Browsing by Subject "Autobiography"
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Item Open Access Designing Community: Architecture, Race and Democracy in American Life Writing, 1900-‐‑1950(2017) Seeskin, S. AbigailThe turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century saw unprecedented growth and change in the demographics of United States urban environs. Not only did U.S. cities grow bigger, they grew increasingly multicultural and multiracial. American architects, urban planners, and social reformers responded to this change by attempting to instill democratic values in American cities through zoning, gridding, and housing reform that sought to alternately include immigrant populations while excluding populations seen as not white (in particular, black communities). Designing Community: Architecture, Race, and Democracy in American Life Writing, 1900-1950 examines autobiographies produced in this era that use architectural metaphors in order to either enforce or challenge this democratizing project. Narrations of the self granted space for members of minoritized populations to show the limits of the architectural project to build democracy.
In a critical introduction and three subsequent chapters, I use methods of literary analysis to study life writing as well as novels, essays, newspaper articles, and poetry. Through my analysis of three life writing texts, I center autobiography as a genre critical to the production of community formation in the United States. Each chapter examines both a particular writer as well as a particular autobiographical technique. In my first chapter, I primarily examine the 1924 autobiography of Louis Sullivan titled The Autobiography of an Idea. I argue that Sullivan uses techniques lifted from the Bildungsroman in order to show his readers who they, too, can develop into democratic subjects. In my second chapter, I examine the 1950 memoir of the Jewish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska titled Red Ribbon on a White Horse. I argue that her use of the confessional produces space for her to generate self-determination as a critical component to the production of multi-ethnic community. In my third chapter, I examine Richard Wright’s 1945 memoir Black Boy. I argue that his use of the testimonial enables readers to see human life as innately interconnected. In my conclusion I show that architectural metaphors continue to govern contemporary visions of democratic life in the United States, particularly as Donald Trump’s administration has campaigned to build a wall on the United States’s southern border. I argue that this is a moment in which those invested in racial justice should listen to minoritized voices.
Item Open Access The Demands of Integration: Space, Place and Genre in Berlin(2012) SchusterCraig, Johanna EThis dissertation argues that the metaphor of integration, which describes the incorporation of immigrants into the national body, functions as a way to exclude "Muslim" immigrants from German national identity, as these groups are those most often deemed "un-integratable" (unintegrierbar). By looking at cultural products, I explore how the spatial metaphor of integration is both contested and reproduced in a variety of narratives.
One of the recurring themes in integration debates focuses on finding a balance between multiculturalist strategies of population management; the regulation and enforcement of the third article of the German Basic Law, which guarantees gender parity; and the public religious life of conservative Islamic social movements like Salafism, which demand gender segregation as a tenet of faith. Discourses of women's rights as human rights and identity politics are the two most frequent tactical interventions on the integration landscape. My dissertation explores how identity, performance and experience of gendered oppression manifest in the autobiographical novels of Turkish-German women, comic books, journalistic polemics, activist video and the activities of the social work organization Projekt Heroes. Reading a broad array of cultural products allows me to explore the tension between the metaphor of integration and the reluctance of some to reenvision German national identity, with specific attention to how this tension plays out in space and place. Through literary analysis, participant-observation and interviews, I explore how the language of integration shapes the space of the nation and limits what the space of the nation could become. I argue that the tone of integration debates over the past decade has become increasingly shrill, and propose that limited and strategic silence may offer potential as a political strategy for reenvisioning modes of immigration incorporation.
Item Open Access The Lure of Origins: Sexology and the Trans Autobiographical Mandate(2023) Fischer, Julien E.This dissertation, The Lure of Origins: Sexology and the Trans Autobiographical Mandate, intervenes in the conundrum I call “the trans autobiographical mandate” that characterizes the relationship between U.S. Trans studies and sexological genres of trans autobiography. The conundrum is as follows: some forms of trans self-representation—namely, those found in sexological archives—have been understood by Trans Studies to be oppressive and too mired in anti-trans ideologies and discourses to allow for trans people’s agency. This has meant that, to do justice to the trans authors of these autobiographies, Trans Studies critics have been compelled to read the past through the enabling perspective of a trans affirming present, where what is found in the archive is given new shape through contemporary lexicons of trans identity. At the same time, other forms of trans self-representation, including those found on the presumed “outside” of medicine, have been endowed with a liberatory potential to challenge, disrupt, overcome, and rewrite the norms and ideologies of medicalization that have historically defined trans life in limited and limiting ways. In The Lure of Origins, I argue against three tendencies that have characterized the dominant position of Trans Studies in its attempt to resolve the conundrum of the trans autobiographical mandate: I contest the idea that trans medicalization only represses trans life, which has established the assumption that the field already knows both what can be found in the medical archive and how to read what we find there; I resist the idea that there exist forms of trans autobiography that are free from the constraints of medicalization and pathologization; and I refuse the burden that this bifurcation in modes of autobiographical reading and writing places on trans people to know ourselves and each other, to be able to author and authorize our own stories, and to do so in terms which are imagined to be our own. To these ends, I reopen an anonymous case study I call “the case of the metamorphosing physician,” which arrives to us in the Trans Studies present as definitively trans, in order to retell the story of how the case arrives here. I construct an account of the multiplicity that this case carries in its enmeshment in discourse, interpretation, and the desires of those who have gone back to read and re-read it while offering pathologizing frames for understanding its true meaning. Over four chapters, I follow the case study’s successive resignification in the course of the long twentieth century sexological canon: as a “Stage of Transition to Metamorphosis Sexualis Paranoica” in Krafft-Ebing (1892); a case of delusional cross-dressing for Magnus Hirschfeld (1910); an illustration of the difference between same-sex desire and cross-gender identity in Havelock Ellis (1913); and finally as the original autobiography of a transsexual in Richard Green (1966). In each chapter, I examine how the meaning of this paradigmatic case study evolves by changing sets of sexological hermeneutics which transform how the autobiography is read. I call attention to the multiple diagnostic inheritances buried within the contemporary signifier “trans,” including those that carry a pathologizing history with which the field has sought to dispense, and argue against reading this case within the singular “true” meaning of a trans origin offered by Trans Studies today. By attending to each scene of its medicalization, I consider how “trans” harbors a complex history of pathologizing frameworks from which it is still not free. I also show how the notion of a self-defining trans person who knows themselves does not emerge apart from the history of trans medicalization, but rather as a product of medicalization itself, which has demanded an equation between health and self-certainty as a prerequisite for trans inclusion. I insist on the importance of attending to the complex archive of pathology that troubles Trans Studies from the inside, not to recuperate pathology for more liberatory ends, but to disrupt the fantasy of the trans autobiographical mandate which demands a self-authorizing and self-knowing trans subject. I argue for a de-exceptionalizing story of the trans “origin” which refuses to pull this figure from the past into the self-conscious form that Trans Studies now desires. Ultimately, I rethink the terms by which trans affirmation has been made equivalent to the insistence that trans must be disarticulated from categories associated with insanity, particularly paranoia and psychosis, in order to be legitimate. By refusing this disarticulation or the assumptions in which it is grounded—which would only permit the freedom of transition to subjects who are presumed, by medicine’s own standards, to be sane—I insist on reading “trans” within a broader context in which its formation is unthinkable outside of its enmeshment with pathologizing histories. In doing so, I offer a mode of storytelling that historizes “trans” while resisting the demand to prove trans sanity through the articulation of true trans selves in transparent, autobiographical speech.