Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

Autobiography and Performativity

Every day, in disparate venues, in response to sundry occasions, in front of precise audiences (even if an audience of one), people assemble, if only temporarily, a “life” to which they assign narrative coherence and meaning and through which they position themselves in historically specific identities. Whatever that occasion or that audience, the autobiographical speaker becomes a performative subject.

This is another way of suggesting that autobiographical telling is not a “self-expressive” act. The theory of self-expression that has driven various strands of autobiography theory assumes that self-identity emerges from a psychic interiority, located somewhere “inside” the narrating subject. There it lies in a state most coherent, unified, evidentiary, even expectant, awaiting transmission to a surface, a tongue, a pen, a keyboard. Through such media the essence of this inner self can be translated into the metaphorical equivalence in language, into strings of words and narrative sequences. This theory of autobiography assumes an ontological and integumentary relationship of interiority to bodily surface and bodily surface to text as well as the identity (synonymity) of the “I” before the text, the “I” of the narrator, and the “I” of the narrated subject.

But the “self” so often invoked in self-expressive theories of autobiography is not a noun, a thing-in-itself, waiting to be materialized through the text. There is no essential, original, coherent autobiographical self before the moment of selfnarrating. Nor is the autobiographical self expressive in the sense that it is the manifestation of an interiority that is somehow ontologically whole, seamless, and “true.” For the self is not a documentary repository of all experiential history running uninterruptedly from infancy to the contemporary moment, capacious, current, and accessible. The very sense of self as identity derives paradoxically from the loss to consciousness of fragments of experiential history. Benedict Anderson suggests that this “estrangement” from our experiential history necessitates “a conception of personhood, identity . . . which, because it cannot be ‘remembered,’ must be narrated” (204).

Autobiographical narration begins with amnesia, and once begun, the fragmentary nature of subjectivity intrudes. After all, the narrator is both the same and not the same as the autobiographer, and the narrator is both the same and not the same as the subject of narration. Moreover, there are many stories to be told and many different and divergent storytelling occasions that call for and forth contextually-marked and sometimes radically divergent narratives of identity.

In each instance, then, narrative performativity constitutes interiority. That is, the interiority or self that is said to be prior to the autobiographical expression or reflection is an effect of autobiographical storytelling. What Judith Butler says of gender performativity can be reframed in terms of autobiographical performativity: “Within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. . . . There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Gender 24–5). And those expressions of interiority are effects produced through the action of public discourses, among them the culturally pervasive discourses of identity and truth-telling that inform historically specific modes, contexts, and receptions of autobiographical narrating (see Gilmore, Autobiographics 1–15).

Such discourses might well be understood, à la Michel de Certeau, as hegemonic “strategies” for the cultural reproduction of normative selves (xviii-xx). They function as culturally credible means of making people “believers” in deep selves. For, as de Certeau recognizes,

Autobiographical storytelling becomes one means through which people in the West believe themselves to be “selves.” In this way, autobiographical storytelling is always a performative occasion, an occasion through which, as Butler argues in theorizing performativity, the “power of discourse . . . produce[s] effects through reiteration” (Bodies 20).

De Certeau and others trace this conjunction of bourgeois subjectivity and disciplined bodies to various effects of post-Enlightenment culture. Emergent capitalist economies and new republican nations encouraged and required persons to understand themselves to be equal, free, autonomous, and rational subjects, “individuals.” But such free individuals in turn required disciplining through an internally generated program of self-scrutiny.[1] Thus the bourgeois reification of self-regulation assumed an interiorized self to be regulated. To this self was assigned depth beneath/inside the surface of the body, what was sometimes considered synonymous with “soul.”

