Autobiography.pdf

Autobiography
By: Maria Tamboukou

Abstract
Autobiography is a literary genre that goes back to the 18th century and has developed a rich history with
diverse genealogies. Situating autobiography in its wider context, the focus of the entry is on how we read
and consequently analyse and rewrite autobiographies in social sciences research. The entry unfolds in
three sections: (1) epistemological problematics that autobiographies raise, (2) an overview of methodological
approaches to the uses of autobiography, and (3) contemporary themes that have emerged in the visual turn
and the digital era of autobiographical research in the social sciences.
Introduction
Autobiography was first taken as a literary genre in the late 18th century, but its emergence goes back
to antiquity where it blends with other forms of life-writing, such as letters, journals, and memoirs. St.
Augustine’s Confessions (c. 397–400 CE) has been an influential text in this long autobiographical genealogy,
which unfolded in different strands across geographies, cultures, and histories. Confessions has shaped
the conceptual framework within which autobiography emerged in Europe during the Renaissance and was
subsequently formed as a modern literary genre. It promoted the view of a universal masculine White subject,
who looks back at his extraordinary life and recounts the events that made him both separate and complete.
The autobiographies of the great men that shaped the canon were based on the ideals of autonomy, self-
realization, authenticity, and transcendence. Their form was a developmental narrative, founded on a clear-
cut self-consciousness and driven by the authorial intention towards a high purpose, be it religious or political.
Seen in the context of modernity, the history of autobiography is therefore marked by class, race, and gender
privileges, but it has also allowed for marginal areas and minor knowledges of the self to emerge from its
feminist, working-class and postcolonial strands of inquiries (see Smith & Watson, 2001; Tamboukou, 2016).
Given its long, rich, and diverse histories, autobiography became a slippery term in need of disciplinary
classifications, genre taxonomies, and literary explanations. In this context, Philippe Lejeune’s definition has
become a reference point but has also opened up a field of debates wherein Lejeune himself has participated
in reviewing his work in later years: “a retrospective prose narrative written by a real person, concerning
his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality” (1989, p.
4). Leaving aside the male grammatical pronouns, as well as the porous boundaries of the aforementioned
delineation of autobiography with other forms of life-writing, as well as with fiction, there is an important
tripartite relation that Lejeune particularly highlighted as a condition sine qua non of autobiography: “the
author, the narrator and the protagonist must be identical” (1989, p. 5, emphasis in original). In trying to
discuss the problem of how the tripartite autobiographical relation can be expressed in the text, Lejeune
also came up with the necessary concept of the autobiographical pact—the understanding and implicit
agreement between the authors and their readers that the autobiographical text recounts real-life events and

real-life personalities and characters. For Lejeune then, defining autobiography involves conceptualizing it
not only as a mode of writing but perhaps more importantly as a mode of reading, “a historically variable
contractual effect” and in this sense the history of autobiography should be “above all, a history of its mode of
reading”(1989, p. 30). Looking at autobiographies as modes of reading rather than writing creates epistemic
conditions of possibility for their use in social sciences research. But how does one read and consequently
analyse and rewrite autobiographies in social sciences research? This entry addresses these questions first
by looking at the epistemological problematics that autobiographies raise, second by mapping methodological
approaches to the uses of autobiography, and finally by considering themes that have emerged in the visual
turn and the digital era of autobiographical research in the social sciences.
The Evidence of Auto/Biography: Truth,
Power, Memory, and the Subject
The rise of autobiography goes hand in hand with the emergence of “the subject” as an object of knowledge
and research in the epistemic realm of the human sciences from the 17th century onwards, a discursive
effect of classical thought, as Michel Foucault provocatively put it in The Order of Things (2000). Theorists
of autobiography have mapped the socioeconomic and political conditions of possibility for “the rise of man”:
the liberal humanist subject in the philosophies of the Enlightenment; the Industrial Revolution and the
emergence of the all-powerful figure of “the economic man”; the romantic socialist revolutionary movements
of the 18th and 19th centuries and their focus on individual rights; the rise of mass literacy and the consequent
outburst of literary activities in modernity, enabled by the print revolution; and finally the modern science
movements including social Darwinism with its emphasis on survival and evolution, psychoanalysis, and new
forms of writing history (see Anderson, 2001).
As a research field responding to the emergence of the subject, autobiography brings together many different
disciplines including sociology, history, philosophy, literature, psychology, and cultural studies, to name a few:
It is thus constituted as an interdisciplinary area par excellence and allows for diverse methodological and
epistemological approaches to be deployed in its inquiries. It is precisely in the interdisciplinary forum that
the study of “stories of the self” has created that generic boundaries have been interrogated and challenged.
Stanley’s intervention in introducing the slash in auto/biography has been influential here (1992). Stanley
has argued that autobiographies and biographies are forms of life-writing which may be distinct, but whose
distinctions are not generic. She has also reworked the interplay between fiction and auto/biographies, noting
that “the complex intertextuality of fiction and autobiography is as old as the novel” (1992, p. 59). Lives and
fictions in their intertextuality reveal another aspect of the complex relation between the past and the present
self. Recognizing that life presents us with complex views of the self, Stanley has suggested that it is the
work of any biographer to trace and explore various versions concerning the life of his or her subject, rather
than trying to construct a unified, coherent image of this life. Further reflecting on Virginia Woolf’s moments
of being, Stanley has theorized the relationship between the present and the past self, the present and the

