- Women Creators Across Borders: Rhetorics of Life Writing

Catalog description

How do women negotiate the challenge of re-composing lives and cultural identities under conditions of geographical dislocation and cultural estrangement? Such self-fashioning requires a strong sense of voice. Yet, both migration and patriarchy challenge the self’s cultural expression: pressures to assimilate rush the stranger into silence, while patriarchal ideologies challenge women’s cultural relevance and claim to a public voice. In this course, we read work by women who have become recognized public voices: Hannah Arendt, Masha Gessen, Nora Krug, bell hooks, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, among others. We explore how their life writing (personal essays, memoirs, and graphic memoirs) becomes a rhetorical tool to evoke the experiences of the displaced, render them intelligible, and theorize transnational and anti-colonial feminist identities. By attending to women’s life writing as resistive and creative engagement, we consider displacement as not only a wound. Rather, we study it as the engine for rhetorical projects of transnational and cross-cultural belonging that articulate more awake, imaginative, spiritual, and connected living-thinking-being.