Current issue

Open Access to article from 44-1 available until 9/1/2018

The focus of this issue is life writing and new approaches to studying women’s autobiographies. Lara Vapnek discusses why pioneering American labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn omitted her sexual relationships with women and men from her autobiographical writings. Nora Doyle’s essay takes a new look at Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, seeing it as Stein’s clever reworking of domestic fiction in its pairing of a domesticated wife with a “genius” husband. Sharmila Sreekumar discusses how Kamala Das’s self-deferral in Balyakala Smaranakal (Memories of childhood) unsettles autobiographical conventions. Estelle Carol offers a visual memoir about her time spent as a member of the Graphic Collective of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union in the 1970s. Alexandra Ketchum’s history of feminist restaurants and cafés in 1970s and ‘80s Ontario encourages us to consider how space shaped feminist solidarities and political organizing, while Samantha Pergadia’s analysis of geological metaphors in the work of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler invites us to rethink temporalities. In Olga Zilberbourg’s short story, two women are baffled as they contemplate a friend’s suicide. Corey Hickner-Johnson’s lyrical essay about running depicts an autobiographical crisis-moment in acutely visceral and visual terms. Hillary Chute reviews recent scholarship analyzing women’s graphic novels. In closing, Ashwini Tambe reflects on the #MeToo movement and how we might fashion a more racially inclusive public reckoning with sexual coercion.