past being conceptualized as two platforms on which the auto/biographer is trying to locate the self. When it
comes to the exploration of the past, Stanley suggests that memory acts selectively, and it is therefore very
probable that a lie or an untold truth can hold more truth than the presented “truth.” It is in this context that
Stanley has finally argued that there is no knowledgeable past. The “facts” are a product of their time, place,
author, as well as of their reader. In this context, she sees auto/biographies as ideological products rather
than representations of an objective truth.
Stanley’s work has been important not only in discussing the blurring boundaries between autobiographies
and biographies, fiction and reality, as well as past and present, but also in inviting social scientists to consider
letters and diaries as related, but also importantly distinct forms of life-writing in social sciences research.
One of the main problems that was early identified in the literature around the use of auto/biographies in
social sciences research was the fact that life histories were mostly taken as unproblematically referential,
mirrors of real lives and real subjects for the researcher to scrutinize and analyse. This mode of reading
and subsequent analysis was perhaps the discursive effect of Lejeune’s autobiographical pact as explicated
earlier. Social scientists were rather slow in entering the epistemological debates revolving around the use of
auto/biographies in other disciplines, but they eventually took “the turn to textuality”—the recognition that told
and/or written lives are effects of discourses and that “experience is at once always already an interpretation
and something that needs to be interpreted” (Scott, 1991, p. 797). Joan Scott’s important challenge of “the
evidence of experience” shaped the field of auto/biographical analytics. Taking experience as a material and
discursive process moulding the formation of complex and entangled subjectivities has allowed for auto/
biographies to be seen as responding to the real rather than representing it (see Tamboukou, 2016). This
possibility of aligning with the real by following auto/biographical traces also responds to the sociological
interest of seeing individual lives as entangled components of social, political, and cultural assemblages
beyond the simplistic structure/action/agency/body/mind dichotomies. Neomaterialist perspectives have
further opened up new ways of theorizing the emergence of the auto/biographical self through his or her
intraactions with material sources, be they objects, human and nonhuman bodies, places or ultimately the
Earth (see Miller, 2011; Tamboukou, 2016).
Auto/biographical research has actually materialized the turn to language and textuality and has limited the
absurdities and unwarranted deaths that poststructuralism has inadvertently brought along. Indeed, in 1966,
Foucault suggested that man did not exist before the end of the 18th century, that man was “a recent creature
[…] fabricated with its own hands” (2000, p. 308) and that it was quite possible that man could again “be
erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (2000, p. 384). Two years later, Barthes would
announce “the death of the author” (1992) as a source of meaning behind the text. If researchers were then
facing the disappearance of man and the death of the author, “would this mean that we were also witnessing
the death of autobiography?” Anderson has asked (2001, p. 14). As already seen, the elusiveness of the auto/
biographical self does not necessarily mean his or her death. It simply means a different way of understanding
and theorizing the subject in social sciences research and beyond.
Despite pronouncing man as a recent creature in the process of becoming extinct, Foucault in his late work

looked at the historicity of practices that human beings have used to constitute themselves as subjects; in
doing so, he has famously argued that “the self is something to write about, a theme or object (subject)
of writing activity” (1988, p. 27). Writing the self is therefore a practice within a wider set of what Foucault
(1988) has called technologies of the self, through which truth, power, and the self converge in his analyses.
Following Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self, Gilmore (1994) has seen autobiography—or rather
in the term she has coined autobiographics—as a discursive regime, a matrix whereby narratives of truth
and experience are knitted together, further theorizing practices of self-representation as technologies of
autobiography. In this light, auto/biographical writing is a technology of the self, albeit not an unproblematic
one. According to Gillmore, it is an area constructed out of conflicts and eruptions: “the technologies of
autobiography are conflictual through and through, derived as they are in relation to discourses of identity and
truth, which are themselves held together by means of some rhetorical violence” (1994, p. 45).
It is important to note here that power should not be seen solely in its negative dimension, as a force imposing
and sustaining domination. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) concept of desire, as a social force producing
reality, also needs to be considered here in its relation to the Foucauldian notion of productive power. In this
light, it is if one can grasp the moment where power and desire dance together in the constitution of the auto/
biographical subject, that one can see how “eruptions” occur and how discursive traditions can be bent. In her
work, Maria Tamboukou has identified auto/biographies as discursive effects of power knowledge relations as
well as textual expressions of desire. She has further argued that it is through one’s entanglement in material
and textual modalities of power and desire that the self is ultimately constituted as a form, simultaneously
a figure in discourse and an instance, an event of the real (see Tamboukou, 2016). Memory, imagination,
and history have been widely identified and discussed as crucial planes in such theorizations. The self is not
only something one constitutes and performs, but also something that one remembers, turns back to and
constantly reimagines. But how is auto/biographical memory to be understood?
Memory culture, as well as the politics of mnemonic practices, is currently a booming interdisciplinary
field, with a particular interest in the way individuals and social groups remember their past and in the
ways certain views of the past come to be shared or are marginalized and forgotten. Key themes in such
discussions have been the remembering–forgetting and imagining–remembering couplets as complementary
phases of perception, multifarious relations between institutionalized historiographies and other practices of
remembering, debates in the contested field of collective and cultural memory, the memory–politics nexus,
but also the way rapid technological changes and the social media radically transform the way we remember
(and forget) both individually and collectively. As Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (2010) have argued
in introducing a volume on memory studies, rather than being a single phenomenon or concept that can be
encapsulated in some clear-cut definition, memory should rather be charted as a plane of practices, an open
process with complex and diverse histories, epistemological fields, and theoretical contexts.
Configured as a plane of practices, but also as an open process, memory has been theorized as a passage
for imagining diffused temporalities wherein past, present, and future coexist, a site for the constitution of
the self as an ongoing becoming but also a contested field for the politics of being in the world. One of the

