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 cafes 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.

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Feminist Autobiography

Lara Vapnek
The Rebel Girl Revisited:
Rereading Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s Life Story
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Nora Doyle
Gertrude Stein and the Domestication of Genius
in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
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Sharmila Sreekumar
“I too call myself I”: Madhavikutty-Kamala Das and the Intransitive Autobiography
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Estelle Carol
The Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective:
A Memoir
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Alexandra Ketchum
“The Place We’ve Always Wanted to Go But Never Could Find”: Finding Woman Space in Feminist Restaurants and Cafés in Ontario 1974–1982
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Hillary Chute
Feminist Graphic Art
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Samantha Pergadia
Geologies of Sex and Gender:
Excavating the Materialism of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler
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News and Views

Ashwini Tambe
Reckoning with the Silences of #MeToo
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Creative Writing
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Olga Zilberbourg
Helen More’s Suicide

Corey Hickner-Johnson
The Color Run

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