But the specificities of flesh determined the degree and kind of interiority assigned the self-regulating subject. Interiority became an effect, and not a cause, of the cultural regulation of always already identified bodies, bodies that were sexed and gendered, bodies that were racialized, bodies that were located in specific socioeconomic spaces, bodies that were deemed unruly or grotesque. Interiority, in complicated ways, became the effect of the surface politics of the body, its physical characteristics, gestures, behaviors, location. And the cultural affirmation of a normative “self” became an effect of the evacuation of unruly heterogeneity within the individual and within the body social and politic. Thus autobiographical storytelling emerged as one powerful means of constituting bourgeois subjects and thereby regulating both bodies and selves. Autobiographical storytelling also became a culturally potent means through which this Enlightenment self was situated in what the West understood as “historical time.” As Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, historical time is understood as “a natural, homogeneous, secular calendrical time.” It is time necessary to the modernist master narrative of development and progress, a time, citing Chakrabarty again, “without which the story of human evolution/civilization—a single human history, that is—cannot be told” (431).[2]

Autobiography and Disidentification

Consider, then, the “mîse en scene” of autobiographical performativity. The “scene” is at once a literal place, a location, but also a moment in history, a (sociopolitical) space in culture. Permeating the scene are all those many and non-identical discourses that comprise the sense of the “credible” and the “real.” Then there is the “audience” or the implied reader. An audience implies a community of people for whom certain discourses of identity and truth make sense. The audience comes to expect a certain kind of performativity that conforms relatively comfortably to criteria of intelligibility. Thus a specific recitation of identity involves the inclusion of certain identity contents and the exclusion of others; the incorporation of certain narrative itineraries and intentionalities, the silencing of others; the adoption of certain autobiographical voices, the muting of others. But audiences are never simple, homogeneous communities. They are themselves heterogeneous collectives that can solicit conflicted effects in the autobiographical subject.

And so the cultural injunction to be a deep, unified, coherent, autonomous “self” produces necessary failure, for the autobiographical subject is amnesiac, incoherent, heterogeneous, interactive. In that very failure lies the fascination of autobiographical storytelling as performativity. For Butler the failure signals the “possibility of a variation on [the] repetition” of “the rules that govern intelligible identity.” “The injunction to be” a particular kind of subject, she continues,

It is as if the autobiographical subject finds him/herself on multiple stages simultaneously, called to heterogeneous recitations of identity. These multiple calls never align perfectly. Rather they create spaces or gaps, ruptures, unstable boundaries, incursions, excursions, limits and their transgressions.

How might we understand these disruptions? Rethinking the role of the unconscious and its relationship to feminist consciousness, Teresa de Lauretis calls this disruptive space the space of disidentification (125–7). The unconscious might be understood as the repository of all the experiences and desires that cannot be identified with the symbolic realm and its laws of citationality, those calls to take up normative subject positions. And Butler reminds us that this power of the symbolic (“the domain of socially instituted norms” [Bodies 182]) to effect citationality is installed in what Freud referred to as the super-ego or the conscience (“the interiorized judge . . . the psychic agency of regulation” [Bodies 181]). The unconscious thus becomes the repository of surplus, of excess, of unbidden and forbidden performativity. The repository of that which is not speakable, not intelligible, not credible, the unconscious is an interiority of disidentifications nested inside the interiority of the identifying subject, an effect of an effect (or what Paul John Eakin describes as “a construct of a construct,” “a story of a story” [102, 120]). This domain of the excluded, according to Butler, “haunt[s] signification as its abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the nonnarrativizable, the traumatic” (Bodies 188).

Yet this process of identification and disidentification is ongoing. As a result there can be no fixed or essential preconstitutive identity. Identifications become what Chantal Mouffe describes as “nodal points” or “fixations” which “limit the flux of the signified under the signifier” (371). This “dialectics of fixity/non-fixation” generates practices that can be unfixings of imposed systems of identification.

In the midst of the “strategies” of what de Certeau calls the “strong” (“whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order” [xix]), a specific autobiographical subject seizes the occasion to effect a timely adjustment of the norm. De Certeau calls such interventions the “tactic” of the weak through which habitable spaces are staked out, through which ruptures in disciplined interiority are effected. “The weak,” he contends, “must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them. This is achieved in the propitious moments when they are able to combine heterogeneous elements . . . ; the intellectual synthesis of these given elements takes the form, however, not of a discourse, but of the decision itself, the act and manner in which the opportunity is ‘seized’” (xix). Through tactical dis/identifications, the autobiographical subject adjusts, redeploys, resists, transforms discourses of autobiographical identity.

The history of an autobiographical subject is the history of recitations of the self. But if the self does not exist prior to its recitations, then autobiographical storytelling is a recitation of a recitation. Ultimately, as Jerome Bruner has argued, the life as lived experientially is itself performative. The living of a life becomes the effect of the life as narrated.

