Academic Autobiography and Women of Color Feminisms: Narrating a Critical Practice

Abstract

Academic autobiography, a life writing text that combines in superlative ways the private and the public, has received increasing critical attention in the last couple of decades. The intersection between one`s personal life and professional commitment has become fertile ground for theoretical exploration as we examine the ways autobiographical and professional writing function together, ask if we can read autobiographical writing from professional perspectives or, alternatively, study to what extent scholarship grows from personal experiences. This essay examines autobiographies by academics in the United States and Canada who have spearheaded reexaminations of women of color feminism in North America-Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Leila Ahmed, and Vijay Agnew. These women demonstrate a critical consciousness of the connections between personal life and academic commitment and enact the ways experience has modified theory. Their autobiographies reflect their negotiation with intellectual issues in their own lives, to the point where they describe how their own experiences became the basis for their scholarly theories. These women`s use of life stories to illuminate the theories they promote becomes itself a feminist gesture that challenges the patriarchal structure of academic arguments. I suggest that this lived theory, apart from giving their practitioners agency, is simultaneously a more nuanced and potent approach to the problems women have in society and in the academe.