striking themes that comes up in the field of memory studies today is that of social amnesia, the fear that
historical consciousness is in danger of being destroyed under the material and cultural influence of late
capitalism, commodification, and new media technologies being components of this collective memory failure.
As Radstone and Schwarz noted, “memory is ineluctably associated with the idea of its absence, atrophy,
collapse or demise” (2010, p. 1). It is in the context of this mnemonic fear that entanglements between culture,
autobiography, and memory emerge and unfold.
Theorists in the field of cultural memory have highlighted the dynamic, durable, and symbolic aspects of
mnemonic practices and processes. They have argued that cultural memory is constituted through repeated
acts of communication, as well as the circulation of recollections of the past through texts, images, and
other symbolic artefacts. As a mnemonic assemblage, cultural memory includes literary forms, ideas, and
practices through which people remember, as well as the institutions that support and sustain the currency
of particular discourses and memories (see Assmann, 2011). In this light, cultural memory is a field of fierce
power relations and antagonistic discourses at play including mnemonic technologies and practices. Auto/
biographies are multifariously interwoven in the many assemblages of cultural memory. There is a peculiar
pleasure taken in recollection, which derives from the very act of remembering the past rather than from the
events themselves, no matter how happy, sweet, or tender they were. But apart from the pleasure that human
beings derive from reminiscences and recollections, they also narrate the past and tell stories of the self in
search of meaning and understanding. As Hannah Arendt (1998) has argued, when people act, they are so
immersed in the force of the action that they do not have time to grasp its meaning or see it in its totality or in
context. It is narratives that take up this role later, when the action is already complete but not its meaning.
A lot has been written about the famous narrative turn in the social sciences as well as the different turns that
the interest in narrative research has taken. Matti Hyvärinen (2010) has suggested four significant narrative
turns from the 1960s onwards: in literary theory, historiography, the social sciences, and finally a more broadly
cultural and societal turn to narration. It is in the wider context of the various narrative turns that autobiography
is mapped, but importantly while narrative and autobiographical research are related, they are not coterminus,
although they continuously enlighten each other. Adriana Cavarero’s philosophical take on narratives and
autobiographies is enlightening in this context.
Following Arendt’s philosophy, Cavarero (2000) has argued that the act of narration is immanently political,
relational, and embodied. To the Arendtian line that human beings as unique existents live together and are
constitutively exposed to each other through the bodily senses, Cavarero adds the narratability of the self,
its constitution by the desire of listening to the story being narrated. In this light, narration is perceived as a
discursive milieu within which the crucial question of who one is gets registered and deployed in unforeseen
directions. In highlighting the question of “who one is,” Cavarero draws on Arendt’s conceptualization of
narration as the medium through which the uniqueness of existence enters the social and the order of
discourse. Although Arendt has argued that life is a story that can only be told after one’s death within the
discursive limits of biography, Cavarero has actually suggested that both biography and autobiography are
constitutive processes of the narratable self: “biography and autobiography are bound together in a single

