Nie-ludzkie doświadczenie i jego ślady w kobiecych autobiografiach. Przypadek trzech modernistek

The article discusses the possibility of reading women’s autobiographies with the main focus on the lives non-human animals. Drawing on the theory of autobiography and the field of animal studies I argue that it is feasible to extract valid and accurate accounts of numerous human-animal relationships or find traces of various animal experience whereby animals can be recognized as agents and subjects.

Dalit Autobiography: A Study of Dalit Women’s Autobiographies

Autobiography is widely admired in the world as a literary genre. Its importance as a means of self-creation, self-examination, and self-regeneration has been identified by critics and creative authors. Autobiography is a Western tradition where people enjoy celebrating them self and are eager to prove their achievements. Indians have adopted this tradition of writing an autobiography from the West. Autobiography can be classified into two categories, life stories that inspire and prove one’s achievements. Secondly, the life stories which not only describes the saga of the individual but also the society as a whole depicts sorrows, subjugation, sufferings, and socioeconomic conditions. Dalit autobiographies belong to the second category. They have portrayed the socio-economic, cultural, and political conditions of Dalit Community under the control and influence of Upper Caste Hindu society. Contemporary Indian Society was divided under the wrong notions of ‘Purity and Pollution’. Dalits were treated as untouchables and polluters to the High Caste Hindus because they were born in the low caste. They were intentionally kept ignorant and denied to take education and asked to live out of town in separate colonies by high caste Hindus to safeguard their control over Dalits. Autobiography came handy to them to demonstrate their age-old suffering, exploitation, and maltreatment. Writers like Shankarrao Kharat, Daya Pawar, Bandu Tupe, P. E. Sonkamble, Shrankumar Limbale, Laxman Mane, Laxman Gaikwad, and Kishor Kale came forward. They penned their experiences in the form of autobiographies. Like male autobiographies, female autobiographers like Baby Kamble, Shantabai Kamble, Urmila Pawar, Kumud Parade, Janabai Girhe, Bama, demonstrated their life stories and experiences of trivial exploitation based on caste, class, and gender.

The heuristic value of autobiographies for gender studies: comparing the theoretical results of Russian and foreign studies

Heuristic value of autobiographies for specialists in gender and female studies (based on the comparison of theoretical results of Russian and international autobiographical studies). The article discusses the qualitative changes in the study of autobiographies in historical works. The author focuses on the importance of gender studies in the field of complex relations between various approaches, including the philosophical, psychological, and linguistic way of analyzing life histories, in general, and women’s autobiographies, in particular (which comprises using the theory of female writing created by French feminist philosophers), as well as old and recent literature in the field of autobiographical research. The gender approach to the analysis of documents makes it possible to conclude that men report less about their family and private life and tend to give this life a different meaning and place in the system of value hierarchies. The second conclusion when comparing male and female autobiographies is the individualized and independent representation of the ego in life stories. Analysts point out that when collecting material about men’s lives, it is the gender of the story collector that is important. When talking to a female interviewer, the narrator presents the same life events in a different way than to male interviewer. When reading an egotext, a male analyst immediately forms a male community and, at the same time, hierarchies typical of relations between men. Keywords: autobiography, women, gender, gender history, history methodology, biographi- cal research, memory psychology, historiography

Power and Representation in Women’s Autobiographies

The study discusses epistemological aspects of power and the dynamics of its perception in the process of life-writing. Autobiography is presented as a specific form of epiphany. The paper suggests that writing one’s own life enables the author to better understand the past. As a result of a retrospective self-analysis the writer shapes a new look at the borders of his/her personal power and the level of its dependence on others. In investigation of life-writings, a qualitative method of social sciences in combination with hermeneutics, close reading and discourse analysis reveal deep and hidden social norms, gender roles, religion, and their role in empowerment and disempowerment of the author. The study consists of two parts. The first part is theoretical and interrogates the notion of personal power. It finds links between writing the own life and conscious empowerment, arguing that the author becomes more conscious about the own personality after having analysed the past decisions from the perspective of present times. The second part presents two autobiographies by female authors from two different Muslim cultures. These authors negotiate between the larger nationalist agenda and their own personal concerns. These autobiographies (Pakistani author Tehmina Durrani, My Feudal Lord; Azerbaijani writer Banine, Caucasian Days and Parisian Days) are the end of their authors’ long silence, their revolt against the conventional norms, their decision to have an agency to confess and protest. These autobiographies are the authors’ attempts to break the established matrix of perceptions, imposed norms, and gain power to build the real picture of their identity. The study sums up with the conclusion that in spite of very similar motifs of female authors to get empowered through self-analysis, different cultures and time create specific subjectivities associated with particular historical events and geographical location.

Rewriting the Women Enmity Lore: New Voices in Autobiographical Narratives

Many women were socially conditioned as children to believe that gender operates on a superiority/inferiority axis – the male has been naturally created to be in charge and to take dominion of all living and non-living things including plants, animals, fishes, birds, children, and women. For the women, they are to be submissive to the biological order of things which patriarchy has worked hard to institutionalise. One of the means patriarchy has adopted to sustain this belief is the divide and rule tactic, where women are taught to believe that they cannot work together, cannot love one another and cannot support one another because they do not like themselves. This belief is propagated through folklore, especially in co-wife rivalry tales. Another common instance is the raging ‘war’ between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. This paper will analyse the common myth that women are their own worst enemies through selected Nigerian folktales, and in the second part, will analyse contemporary Nigerian women’s autobiographies, with particular emphasis on the 3-volume biographical compendium, Women of Valour, and how these women negated this erroneous belief in their narratives. One of the findings of this paper is that women’s autobiographies have significantly disabuse many of these patriarchal myths about women, thereby rewriting and re-narrating women’s life histories. Another finding is that many of the women featured in the biography used the medium as a platform to voice themselves into being, thereby empowering themselves through the narration of their life stories.