Northwestern Events Calendar

Oct
28
2015

"Life Writing to Watch Out For:Queering the Memoir from Harriet Martineau to Alison Bechdel" with Cora Kaplan

When: Wednesday, October 28, 2015
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM CT

Where: Harris Hall, 108, 1881 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Cost: Free

Contact: Jasmine E. Tucker   (847) 491-5871

Group: Gender & Sexuality Studies Program

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

This talk will explore the modern origins, evolution and current state of women’s life writing through the innovative work of two extraordinary women, the British writer and political campaigner, Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) and the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel (1960-).

A celebrated, journalist , novelist, travel writer, early sociologist and memoirist, Martineau, deaf from childhood, was a powerful public advocate for the abolition of slavery as well as an outspoken supporter of women’s rights.
‘Lionized’ in London at the age of 30 for her popular series of short tales, Illustrations of Political Economy -- didactic, entertaining stories written to educate a broad readership—she built on their huge success with two books of her travels in America in the 1830’s highlighting the evils of slavery. Life in the Sickroom (1844), chronicled her own struggles with ill health. She shocked her readers with her avowed agnosticism and her belief in mesmerism. At age fifty-five, thinking she was dying, she wrote a fascinating memoir, perhaps one of the first really ‘modern’ secular autobiographies by a woman, with unvarnished portraits of her family and her contemporaries. The book was not published until after her death in 1876. Rediscovered by second wave feminists, it is now acknowledged as one of the most important of nineteenth century memoirs.

Like Martineau, Alison Bechdel found her métier in a popular medium which she has transformed. Her long running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, an hilarious if often sobering window on lesbian lives from the 80’s through the noughts, follows the ups and downs of its four lead characters as they negotiate the wider world of American social and political life. Her brilliant midlife graphic memoirs of her parents and herself Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) and Are You My Mother? (2012) brought her international acclaim. A very successful musical adaptation of Fun Home premiered on Broadway in 2013.

In taking as one of its leading maxims that the ‘personal is political’, Second Wave feminism encouraged women to experiment with life writing, not as confessional but as a radical genre through which to develop a new kind of social and sexual politics. This talk argues that Martineau and Bechdel’s ingenious, moving and formally inventive work, has, in different but related ways, changed and challenged our understanding of the meaning and uses of life writing.

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