2-3pm, Thursday, 11 November, 2021 from 2-3pm in the Project Room, 50 George Square. A one-hour research in progress panel on ‘non-normative lives’, proposed and with presentations by Edinburgh doctoral researchers and James Tait Black Biographer readers Nicole Chen and Charley Matthews, followed by discussion.
Nicole Xuan Chen: ‘Reflective Life-Writing on Disability: Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg (2021)’
Abstract: The term “reflective biography” is used to connote biography that self-reflexively reflects on life-writing generic forms it enacts, or a piece of life-writing that situates on the blurred boundaries between biography and autobiography and exhibits a flexible and fluid notion of referentiality. Using the term in the latter sense, I read Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg (2021) by Emily Rapp Black, a JTB Prize candidate this year, as an explicit reflective life-writing text on disability. Examining it from the perspective of narrative medicine, I intend to discuss the importance of narrative and life-writing to individuals with disability and patients whose living experiences deviated from the “normalcy” in their journeys towards self-identification.
Bio: Nicole Xuan Chen is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Her project centres on a sudden cluster of biofictions published within a decade or so from the end of last century that feature Virginia Woolf as the main protagonist-subject. Under the broad framework of experimental life-writing, she studies them thematically via such lenses as illness narrative, image-text intersectionality, and the modernist culture of conversation. She is also interested in medical humanities and is a research member at the Bio-Health Narrative Research Centre at the Southern Medical University (PRC). She is on the reader panel for James Tait Black Prize and is the editor and chief Chinese translator of the monograph Literary Medicine: Brain Diseases and Doctors in Novels, Theatre, and Film.
Charley Matthews: ‘Non-normative lives and the ethics of the private diary’
Abstract: Various life-writing scholars have argued that women and gender-nonconforming people have often used diaries to explore an interior world that feels at odds with the dominant values of a society based around strictly gendered codes of behaviour. But what happens when non-normative bodies enter the equation? How do we justify reading and analysing the ostensibly private thoughts of a marginalised person, when the scholarly institutions from which we produce our analysis are inevitably built on hegemonic assumptions and foundations? To paraphrase Saidiya Hartman, does this not re-enact a further violence on these people’s subjectivities and identities? This informal paper is the beginnings of an attempt to think through some of these ethical questions around working with the diaries of marginalised people, drawing on JTB prize submission Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg, as well as my own experiences working with the manuscript diaries of queer nineteenth-century landowner Anne Lister.
Bio: Charley Matthews is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Their thesis examines the reading practices of queer women and gender-nonconforming people in the nineteenth century, working with letters, diaries, and other lifewriting from the period. Their research interests also include publishing history, narratology, and the novel. In 2021, they presented at SHARP’s conference “Moving Texts,” and at a conference on “Gender and the Book Trades” at the University of St Andrews.
