be told through selves and through emotions without being at the expense of other stories and selves?”33 Probyn writes in the engaged, autobiographical mode, but in the hope that it is possible “to construct ways of thinking that are marked by ‘me’ but that do not efface actively or through omission the ways in which ‘she’ may see differently.”34 This requires resistance to “a simple reification of either experience or the experiencer,”35 acknowledging that there is no “unmediated innocence”36 to the self and to experience.
Feminist theology has a methodological commitment to the authority of “women’s experience,” but problems inherent in this were apparent from its earliest days, and extended and profound critiques are in no short supply.37 The two main criticisms are the philosophical naivety of its notion of ‘experience,’ and its failure to account for difference in grouping together the experience of white middle-class westerners with that of women from different social contexts. Taking on the criticisms of womanist theologians, in 1989 Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow admitted that “[t]he notion of women’s experience must be taken as an invitation to explore particularity rather than to homogenize significant differences.”38 Therein lies the enduring significance of feminist theological method: that particularities matter; that theological truths do not necessarily hold for everyone, and that theology is always done with an agenda, whether or not it is acknowledged. Emphasis on women’s ‘stories,’ rather than ‘experience,’ could underscore that experience is never unmediated; rather it is constructed and interpreted. The communal nature of ‘story’ may guard against the charge of solipsism, and the accusation that liberal belief in the authority of experience rests on Enlightenment notions of the autonomous individual. At the same time, the particularity of ‘story’ can prevent white, middle-class feminist theologians from committing the error of confusing their own experience for ‘women’s experience.’
We do not look inside ourselves and find our stories there, submerged and waiting to be brought out into the light. The stories we tell about ourselves are produced—albeit from the ‘stuff’ of experience, however fragmented and unreliable our memory of it—within particular contexts and for particular purposes. This is especially the case with academic life-writing; for example, Probyn’s story of her experience of anorexia, given as part of a conference paper, “was, of necessity, a representation forged for my argument,” and this is confirmed by her family’s reaction: “my mother’s conclusion in reading the article was that I had a happy childhood, whereas my sister’s was closer to the point as she gently mentioned the poetic, or academic, license involved in my description.”39 This is a reminder that our stories are never just our own: they are also part of the stories of those others whose lives intersect with ours. In putting experience into the public domain of academic discourse, respect for the feelings and privacy of partners, family, and friends will often require that only certain stories are told, in a very certain way. Furthermore, how one chooses to present oneself, in academic life-writing as anywhere else, is shaped by how one wishes to appear; thus behavior and motivations of which one is not proud are likely to be omitted or drastically altered in the telling.
These are issues that apply not only to academic life-writing, but, as “the process and the product of assigning meaning to a series of experiences, after they have taken place, by means of emphasis, juxtaposition, commentary, omission,”40 to autobiography in general. In postmodern critical theory, autobiography does not disclose a life and its historical moments, or a unique individual self.41 Rather, autobiography is “a narrative artifice, privileging a presence, or identity, that does not exist outside language”;42 indeed “[t]here is no essential, original, coherent autobiographical self before the moment of self-narrating.”43
The recollection of life events in the form of a coherent story is constitutive of a “narrative identity.”44 According to Paul Ricoeur, “life cannot be understood other than through stories we tell about it,” thus “a life examined, in the sense borrowed from Socrates, is a life narrated.”45 Richard Kearney takes this rephrasing of Socrates as far as to say that “the unnarrated life is not worth living.”46 Writing of the human desire for narration, Adriana Cavarero describes how, in The Odyssey, Odysseus weeps for the first time when he hears his story told by another, “[n]ot only because the narrated events are painful, but because when he had lived them directly he had not understood their meaning . . . By fully realizing the meaning of his narrated story, he also gains a notion of who is its protagonist.”47 He weeps because he has encountered “the unexpected realization of his own desire for narration,” the desire shared by all human beings, “narratable selves.”48
The narrative identity produced in autobiography is ascribed a redemptive role by thinkers such as Kearney, who claims that “[a] model of narrative selfhood can . . . respond to anti-humanist suspicions of subjectivity while preserving a significant notion of the ethical-political subject.”49 I agree to an extent, but am suspicious of Kearney’s emphasis on narrative “unity.”50 The sense of wholeness upon which rest rationalist accounts of the human subject, undermined by modernist literature and postmodern theory, have, it is argued, long been taken for granted by men, but proved harder to come by for women. As feminist theorists of autobiography have noted, “[n]o mirror of her era, the female autobiographer takes as a given that selfhood is mediated; her invisibility results from her lack of a tradition, her marginality in male-dominated culture, her fragmentation— social and political as well as psychic.”51
Academic life-writing would do better not to reproduce, in terms of narrative, a stable and authoritative identity, “a postmodern, self-help driven subject who coheres around any story she is able to cobble together.”52 As Kathy Rudy writes of her experience of telling her story of leaving the Christian faith because of conflicts about her sexuality,
[t]he “all-or-nothing” problem of unified subjectivity . . . is that it does not accurately reflect the way I feel in losing my faith. It was and is a much more jagged process, an uneven development. I find myself longing for things I no longer believe in, believing in things that seem patently absurd . . . What I need is a theory of subjectivity that would allow me to be two contradictory things at the same time, that would allow me to say “I believe” and “I don’t” in a way that does not require coherent explanation. I need a theory that will allow me to be fragmented . . .53
The recognition that the ‘personal voice’ is neither unified or pre-existent may guard against the temptation to invoke it as authoritative, thus silencing the voices of others. Speaking in a personal voice, but with an awareness that this voice is not natural or innocent, but deliberately adopted for a particular purpose, is preferable to an ‘impersonal’ voice—equally as unified, but denying its