desire […] they result from an existence that belongs to the world, in the relational and contextual form of
self-exposure to others” (2000, p. 33, 34). Cavarero’s philosophical take of auto/biographies as relational
narratives within the political has been an important intervention in the field of feminist critical theorization of
auto/biographies.
When feminist theorists started writing about autobiography in the 1980s, they were confronted with the
absence of women’s texts from the autobiographical canon. This was indeed a paradoxical absence, given
that the first autobiography in the English language was The Book of Margery Kempe, a dictated memoir of a
Norfolk-based religious mystic that was written in the early 15th century, remained a manuscript till 1936 and
did not make its way into the canon. In their 1979 volume, Journeys: Autobiographical Writings by Women,
Mary Mason and Carol Green included Margery Kempe’s text in the first women’s autobiographical canon
alongside three other late medieval texts: the life-writings of Julian of Norwich, Margaret Cavendish, and Anne
Bradstreet. As Mason put it in her essay, “The Other Voice”:
In these four works—Julian’s Revelations or Showings, The Book of Margery Kempe, Margaret
Cavendish’s True Relation and Anne Bradstreet’s “To my Dear Children”—we can discover not
only important beginnings in the history of women’s autobiography in English as a distinct mode of
interior disclosure but also something like a set of paradigms for life-writing by women right down to
our time. (1980, p. 210)
Mason was one of the first theorists to argue that women wrote differently than men, in terms of narrating their
experiences through the lives of significant others, such as their husbands (Cavendish) or their communities
(Bradstreet), among others. Thus, Cavarero’s philosophical idea of relational narratives was fleshed out in
the archive of women’s autobiographical texts and influentially shaped the field of women’s autobiographical
criticism. Feminist theorists of autobiographies have used the relational mode to show that women’s self-
writings often disturb the tradition of male autobiography in the Western culture and interrogate the supposed
coherence and autonomy of the selves that are represented in it. While keeping with the deeply rooted
tradition of writing the self, women have also decisively subverted its traits. In this context, “the question of
genre has ridden on the question of gender” Shari Benstock (1988) has argued. Smith and Watson (2001)
have mapped the field of feminist theories of women’s autobiographies, tracing three significant stages
in its deployment: theories based on women’s experiences, challenging the evidence of experience, and
considering difference in the wake of postcolonialism.
Estelle Jelinek’s Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (1980) was a significant contribution in the first
phase, namely, the making of the archive of women’s autobiographical texts, which were initially theorized
as unproblematically referential. Jelinek mapped women’s and men’s autobiographies as two contrasting
territories, highlighting and emphasizing sexual difference in the way they are constituted. She therefore
identified certain quasi-universal characteristics and differences between them: Women’s writings of the
self appear discontinuous, incoherent, irregular, and full of personal concerns as opposed to the linear,
chronological, and coherent male writings, which deal dynamically with personal achievements within the
public sphere. This fragmented, incoherent, open self, represented in women’s autobiographical practices,
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is further differentiated from the monadic and universal self of the male autobiographical tradition; the latter
appears to evolve in the text in a procedure that looks natural to himself as well as to the others, a man as
“a representative of the time, a mirror of his era” (Brodzki & Shenk, 1988, p. 2). In contrast, the female self
was autobiographically constituted in its relation to others, a dependent social self, differentiated from the
independent, self-contented paradigm of the male tradition.
Within the discursive regime of the second wave theories of difference, Jelinek’s intervention came under
criticism. Nancy Miller and Domna Stanton were amongst the first feminist theorists, who revised essentialist
approaches to women’s autobiographies. In “Towards a Dialectics of Difference” (1980), Miller challenged
the idea that maleness is a universal and coherent subject position and instead suggested a gendered
reading of the autobiographical genre. Difference for Miller should be located “in the negotiation between
writer and reader” (1980, p. 56) and hence her suggestion for “a dialectics of difference.” In writing her own
autobiography, What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past (2011), Miller has drawn on a handful of objects
found in a drawer to piece together the biography of her father, blending it with her own life story. The scraps
and fragments of Miller’s family memorabilia have revealed the dark side of autobiography: silences, gaps,
and shadows—things that evade narration, “a treasure of possible knowledge, inherited but never fully known,
collected and stored in a drawer full of abandoned memories” (Miller, 2011, p. 70).
In her edited volume, The Female Autograph, Domna Stanton expanded the historical and geographical
boundaries of women’s autobiographies and in her own personal contribution “Autogynography; is the Subject
Different?” (1984) she excised bio (i.e., life) from autobiography foregrounding the problematic relationship
between lived experiences and their textual representation. Looking closely at the critics of the specific nature
and substance of autobiography, Stanton argued that in terms of its referentiality autobiography should be
considered as an un-ended, fragmentary, and heterogeneous mixture of discourses and histories. Stanton’s
fundamental argument was that the female subject constitutes herself through writing. In rewriting her life,
the author of the female self does not produce an autobiography but a female autograph. In this light and
while keeping the importance of the different ways of writing the self within her theoretical project, Stanton,
attempted not to use difference as a way of essentializing the binarism between “masculine” and “feminine”
ways of writing the self; she rather used it as a lens to look at the historical and cultural specificity of women’s
writings. Stanton’s intervention has been influential in revising the field of women’s autobiographical writings.
Benstock’s collection of The Private Self (1988) further enriched the field of women’s autobiographical writings
by exploring interrelations between the “private” and the “public” self from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Benstock saw the selves of the autobiographies oscillating between various and sometimes contradictory
subject positions, trying to survive and find a voice through the act of writing the self. In theorizing the genre
of autobiography, Benstock (1988) designated female self-writing as a way of bridging the gap between “self”
and “life” in an attempt to negotiate space from which to constitute a self. In this process of writing the
self, the female subject traces fissures of discontinuity that cannot be found in the texts that form the male
tradition of autobiographical writing. In Benstock’s view, self-writing becomes a way of waking up the Freudian
unconscious, an active unsettling of the “I,” a painful exercise of the mind.