Now I turn to performative moments in and performative aspects of a diverse set of autobiographical texts. I start with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography because it has been such an influential text in the history of American national identity, autobiography, and bourgeois subjectivity. I follow with discussions of three texts written by people who take up autobiographical discourses from different cultural locations, but locations on the margins: Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), and Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (1983). My comments are not meant to be readings of the texts as such; they are meant to explore the textual implications of the autobiographical performativity mapped out in these opening comments.

Benjamin Franklin’s Wheelbarrow

Franklin’s Autobiography is a kind of “conduct book,” a generic commonplace of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that offered formulas for living through normative discourses of gender/race/class. But Franklin’s is a conduct book with a critical difference. English conduct books of the eighteenth century tended to describe the character and delineate the education of the aristocratic gentleman. Franklin’s conduct book deconstructs these aristocratic notions of identity in service to a new bourgeois notion of identity.[4] Filled with maxims for living, instructional episodes, and “contrastive fables,” the Autobiography, according to Malini Johar Schueller, “celebrate[s] the mythology of new America—the privatized individual’s rise to success in the marketplace” (20).

Franklin deftly incorporates and effectively realigns various discourses of identity culturally available to him as he consolidates a new autobiographical subject out of the discourses of liberal humanism joined to capitalist entrepreneurship (Schueller 21–30). In this sense he takes up discursive tools where they lie, to invoke Butler. For instance, those discourses of Puritan antinomianism that rebuked the privileges of established authority were redeployed by Franklin in order to challenge any kind of received authority, from the authority of his own father or brother to that of any aristocratic privilege based on birth and social status. Those Calvinist discourses outlining the just pursuit of moral perfection he reformulated and redeployed in service to a secular ethics. If the bits and pieces of these discourses lay around for inclusion and refashioning, so did newer ones such as the Lockean discourse of egalitarian individualism and universal rights. He is both the conservator of provided identities and the active agent, the self-fashioner who adjusts to new interpretive possibilities.

But I want to look more closely at one commonly-cited passage revelatory of Franklin’s self-fashioning as a particular kind of autobiographical subject:

On one level this autobiographical moment provides a meticulous description of Franklin’s everyday presentation of self. On another it exposes the performative nature not only of his everyday self-presentation but also of his self-narrating project. Consequently, this narrative scene in the Autobiography resonates with the narrative scene of the Autobiography. Franklin is putting himself together (“secur[ing]” himself) narratively (in daily life, in autobiographical representation) in the coherence of a “character,” the tradesman specifically and the capitalist entrepreneur in the broader sense.

In her study of autobiographical subjectivity in the personal writings of the eighteenth century, Felicity A. Nussbaum takes up the meaning of character in the century. On one hand, “character,” à la the Theophrastian model, “is imagined to be a public construction, the material evidence of a private interior reality that reflects an individual’s essence,” a construction that is “expressive of a whole and unified personality” (107). On the other hand, there is an emerging emphasis in the century on the impact of education and experience on “character,” that is, an acknowledgment of its socially-situated nature, its malleability and its inessentiality. Thus, the very word “character,” Nussbaum argues, is charged with that tension so ripe in the century between the essentialist notion of a personal identity tied to birth and social status and the more flexible notion of an earnable identity, a notion central to the emerging ideology of the bourgeois republican subject.

Franklin’s Autobiography negotiates this tension in a complex way. Averring that he is “in reality” a tradesman, he affirms the self-expressive capability of identity by affirming the interiorized self of the “self-made” man. The myth he promotes is that these behaviors might be said to express the character of the new bourgeois tradesman. Yet he simultaneously exposes the performative nature of the tradesman’s identity, attesting to what Erving Goffman argues is the relationship between expressions of character and social contexts. According to Goffman, “expression in the main is not instinctive but socially learned and socially patterned; it is a socially defined category which employs a particular expression, and a socially established schedule which determines when these expressions will occur” (7). There would be no way of testifying to his character as someone not above his business but by attending to his business behaviors. Industriousness is the performance of industry, being frugal the performance of frugality. Validating the regulatory behaviors of frugality and industriousness (among other bourgeois behaviors), this passage reveals the ways in which the discourse of the “tradesman” enacts itself on and exacts the compliance of the body through bodily deportment, gestural display, actions, and placement. The interiorized character or identity of the tradesman is an effect of bodily acts and behaviors, the regulatory practices of emergent bourgeois identity formation.

