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Life writing is often considered to endorse a universalist liberal humanist ethics that encompasses a broad spectrum that goes from a neoliberal emphasis on self-sufficiency to theories of care that highlight our common vulnerability and interdependence. This universalist humanist ethics, even in its most progressive forms, may blunt life writing’s radical edge and even participate in the silencing and oppression of subaltern beings that fall outside its scope. Thus, diseased, displaced, dissenting, or dis-integrated autobiographical voices and life writing’s dissident potential and radical, queer promises need to be reassessed and reclaimed.
This special issue aims to examine critical and antinormative explorations of the self as they become manifest in contemporary and also older forms of life writing that have challenged hegemonic discourses shaping human subjectivity, the sexual order, and the political status quo.