Against ‘the devil from within’: Doing feminism through re-membering the multiple selves
Journal
Plural Feminisms: Navigating Resistance as Everyday Praxis
Pages
93-104
ISBN
9781350332713
9781350332737
Date Issued
2023-09
Author(s)
Abstract
Storytelling puts feelings into words and makes sense of those words. In this autoethnographic writing, based on the diaries in the past years, I try to re-member my present self and connect it to the past one, which is related to what the world would consider ‘trivial’ matters. These notes reflect life’s vicissitudes, embodied and experienced affectively. The reflecting process reformulates the past through narration concerning the closets where I once hid and others I have no idea how to break out of yet. To resituate my-self back in these unpleasant experiences and resist the easiness generated from denying, erasing, silencing, and thus forgetting our life’s stories is an essential element of feminist and queer politics. Acts of re-membering enable one, I’d argue, to position own identities in a space where the past is not recalled mechanically; the re-subjectivisation process refuses to privilege the future and the present over the past—a past in which injustices were experienced but were yet becoming describable. Feminist storytelling dismantles hierarchies and subverts the existing order of memories, and here, what I aim to unpack is the devil from within (心魔, xīn mó) coproduced by and entangled with heterosexism, racialised bodies, desirability, and unspeakable femininity.
Subjects
queer politics
the devil from within
symbolic interactionism
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing
Type
book part
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