Franklin’s text reveals the ways in which the interiority of a privatized (individual) consciousness is an effect of a set of behaviors, gestures, actions in the world. The interior self of this “self-made man” is comprised of the behaviors and activities of the virtuous capitalist, an apparent oxymoron that Franklin strips of its oxymoronic status. If Franklin’s affirmation is meant to suture the gap between the interiority of consciousness and the public self with its politics of the body, it in fact opens up that gap and reveals it as a space of performativity. And yet the performative nature of the “self-made man” is fundamentally a bourgeois opportunity. The emphasis on the reproducibility of virtuous behaviors supports Franklin’s promotion of personal achievement. What one did and how one behaved led directly to what one owned, and what one owned, not one’s birth or class origin, determined one’s identity as a new American man. Further, it promotes the reproducibility of bourgeois subjects. Paradoxically, the bourgeois individual becomes a commodity, and autobiography itself a bourgeois enterprise, the production of a “life” reproducible and consumable. The Autobiography serves as a conduct book through which American men become “self-made men” by interiorizing the performativity of individualist masculinity.

Frederick Douglass’s Amnesia

If in the Franklin passage we have performativity within consciousness, in the following passage from Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, we have performativity without consciousness. Douglass divides the narrative of My Bondage and My Freedom into two parts, life in slavery and life after escape. In the early pages of the second part he recounts his first speaking appearance at an anti-slavery convention held in Nantucket in 1841. After explaining that William C. Coffin “sought me out in the crowd and invited me to say a few words to the convention,” he continues:

In this scene, the ex-slave is summoned to speak for the first time before a white audience. In other words, he is put on display and asked to perform. But precisely “who” is doing the performing? A man? A free Negro? A former slave? A slave? If Franklin remembers his performance of industriousness, Douglass, suffering a precise amnesia, forgets his. If what Anderson suggests is the case, that “all profound changes of consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias”, then what do we make of this memory of amnesia (204)? Douglass has recently gone through a change of “identity,” from that of the “slave” to that of “free” man. And yet the Fugitive Slave Law ensures that even in the north, where he assumes the identity of a “free” man, he remains “a slave.” As both/and, Douglass remains suspended in consciousness changes.

This amnesia signals the radical difference between the autobiographical projects of a Benjamin Franklin and a Frederick Douglass. Franklin’s exuberant and optimistic narrative assumes his rights of ownership—as a tradesman in an emergent capitalist economy, as a person in the tenets of egalitarian liberalism, as an autobiographical subject with an autonomous interiority. The textual “Franklin” is a product/property of the narrating Franklin who has the rights to his own life and his own body. But Frederick Douglass has a different relationship to the location of the autobiographical subject because of the experiential history of slavery that has rendered him a non-subject and thus a non-“man.” He has no history of property rights, including the right to his own body, person, and subjectivity.

What Douglass does remember of the speaking experience are activities, gestures, behaviors of his body: he can barely stand erect; he stammers; he speaks in discontinuous sentences; he trembles. The material of his body unconsciously “speaks” for/as “Frederick Douglass.” The bent rather than upright body and the incoherent language create the effect of unconsciousness, the very unconsciousness that has been assigned him in the organized system of slavery. As a slave he has been assigned the identity of the beast of burden, irrational, less-than-fully-human. Ironically, the body speaks as the “slave,” the non-human being objectified in the discourses of slavery. Douglass’s amnesia evacuates the interiority of the bourgeois republican subject from this moment of public display.

If Douglass cannot remember his own, he can vividly recall Garrison’s performance:

What Douglass vividly remembers here is being spoken for. Garrison, he says, “t[ook] me as his text,” interpreting his life for him. That is, Douglass remembers that Garrison turned his life into the “other” of his (Garrison’s) speaking performance.

