see
her as a product of culture. Does this tell any truth about me? I don’t know how others might read
her? I am an ‘analytically enquiring feminist subject’ but am still struggling to become a ‘refusing
female subject.’
Bibilography
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Stanbury,S (eds) Writing on the Body, Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory.
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West Sussex
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Reprint 2010
Grosz, E, (1995) Space,Time and Perversion. Routledge. New York
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Sussex
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Anderson, S (eds),Using Biographies and Life History Approaches in the Study of
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Richardson,L (2004) Travels with Ernest, Rowman and Littlefield, Maryland
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