Body Doubles: Uncertain Ontologies in Contemporary Experimental Women's Life Writing

Contemporary feminist life writing is built on an extraordinary tradition of category-testing experimentation with language and form. The specific textures and individual embodiments of gendered experience have frequently inspired challenges to accepted renditions of canonical genres of ‘the life’. This thesis argues that contemporary women’s life writing continues to interrogate the limits of the discourse and genres of the self by examining three texts by North American feminist authors. These texts are Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia (2000), Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? (2010), and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015). From the 1990s onwards, following the problematisation of the category of ‘woman’ and the ensuing ontological crisis in feminism, metatheoretical women’s life writing has been deployed to explore and manage a set of productive and seemingly irresolvable contradictions around the state of women’s identity. These contradictions manifest in these texts as parataxis, comic inversion, and as the queer strategy to sit ‘athwart’ opposing ideologies rather than ‘against’ them. Using accounts of the grotesque and relational ontology as theoretical frameworks, this thesis explicates how these texts have commented on this ontological uncertainty, disrupted genre taxonomies, and challenged the individuality of the ‘I’. Both frameworks propose that identity functions in both literary and social contexts as a mediation or dialogue between self and other that allows for a feminist ontology that is both individual and collective. These frameworks are appropriate for the state of contemporary women’s life writing for their ability to parse contradiction, and for their ability to challenge boundaries. Through these frameworks, this thesis maintains a particular focus on the role of the body and the limits of individualism. All categories are at stake in these texts. These texts understand that the questions and complications raised by the avant garde work of the twentieth century and the feminist theory of the 1990s cannot be solved, and a solution is not their desire. This thesis contributes to this ongoing discussion by arguing that ontological uncertainty is a compelling position from which to write and that this uncertainty has produced engaging and inventive contemporary experimental women’s life writing