In taking “Douglass” as his text the white abolitionist appropriates the other, an act that signals the differential relationship of the black speaker and the white speaker to the public occasion. “Douglass” disappears into the rhetorical art and artifice of Garrison’s performance, his otherness apparently obliterated. He becomes a (rhetorical) effect of a (rhetorical) effect. It is almost as if Douglass’s performance becomes the unconscious of Garrison’s performance (Pease). In this sense Garrison also takes “Douglass” as his “pre-text” in two senses of the word. Not only is Douglass’s object status the unconscious content of Garrison’s subjectivity, but the autobiographical story of the escaped slave provides a pretext, an occasion for the white abolitionist to perform his power and his glory, the wielding of the audience into his single individuality. Douglass’s amnesia reveals how the story of the escaped slave was neutralized: by incorporating the story of this cultural other into his proselytizing agenda, the white abolitionist makes it his own, effectively dis-owning Douglass. Douglass’s subsequent experience, described in his narrative, suggests that again and again he failed to speak “as a slave” and was thus labeled an “imposter” or “impersonator.” His speaking was unintelligible to an audience that expected an already written script.

Intriguingly, Garrison himself wrote of Douglass’s speech in his “Preface” to Douglass’s earlier narrative, the 1844 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave:

In this passage Garrison constructs Douglass as a perfect specimen of “man”—in body noble, in speech eloquent, in intelligence rich. He becomes more miracle than escaped slave, exceptional rather than representative. And like Douglass Garrison uses Douglass’s body as a text to be read; what Douglass presents as nervous trembling, Garrison presents as “trembling for his safety,” thereby heightening the effects of slavery in reducing someone so noble to such powerlessness. Garrison’s projection of Douglass tames the otherness of the escaped slave by rendering him in the discourse of the same, that is, the discourse of liberal humanism. The political implications of such a biographical portrait are profound: The exceptional can be incorporated and neutralized; the representative remains more threatening to the discourses of republican identity.

At the close of the version of his life to which Garrison’s comments are prefatory Douglass describes his first speech in this way: “The truth was, I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease” (Narrative 153). There is no mention of Garrison’s speech at all. There is no comparison of himself to Garrison. There is no lingering on his inability to remember. The difference in the 1855 version is therefore arresting. Certainly Douglass would have read the abolitionist’s description of his first speech since Garrison’s letter was included in the introduction to Douglass’s 1844 narrative. The 1855 narrative in effect challenges the white man’s account of Douglass’s public appearance and challenges also the way in which Garrison rewrote him as a “text.”

Douglass’s narrative unconsciousness signals a variety of meanings within the context of his autobiographical text. He speaks before the white audience as someone who has been a “slave” and thus as someone who has been assigned a blank interiority. At this moment of crossing over from one system of discursive identities to another, he fittingly or ironically goes blank. Thus the unconsciousness might evidence the blank interiority projected by white Americans upon slaves and ex-slaves. Or it might evidence the blank interiority assumed by the slave who has been brutally cathected as the self-consolidating other. Or it might evidence the radical point of transformation. Simultaneously his refusal of consciousness at the moment of commanded public display might signal his refusal of identification with the stipulated posture of degraded “slave” or of the exceptional and noble “ex-slave,” those contradictory identities he carries to the podium. This narrative staging of unconsciousness might then serve as a “tactic” of disidentification as well as a gesture of resistance to Garrison’s appropriation of his “life,” an appropriation that takes place in the “free” territory of the North. Here, then, is a narrative hesitation, a narrative interruption in the power of discourse (in this case, Garrison’s abolitionist politics) to command an easy and easily intelligible citationality.

Gertrude’s Alice (Being and Possessing)

If in the discussion of Franklin and Douglass I have looked precisely at particular moments of self-conscious performance, in turning to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas I want to consider the performative nature of the entire autobiographical enterprise:

Quite simply, Stein undermines the basis upon which what Philippe Lejeune describes as the “autobiographical pact” is founded: the self-identity of the subject of the autobiographical narrative and the autobiographical speaker. We might call this a first-person biography or a second-person auto/biography or un/collaborative storytelling. The subversive nature of Stein’s “camp” autobiography (Gilmore, “Signature”) reveals the fantasy that sustains “traditional,” or what Stein would call “paternal,” autobiography. In the ruse of conclusion, Stein’s tour de force confuses the differentiation of identities, roles, and performances.