A contributor to Benstock’s collective work, Susan Friedman Stanford (1988) noted that the separate and
unique selfhood of the autobiographical canon failed to take into account the importance of a culturally
imposed group identity for women and minorities and ignored the differences in the social construction of
gender identity. Friedman pointed instead to historical and psychoanalytical approaches of identity formation,
that focus on the development of the self, through intense interaction with others. She particularly drew
on Sheila Rowbotham (1973) and Nancy Chodorow (1978), whose analyses recovered notions of
interdependence and community within history and psychoanalysis, respectively. Friedman showed how
focusing on ideology and institutions, Rowbotham traced the way the female self has been silenced, rendered
invisible, and distorted in the cultural mirrors of a man’s world. She also quoted Rowbotham’s argument
about the possibility for women to move beyond alienation and in solidarity with other women to create
an alternative identity that is neither purely individualistic, nor purely collective. From the same standpoint,
Stanford considered the way Chodorow rejected the model of isolated selfhood and drew on psychoanalytical
objects-relation theory to argue that the female self is defined in terms of “a self in relationship.” Employing
Rowbotham’s historical and Chodorow’s psychoanalytic model for exploring the self that women have written
out, Stanford argued that women can find an identity “by breaking the silences imposed by culture and
reclaiming the power of words that are both communal and individual” (1988, p. 53).
Womens’ history has indeed become a field largely shaped by autobiographical insights. Carolyn Steedman’s
work has become particularly influential in the field of history. Her own autobiographical testament, Landscape
for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (1986), has become a canonical reference for a range of
feminist theories problematizing what can and/or cannot be represented through autobiography. Women’s
autobiographical texts and practices have thus provided a vital entry point for exploring the historical
dimension of their present condition as well as their possibility of becoming other. In this context,
autobiographies have been seen and theorized as “texts of the oppressed,” inevitably situated within the
political, as Swindells (1995) has argued:
Autobiography now has the potential to be the text of the oppressed and the culturally displaced,
forging a right to speak both for and beyond the individual. People in a position of
powerlessness—women, black people, working-class people—have more than begun to insert
themselves into the culture via autobiography, via the assertion of a “personal voice,” which speaks
beyond itself. (p. 7)
There are indeed differences and variations in the autobiographical tradition and these differences have been
marked by gender, but not only; race and ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation, for example, are important
sources for the construction of differences. These differences however, although not totally ignored, were
downplayed in the initial stages of feminists’ revisioning of the autobiographical tradition (see Smith & Watson,
2001). However, by the end of the 1980s, a new wave of autobiographical criticism looked at the intersection
of race, class, and gender differences in autobiographical texts. In Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender,
Self-Portraiture (1989), Françoise Lionnet examined autobiographical writings by women of colour, arguing
that autobiographical texts from women and colonized people gather together many voices that are in

dialogue with each other. In this context, she coined métissage as a term encompassing multivoiced texts
and hybrid identities. Regenia Gagnier’s Subjectivities (1991) on 19th-century working-class autobiographical
writings also contributed to neglected groups and their auto/biographical expression. Yet when examining
autobiographies of “other subjects,” one cannot necessarily expect to find traces of racial, gender, or working-
class identities. As Zora Neale Hurston (1970) put it in her autobiography Dust Tracks on the Road,
Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole. God
made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them. I learned that skins were no
measure of what was inside people. So none of the Race clichés meant anything anymore. I began
to laugh at both white and black who claimed special blessings on the basis of race. Therefore I saw
no cures in being black, nor no extra flavor by being white. I saw no benefit in excusing my looks
by claiming to be half Indian. In fact, I boast that I am the only Negro in the United States whose
grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief. (p. 235)
Hurston’s autobiography cannot fit into the radical texts of Black autobiography despite the fact that she has
been hailed and indeed celebrated as a significant literary figure by contemporary African American women
writers (see Walker, 1983). In a similar vein, when writing autobiographies and memoirs in the 19th and
20th centuries, women workers wrote on various topics, including their passion for politics and their love for
reading, philosophy, art and literature, but they systematically omitted the details of their labour. Work was
something they did to survive not something to remember, celebrate, or write about (see Tamboukou, 2016).
Thus, the problem of representation and the limitations of the evidence of experience are not eliminated on
the basis of the radical terrains from which subaltern autobiographies have emerged. What does change in
the autobiographical game however is the possibility for multiple and diverse voices to be heard and mapped
in the cartography of what it means to be human.
What difference has also brought to the fore in the autobiographical terrain is the unsettling of certain
narrative conventions, particularly so the interrogation of the need for sequence and coherence as necessary
conditions for good autobiographical stories. In this context, the coherent self of autobiographical theory
emerges as a cultural construction as well as an effect of gendered and racialized discourses and practices.
As already discussed, critical feminist interventions in autobiographical studies have shown that there are
many different ways of narrating the female self, ways that are always embedded and embodied and
often experimental, transgressing the limitations of coherence and closure. For postcolonial critics, hybridity
and multiplicity have emerged as catalytic factors in the ways researchers read, analyse, understand, and
evaluate autobiographical narratives. What happens to the desire for textual coherence, however, when place
and location as material coherences par excellence, melt into fluid spatialities, forced displacement, and
diasporic subjectivities? How can coherence be sustained in autobiographical texts produced as effects of
discourses of colonization? How can “the coherent self” be located across different national territories, ethnic
locations, and multicultural places when narratives of return cannot be imagined, let alone expressed or
inscribed, when there is no material place of origin or beginning? These are questions that have opened up
rich and fertile terrains of auto/biography-based research in the social sciences.

On the Uses of Autobiography in the Social
Sciences
In making connections between autobiography and the social world, researchers are confronted with a wide
range of its uses in a number of disciplinary fields including sociology, psychology, anthropology, politics,
and education, to name some of the most established and well defined in the social sciences. Whatever
its disciplinary base be, the auto/biographical society, as Ken Plummer (2001) has named it, keeps raising
recurrent grand questions:
What is a life? How indeed can we know a life? What is the link between telling a life and living a
life? What are the ways of telling a life? How does “writing a life” differ from a telling? How does a
life’s telling link to a culture and its history? How does the reading of a life link to the telling of a life?
And to truth? Are all lives to be told equally or are some better to tell? (p. 86)
In addressing the complexity of these questions, Smith and Watson (2001) have identified five components
in the constitutive process of autobiographical subjectivity: (a) memory, (b) experience, (c) identity, (d)
embodiment, and (e) agency. These five components can provide helpful threads in the ways a researcher
can go about eliciting, collecting, and/or analysing autobiographies, both oral and written, that is the ways he
or she performs “autobiographical acts” (Smith & Watson, 2001, p. 50). According to Plummer (1995), there
are at least three subject positions in every autobiographical act: (a) the narrator, who writes or tells the story;
(b) the coaxer, the researcher in the context of this entry, who elicits the story, or traces it in the archive; and
(c) the reader or listener who perceives and interprets the story. The researcher as coaxer has already been
involved in the process of interpretation since there is never such a thing as a pure story to be told, heard, or
traced in the archive. All stories are always already retellings and rewritings.
Complexities notwithstanding, Smith and Watson’s five components of autobiographical subjectivity and
Plummer’s tripartite schema of autobiographical acts are a good starting point for a design on
autobiographically drawn research. What also needs to be taken into account is the materiality and spatiality
of the auto/biographical act. Autobiographical sites can be complex and multilayered and “they may be
predominantly personal, institutional, or geographical though to some extent these three levels often overlap”,
Smith and Watson have pointed out (2001, p. 56). While considering autobiographical representations of
gendered memories of work Tamboukou was intrigued by the force of the urban workshop in shaping the
garment workers’ narratives. Marguerite Audoux, a 19th-century seamstress, wrote an autobiographical novel
revolving around the figures and acts of her Parisian atelier.
All Saints’ Day was approaching, and all our customers were demanding their clothes for that day.
An activity full of dread filled the workshop. Mme Dalignac distributed the work with a careworn
forehead, and the instructions she gave in an absent-minded way were not always understood.

Bergeounette, who no longer allowed herself time to look through the window, took badly any
remarks about her work; and Duretour, who could laugh no longer, began to cry at the slightest
reproach. Bouledogue growled, and said that we were doing the work of two days in one. Nobody
answered her, but the jumpiness increased. A reel of cotton would roll under the table, or a pair of
scissors fall noisily to the floor. (1920, p. 26)
Audoux’s autobiographical novel threw light on Tamboukou’s research on the gendered memory of work, and
it was a rare archive for her explorations since women workers—when they wrote—they would mostly leave
out the drudgery details of their needlework and would write about agonistic politics, art, and culture (see
Tamboukou, 2016).
In light of these questions and problematics, what themes or strands a researcher working with
autobiographies might pursue in his or her analysis? Smith and Watson have devised “a tool kit of twenty
strategies” (2001, p. 165) that can serve as an entry point in the archive of autobiographical documents:
authorship and the historical moment; the history of reading publics; the autobiographical “I”; identity;
narrative plotting and modes; temporality; audience and addressee; coherence and closure; memory; trauma
and scriptotherapy; evidence; authority and authenticity; voice; experience; body and embodiment; agency;
relationality; knowledge and self-knowledge; collaborative autobiography; and ethics. Their themes have
given rise to some pertinent questions that might help researchers as they examine autobiographical
documents:
• What was the historical, political, and cultural context within which autobiographical narratives were
written, circulated, and read? In short, what were their conditions of possibility as well as their
discursive limitations?
• How can we as researchers map the position and relations of the narrating “I”?
• Should researchers become interested in the form of the autobiography, and how do they think that
form, content, and context relate in their analysis?
• How do spatiality and temporality intervene in the production, reception, and analysis of the
autobiographical narrative?
• What kind of epistemological questions can researchers raise in relation to the evidence of
experience, the reliability of memory, or the authenticity of voice, amongst other concerns of
“validity”?
• How can researchers include the body and embodiment in autobiographical research?
• What does it mean to engage with the ethics of autobiographical research?
There has been a rich body of literature revolving around these questions and some heated debates
have already been mounted. In her analysis of women’s autobiographical narratives, Tamboukou worked
on three interrelated levels: (a) deconstructing narrative content, (b) unsettling narrative forms, and (c)
mapping narrative contexts. The overarching theme that emerged from her content analysis of women’s
autobiographical documents is the salience of space, place, and movement in the constitution of

