Jennifer Cooke, Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity

Abstract

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a plethora of writers, who have challenged and expanded previous notions of feminist life writing. In Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity, Jennifer Cooke identifies works by thirteen contemporary writers as examples of what she refers to as a new audacity in life writing. Several of these writers are young, early in their careers, and already connected with each other through reviewers or publishers. Defining audacity as a ‘public challenge to conventions, characterized by a disregard for decorum, protocol, or moral restraints,’ Cooke refers to the thirteen writers as feminists, even when they do not directly engage with politics. Unlike their predecessors, she clarifies further, these writers are writing in the wake of queer, gender and trauma theory, and post-structural critiques of binary thinking. They view identity as social constructions manifested both materially and bodily. Through the perspectives that these writers offer on their lives and the experimental form their writing takes, Cooke argues, they are reshaping feminism and its concerns.