Thus the trick in the ending becomes thick with meaning. As many have noted, in their long-term relationship, Stein assumed the role of “husband” to Toklas’s “wife,” the lesbian couple thereby reiterating the normative heterosexual model of domesticity. With this context in mind, we can unpack the implications of the autobiographical project. One woman, Stein, who assumes the positionality of “husband” in the heterosexual couple, speaks as another woman, “Toklas,” who assumes the positionality of “wife.” Stein, that is, puts on the identity of “wife.” But something excessive happens when a woman performs femininity; as Mary Russo suggests: “To put on femininity with a vengeance suggests the power of taking it off” (224). Thus a disjunction occurs between the sexed body (Stein as biological female), gender identity (Stein as “husband”), and gender performance (Stein as “Toklas”/the culturally credible “wife”). Body/identity/gender are rendered non-identical.

Stein also camps up the performativity of gendered narrative expectations. The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas begins with the failure of Toklas to perform her “wifely” duty. In other words, the “wife” fails to enact the rituals of “wifehood.” As a result, the husband takes on the “wife’s” duty. As “Alice” then, Stein reiterates a conventional wife’s tale, the narrative of the husband’s public “life.” In this sense the narrating Stein puts on “femininity” as she narrates a normative “feminine” story (a biography rather than an autobiography). But neither the “wife” nor the “husband” functions as a unified narrator. And so this narrative ventriloquism not only sustains the notion of a “feminine” narrative—the “wifely” tale is finally told, after all—but also subverts it—the “husband” tells it as a “wife,” but the “husband” is “him”self a “her”self. “There is no there there,” as Stein said of Oakland.

The very autobiographical recitation that promises to shore up gender identity becomes its undoing. And so the notion of autobiography as expressive of a gendered “self” is here undermined through Stein’s emphasis on the performative nature of identity. Stein’s ventriloquism disrupts the stabilities of “feminine” and “masculine” narratives as it disrupts the normative alignment of interiority to bodily surface to gender performance in the context of compulsory heterosexuality. Heterosexual coupling becomes here a fiction both re-sited and dis-located in the camped-up performance and the “compelled” performativity of heterosexual norms (Butler, Bodies 1).

Cherríe Moraga and Her Malinche

The last text I want to consider is Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years. In this personal/political compendium of multiple genres,[6] Moraga explores through poetry, essays, memory fragments, myths, the complex relationship of the surface of bodies, the construction of interiority, and the specific inscription of history. As I have noted elsewhere the body moves through all the disparate forms intermixing in this text, fragmented into specific parts and pieces, crossed by desires, overwritten by cultural inscriptions and discourses, but most particularly the discourse of female treachery and betrayal signified by the body and the history of La Malinche (Smith 139–46). The Chicana lesbian is rendered as the cultural grotesque, assigned an “unnatural” body, a disruptive, corrupting body, and thus a traitorous interiority.

Moraga explores her experiential history of passing, passing across her racial identities, disappearing into the Anglo in her or returning to the Chicana in her. “I was ‘la guera,’” she writes, “—fair-skinned. Born with the features of my Chicana mother, but the skin of my Anglo father, I had it made. . . . Everything about my upbringing (at least what occurred on a conscious level) attempted to bleed me of what color I did have” (51). The materiality of her specific body and the historical conditions of her experiential history enforce upon her the ways in which racial identity can be performative. But she also explores another kind of passing, the passing of the lesbian girl/woman as a heterosexual “woman.” She discovers the ways in which she learned to perform as a heterosexual woman in a cultural context that joined treachery to lesbian desire. Moraga’s incisive analysis reveals the complexities of identity formation and deformation. It isn’t that identity is totally disjoined from the surface politics of the body; it is that identity, produced by complex cultural locations, is at once culturally overdetermined and manipulable. Paradoxically identity is dis/identity.