autobiographical subjectivities.
But while space has been crucial as an analytical theme of content analysis, the multiple forms of the
autobiographical documents Tamboukou worked with have equally challenged sequence and form as
indispensable features of autobiographical stories. These are some of the questions that her attention to
the form of autobiographies has raised: How can coherence be sustained in autobiographies produced as
effects of patriarchal discourses? How can “the coherent self” be located across different national territories,
ethnic locations, and multicultural places when stories of return cannot be imagined, let alone expressed or
inscribed?
Tamboukou’s attention was finally drawn to the urban spaces of modernity in what she has discussed as
auto/biographical geographies of the female self. In this light, Paris and New York as economic, political, and
cultural hubs of modernity have been meticulously mapped and explored, both literally and metaphorically.
The social geography of these metropolitan centres has shaped her understanding, interpretation, and
analysis of the autobiographical documents with which she was working (see Tamboukou 2016).
What is important to remember is that questions of autobiographical content, form, and context can only be
addressed within specific research projects. Perhaps this is why autobiographical research is an emerging
field of inquiry within social sciences research and beyond, particularly so in the era of the visual turn and the
digital revolution, a theme that is discussed next.
Auto/biographies Across Diverse Media
In addition to textual autobiographies, today there are many visual modes of autobiographical acts—self-
portraiture photography, films, and videos being amongst the most often reviewed and theorized. Discussions
around portraiture and photography as visual forms of life-writing are already interdisciplinary. What emerges
from these debates is the recognition that visual images and textual narratives do not always sit
unproblematically, neither are they illustrative or complementary of each other. The visual unsettles the textual
and vice versa, and it is intra-actions between these different modes and media that create an immensely
interesting field for the search of meaning around the self and his or her world. In this context, the visual turn
in narrative and autobiographical research needs to consider carefully discourses and debates in the field of
visual studies and art histories. It is not enough to juxtapose visual images and textual narratives in making
sense of an artist’s life, a reductionist trend in the writing of artistic biographies but also of art histories.
Shearer West (2004) has noted that the self-portrait has one of the most fascinating and complex histories
within the whole genre of portraiture. This history goes back to the late 15th and early 16th centuries and to
the Venetian invention of flat mirrors that created a turning point, an event in the self-representation of the
artist. This was also the era of what Foucault (2000) has famously described as the invention of man as a
knowing subject and an object of this knowledge. The turn of the 16th century was therefore a critical period
of increasing self-consciousness and reflexivity in the history of thought that created conditions of possibility

for the proliferation of auto/biographical narratives and of all sorts of textual and visual representations of the
self in quest.
In this matrix of complex and often antagonistic discourses around the self and the possibilities and ethico-
aesthetic values of knowing and representing it, artists in different periods have used self-portraiture for
different reasons: to gain a rite of passage in the art world; to promote their artistic abilities; to attract
commissions and patronages; to experiment with different techniques, methods, and media; and to ultimately
emerge as sovereign individuals (see West, 2004). Self-portraiture has also opened up possibilities for
transcendence, pointing to the divine dimension of the artist, as in the art of Albrecht Dürer, who initiated the
tradition of the self-portrait as a visual psychograph.
Self-portraiture is thus related to a life or a real person, the artist himself or herself, but the way this life or
this person has been represented varies according to the period, artistic conventions and trends, social and
cultural expectations of the era, the artist’s talent and genius, and the patron’s or the market’s expectations
and demands. Similarly, self-portraits have been interpreted and analysed from a variety of theoretical
positions in philosophy and trends in art history. A critical question that has been raised is whether a self-
portrait should be defined as such, by the act of recognition it mobilizes to the viewer or by the intention
of the artist. Jordanova (2004) has suggested that the study of self-portraiture is more important in offering
insights in how artistic processes unfold and artistic identities are formed rather than in capturing any kind of
autobiographical truth about the subject of the artist.
Interpreting the self-portrait thus requires much more than a juxtaposition of narratives, visual images, and
titles in exhibition catalogues; it calls for close attention to the historical, social, and cultural contexts that
condition the emergence of the work of art under consideration. The interpretation should therefore be
particularly attentive to the processes of recontextualization: what happens to the work of art when it is placed
in a different context of analysis and understanding and how this recontextualization can create new levels of
meaning that are transdisciplinary rather than, naive, reductionist, or confusing. As Jordanova notes,
Interpreting self-portraits requires an elaborate historical sense. Such images are made in the
artists’ here and now—necessarily a complex swirl of forces, including their aspirations and
anxieties about competition, whether actual or imagined, strategies for creating and advancing a
“reputation,” as well as their immediate domestic and social relationships, geographical location and
economic needs. They are also produced out of artists’ senses of visual models to be emulated,
revered forbears, influential teachers and masters. In other words, artists themselves often have a
vivid awareness, that can be termed “historical,” of what has gone before, and in making it manifest,
as many did in their self-portraits, they speak to contemporaries about their debts and their filiations
and lay down deposits for future generations to examine. (2004, p. 45)
Feminist art historians have shown that women artists’ relation to and use of the mirror in self-portraiture
have opened up new and innovative paths in the history of the genre and Marsha Meskimmon’s 1996
study of women artists’ self-portraiture in the 20th century has been influential in this rich body of literature.

