Life Writing Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas

Designed as a contribution to the field of transnational comparative American studies, this book focuses on gender in life writing that exceeds the boundaries of traditional genres.

The contributors engage with authors who bend genres to speak gender as it manifests in multiple shapes in different geographic locations across the Americas, and especially as it intersects with race and migration, war and colonialism, illness and ageing. In addition to supplying new insights into the established sites of auto/biographical production such as memoir, archive, and oral history, the book explores experimental mixed forms such as selfies, auto-theory, auto/bio comics, and autobiogeography. By combining this multi-genre and multi-media perspective with a multi-generational approach to life writing, the book showcases a spectrum of established and emerging critical voices, many of whom have been influenced by the work of Marlene Kadar, the Canadian life writing scholar whose interventions have expanded the feminist and interdisciplinary methods of life writing studies.

Tracing the intergenerational relay of ideas, this collection fosters dialogue across the western hemisphere, and will be useful to those studying life writing exchanges between North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. This book was originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Eva C. Karpinski is an Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation (2012), and co-editor of Trans/Acting Culture, Writing, and Memory (2013). She is currently working on a book project on multilingual life writing.

Ricia Anne Chansky is Professor of Literature at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She is co-editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, editor of the Routledge Auto/Biography Studies book series, and a Voice of Witness Fellow. She has recent and forthcoming publications on disaster studies, pedagogy, and contested identities.