The self in other words: Autoethnography in francophone women's writing
Description
Autobiography is the writing of a self, viewed as distinct from others. Ethnography, on the other hand, is writing about the other, especially writing about those who are considered radically different, notably illiterate peoples. These two genres are often opposed, but in this dissertation, I show how they are combined in works by francophone women writers. Focusing on texts by Taos Amrouche, Leila Houari, Fatima Mernissi, Mai Thu Van, Helene Cixous, and Evelyne Wilwerth, I consider how women who belong to cultural groups that have, in general, been the object rather than the subject of representation contest these generic boundaries, and as a result, fixed categories of self and other. Their reconfiguration of identity has often culminated in the production of autoethnographies, a hybrid genre that amalgamates the concerns of autobiography and ethnography. Julia Watson has defined autoethnography as 'an ethnographic presentation of oneself by a subject usually considered the 'object' of the ethnographer's interview' (35). I will argue that francophone women writers employ autoethnography as a strategy to write themselves as subjects embedded in specific cultural contexts The ethnographic interview has traditionally been a research tool used to gain data about cultural differences. Yet the interview has the potential to be more than a methodological tool. The interview process involves interrogation, exchange, and performance in a face to face meeting between people. In the two-part structure of this dissertation, I explore the dynamics of the interview process in relation to autobiography and ethnography. In the first section, autobiography is examined as a process by which the self is interrogated and in a sense, interviewed through its concrete experience with otherness. In the second section, I evaluate the interview's role in ethnographic and autoethnographic representations, and consider how selfhood is paradoxically drawn out in the process of describing otherness. In other words, I examine otherness in the self and selfhood constructed within the other