Panel: Editing and Generating the Self, Selves, and Voices
Copanelists: Patricia Casey and Jianqui Sun
This paper is about the dialogic nature of subjectivity. It argues that the process of translation begins in early infancy, and enables us to communicate across the gap between self and other. We express ourselves in dialogue with the gestures and voices of other, who shape our selves in ways that are both enabling and controlling. The gap between self and other is the site of both repression and creativity. I use the Deleuzian concepts of desire and becoming, and examples from my life story, to reflect on how we translate across this gap to live more creatively in the world we inhabit.
As a Western woman, born in the mid-twentieth century, I have been shaped by the cultural discourse of the bourgeois family, and my life has been a pattern of failed selves, unfinished dialogues, as child, wife, and mother. The second half of my life has been a journey into becomingdifferent, finding the voice of a desiring woman. In the last quarter of my life, I have returned to study and writing. I have discovered that translation need not be a restraining and dislocating experience; it can be a creative way of unfolding and refolding the self.
An excerpt from my autobiographical novel of my childhood in outback Australia narrates the importance of the “wireless” as one of our few lines of communication with the outside world for me; this was a site both of control and of freedom to escape into imaginary worlds. From my life now, I use the example of gossip, a form of translation between one’s desires and those of others, to explore how women in the workplace subvert binary lines of control and hegemonic discourse.
Christina Houen is a final year PhD candidate at Curtin University of Technology. Her subject is Life Writing, and her thesis title is “The origami of desire: unfolding and refolding the desiring self.” This thesis is a braided narrative using Deleuzian concepts of desire and becoming to interpret her own life writing and that of other women, and to explore how women have agency in self-creation. Her quest is to rewrite the desiring female self outside the dominant Western paradigm of woman as a passive vehicle of men’s desires. The writing of Heian Japanese women (mid-tenth through the eleventh centuries AD) is used as a mirror for her own life writing; this was a period that spawned an extraordinary body of autobiographical and fictional writing by cloistered court women in a polygamous society. Christina has published short memoirs and essays on subjectivity and desire nationally and internationally. She is writing two fictional memoirs—one of childhood, one of adulthood.