It is precisely the possibility of “passing” in double-time that unmasks the regulatory fictions disciplining the Chicana body. The internalization of cultural fantasies of gender identity (for instance, the cultural fantasy invoked by the very name La Malinche as a negative fantasy, as the “woman” not to be) creates a conflicted interiority that produces necessary failures. The discomforts of dis/identifications, the increasing gaps in stable identifications, prompt the increasing awareness, awareness gained through the very acts of writing, that interiority is an effect of social discourses: “But at the age of twenty-seven, it is frightening to acknowledge that I have internalized a racism and classism, where the object of oppression is not only someone outside my skin, but the someone inside my skin” (54). Refusing to remain in the “passing” lane, Moraga confronts the disabling judgments that had become what Butler terms “the psychic agency of regulation” (Bodies 181).

The experiential and cultural histories of the lesbian body provide Moraga with a means to confront the cultural injunctions that enforce a specific gender/racial/class interiority. This desire is an “excess” in the system, an excess de Lauretis describes as “a resistance to identification rather than unachieved identification” or “a dis-identification with femininity that does not necessarily revert or result in an identification with masculinity but, say, transfers to a form of female subjectivity that exceeds the phallic definition” (126). Moreover, this desire becomes a material window opening onto the social construction of a disempowered interiority as well as a point of view used to resist that disempowerment. This excessive space stretches open interiority and thereby motivates a changed consciousness, an awareness of the performative effects of the discourses of identity culturally provided her.

Speaking autobiographically as a Chicana lesbian is itself a “variation” on the repetition of “rules that govern intelligible identity, e.g., that enable and restrict the intelligible assertion of an ‘I’” (Butler, Gender 145). For the very assertion of that identity signals a failure to be a “woman” within both Chicano and Anglo cultures. In making intelligible a culturally unintelligible subject, Moraga deconstructs the normative identity founding multiple communities. The diverse autobiographical writings incorporated in the text entitled Loving in the War Years mark the performativity of identity as differences.

Conclusion

I have tried in this eclectic reading of disparate texts to illuminate various aspects of autobiographical performativity and resistance. The moments signal the making and unmaking of identities and thus undermine the foundational myth of autobiographical storytelling as self-expressive of an autonomous individualism. The occasion of Benjamin Franklin offers us a monologic performance through which one individual works to consolidate a new notion of the American individual. Thus in Franklin’s text we discover the mechanisms whereby the performativity of bourgeois subjectivity comes into being and is commodified as national myth. The examples of Douglass, Stein, and Moraga, each in their different ways, register the degrees to which the white Euro/American norm is recited by those persons it positions as self-consolidating others. Yet the performative interiority of the autobiographical subject can produce many and conflicted “effects” that also mark interventions in normative identifications with stagings of incommensurable differences that re-site those norms. Writing from eccentric cultural positions, Douglass, Stein, and Moraga take up autobiographical storytelling in order to critique the regulatory effects of the West’s romance with bourgeois individualism. They occupy an “I” and in doing so scramble the boundary markers delimiting the sites of the included and the excluded. In effect, these narratives become sites where a complex and disruptive theorizing of autobiographical performativity takes place.

Notes

A version of this essay, presented as the keynote address at the 1994 University of Wollongong conference, entitled “Self, Life, Writing: Postcolonial Perspectives,” was reprinted in Self, Life, Writing, ed. Anne Lear and Paul Sharrad (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 2000).

1. For an incisive analysis of the construction of an interiorized female subjectivity in conduct books written at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, see Armstrong, esp. ch. 1.

2. Chakrabarty calls history “this gift of modernity to many peoples” (433).

3. Please note that I have substituted the word “subject” for “gender” in the original.

4. A literate American, Franklin writes his conduct book to and for other literate Americans. Through that community of literate Americans he binds together a newly literate middling class. See, for instance, Nussbaum (53–5). Also, with the reproduction of his Autobiography, his life circulated broadly through the newly literate bourgeois class, thereby binding together people in different locations. Anderson argues that this community of readers held together by print rather than proximity became the precondition for the emergence of nationalism. See Anderson, ch. 3 and 4.

5. am indebted to Donald Pease for directing attention to this passage in Douglass’s text. In his brilliant analysis of specific passages in works by Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman, Pease explores the ways in which a post-national consciousness destabilizes the notion of American national identity. Pease himself wants to rethink the facile description of the literature of the 1850s and 1860s as part of an “American Renaissance.”

6. On the intermixing of generic forms in writings by women of color, see Emberley (163).

Works Cited

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