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Dissertation Information for Susan Grace Cumings

NAME:
- Susan Grace Cumings

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Women's Studies

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (2001)

ADVISORS:
- Rebecca S. Chopp
- Cristine M. Levenduski

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Performing Selves: Contemporary Women's Autobioexpression

Abstract: "Performing Selves" develops a new interdisciplinary methodology for the study of women's lives as they are expressed through different creative media. I establish the term autobioexpression to designate a broad repertoire of genres of women's creative self-life-expression. Autobiography and life history are two of these genres, but this repertoire also includes poetry, art, fiction, and other categories of creative production used for self-representation. Drawing on women's autobiography studies, folkloristics and performance studies, this study of autobioexpression formalizes guidelines for identifying and studying blurred and blended genres. Such a method recognizes that each creator has a choice of autobioexpressive forms, including varieties of combinations of forms, which allow her the space to variously inhabit and interrogate the different subject positions to which she lays claim, or which lay claim to her.

I examine here the self-performances enacted through written works by Renita Weems ( Just a Sister Away and I Asked for Intimacy ), Jeanette Winterson ( Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit ) and Angela Hryniuk ( walking inside circles ), and retrospective presentations of the artwork of Laurie Gross ("Weaving the Spirit," Atlanta 1995-96) and Kay WalkingStick "Seeking the Center," Philadelphia, 1995). In each case, I provide a performance analysis that takes into account interactions of "content" and "form," and examines not just what these works say but what they do, that is, how they make present the experiences, concerns and commitments of the women they represent.

Finally, I argue for the future study of autobioexpression as a necessarily collaborative enterprise. The breadth and interdisciplinarity of the autobioexpressive repertoire will require of us a sharing of training, resources, models, dilemmas, and discoveries that undermines the convention that research is a solitary endeavour.

MPACT Scores for Susan Grace Cumings

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C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
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W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-02-02 23:29:20

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