Joanne Leonard’s photo memoir, Being in Pictures (2008), is a rare piece of visual autobiography in the
context of this textual/visual interface. The author/artist/photographer has looked back into her artistic work
of almost 40 years and, by freezing some “moments of being,” she has brought them together as an
encompassing document of life. Although the photo memoir is organized along thematic units, there is also
a latent chronological order in how the themes unfold, thus holding onto an Aristotelian plot of beginnings,
middles, and points of arrival or moments of the present. Leonard is a photographer and academic, and her
feminist approach to photo collage and visual narratives is internationally recognized. Her work is included
in several art history collections and has been extensively cited in the scholarship of life-writing, feminist
studies, and critical theory. She has held numerous exhibitions in the United States and overseas, and her
work is housed in a number of museum collections in the United States, including the Museum of Modern
Art in San Francisco and the Detroit Institute of Art. Leonard’s photographic art emerges from the critical art
scene of the radical 1960s and 1970s, a period when many artists became organically involved in the social
movements of their geographies and times: “I was struggling to reconcile the largely sunny worldview of my
family photographs with the daily experiences of West Oakland poverty I saw, as well as the anger and energy
of the political actions in which I took part” (2008, p. 54) she wrote in her photo memoir.
For Leonard, then, as for many of her contemporaries, art as critique is entangled with politics, with art
and politics becoming constitutive of each other in what Tamboukou (2014) theorized as the artpolitics
assemblage. Having looked at Leonard’s visual autobiography, Tamboukou suggested that it opens up a
performative scene—a dialogic space wherein the autobiographical subject, the researcher, and the reader
meet, interact, and negotiate meaning about subjects and their world. In this light, Being in Pictures becomes
a site of mediation and communication, enabling the emergence of a multiplicity of meanings and traces of
truth. Moreover, Leonard, as the autobiographical subject of the analysis, far from being essentialized, pinned
down in a fixed subject position, or encased within the constraints and limitations of her story, becomes a
“narratable subject” (Cavarero, 2000) par excellence.
In responding to Leonard’s intimate photo memoir, Tamboukou has offered some fragments of thought around
women artists’ textual and visual narratives. While reading autobiographical stories that weave around a
rich range of photographs and artwork in the photo-collage genre, she has resisted the biographical impulse
of discovering the truth about the autobiographical subject. At the same time, she has also avoided the
poststructuralist fragmentation of the subject by holding onto the Arendtian idea of pursuing meaning through
following auto/biographical traces of the self. In recognizing and acknowledging the multiplicity of meanings
that life stories can reveal, she has particularly followed three themes: spatial technologies of becoming
an artist, vulnerability as an ontological precondition of the political, and visual trends in gendering auto/
biographical memories (see Tamboukou, 2014).
Autobiographical inquiries have further largely benefitted from the rich digital archives that are increasingly
becoming available with network and database technologies. An autobiographical document, be it textual
or visual, always functions in relation to its context, and the meanings it keeps generating are subject to
continuous transformations. When the researcher has access to wider archival collections of documents of

life (Plummer, 2001), he or she can more easily discern patterns of social formations and assemblages, feel
and follow space/time rhythms and map the entanglements of bodies and practices. How can researchers
then incorporate the digital revolution in the various ways they write, read, and understand auto/biographical
documents that seem to be continually drawn out from their archival hideouts and be displayed in their virtual
“originality”? There is indeed a wide range of theoretical, epistemological, methodological, and ethical issues
that the digital turn has brought forward. Digital archives have radically changed the understanding of “what
an archive is” to a realization of “what an archive can become.”
Tamboukou has suggested in her works that digital archives can significantly enrich the field of auto/
biographical studies and need to be developed more. They open up a field of infinite discourses, materialities,
and spatialities that the auto/biographical researcher is invited to explore and experiment with. But how can
researchers analyse transpositions of discursive, material and spatial practices into language, art, and image?
In addressing this question, researchers need to devise more nuanced epistemologies and methodologies
about how to discern meaning and understanding in visual and textual entanglements and how to treat
auto/biographical documents beyond the limitations of representation: not as signs that mirror or even
reveal aspects of a reality that is out there, but rather as “things” in themselves, components rather than
representations of the real. Auto/biographical research in the era of the digital revolution has opened up new
opportunities but has also raised important questions that need further investigation.
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