Tender Penetralia: Towards an Ethical Reading of Black Women’s Lifewriting Restricted; Files & ToC
Lawrence, Ariel (Spring 2025)
Abstract
What is the labor of black women’s lifewriting? What do we ask of black women writers when we ask them to tell their life stories? What do we expect when they narrate the stories of black life often lost and unrecoverable? What can we learn from this practice of black women writing about their lives and the lives of others, which so often functions as history, genealogy, philosophy, and elegy? My research considers the critical legacy of black women’s lifewriting in memoir, autobiography, theoretical writing, and beyond. The goal of my dissertation is to illustrate reading practices that decenter whiteness and white actors to focus more on black interiority and intimacy rather than visceral representations of black bodies under the threat of white supremacist violences. There are three central goals to this project. Firstly, I aim to examine texts in conversation with and also pushing against assumed tropes of violence, oppression, and resilience which so often come to frame how we see black people existing in the world. Secondly, I wish to interrogate the way that readers, both inside and outside of the academy, approach these texts with a particular politics of reading which disregards the subtle nuances of black pain, joy, pleasure, and intimacy, but instead centralizes stories of black life as always responding to and laboring to heal the broken vestiges of white supremacist violence. Such a project requires careful attention to the texts themselves, as well as the pedagogical practices and paratextual operations which frame the actual encounter between reader and text. Thirdly and lastly, my project intervenes into the fields of African American Literature and Autobiographical Studies to offer ethical reading practices that consider the full breadth and depth of black women’s lifewriting. Such a reading practice makes space for the dynamic interplay of rhetorical, aesthetic, and intellectual strategies that converge, and at time diverge to confirm and complicate the nuances of black life. Additionally, it encourages readers to be attuned to the quiet intimacies of black interiority beyond the invasive nature of the white gaze.
Table of Contents
This table of contents is under embargo until 22 November 2025
About this Dissertation
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File download under embargo until 22 November 2025 | 2025-04-28 12:17:19 -0400 | File download under embargo until 22 November 2025 |
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