Contesting Representations

Abstract

Autobiographical and `life-writing' genres provide textual sites for representing aspects of experience and the articulation of relational selves. This paper investigates contemporary, postmodern feminist assays of identity that both question and challenge the limits of modernist representations of subjectivity. In life-writings by Helene Cixous, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde and Maya Angelou contestations over representation, agency and resistance. to fixed identity categories are made explicit. Postmodern textual and interpretative practices, including autobiographical `metissage' and non-synchronous analyses of raced, gendered and classed subject positions, replace essentialist representations of subjects in a politics of hybridity and difference. These texts offer pedagogic expressions of resistance to the enduring legacy of modernist authorship as an act deriving from a coherent self-present writing self. The practice of metissage and the disruption of temporality in these contemporary writings is regarded as an alternative representational poetics and politics founded on a non-foundational feminist and materialist ontology.