Synopses & Reviews
The premise of Confessional Politics is that in this confessional age, "telling all is in." From a unique variety of perspectives and angles, the essays in this collection explore the association of confession with femininity; they examine its function as a gender-specific discourse as they probe its many feminized genres and subgenres. Confessional Politics investigates the creative and strategic ways in which women shape the telling of their sexual stories in order to resist and negotiate the confessional practices designed to position them in conventional sexual frameworks.
Investigating the confessional politics of traditional forms of social life writing (including erotic diaries, journals, letters, and confessional fiction), this book significantly expands its focus beyond conventional forms to include practices affecting mass readerships and audiences. The collection addresses provocative general topics: talk shows, sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexuality, self-help books, and cross-dressing, as well as expressive works such as contemporary Canadian women's poetry, lesbian fiction, performance art, Anne Frank's recently released complete diary, and memoirs.
Review
"Gammel has done a simply outstanding job. This is not a collection of ten essays on a related topic. The division of the book into Confessional Interventions, Confessional Modalities, and Confessional Inversions allows the reader to read this book as a single unit, something that unfortunately rarely happens in such gatherings of essays."James King, author of Virginia Woolf and William Blake: A Life
About the Author
Irene Gammel is an associate professor of English and women's studies at the University of Prince Edward Island. She is the author of Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove and the coeditor of L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture.