Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 19, Issue 3, 2016

Unpublished and undistributed, Truus van Bruinessen’s collection of life-writings in Dutch (journal, letters, and travel writing) and English (memoir) only exists in a box in Canada’s National Archives. It documents its author’s migration to Canada and her domestic travails as a housewife of the 1950s, which include her lack of access to English. The archive provides a unique opportunity for the study of gender and language shift in adult migrants’ life-writing. Comparative analysis of van Bruinessen’s skilful and highly gendered use of the epistolary form in Dutch on one hand, and of her memoir in imperfect and belatedly acquired English on the other, reveals interesting differences in style, tone, and content. Such analysis shows how a woman’s migrant subjectivity, originally constituted in Dutch, could not adequately be represented in English, as a talented writer’s mother tongue was twisted in (self-) translation.

Within the last decade, several studies have analysed the life-writing produced by veterans of the U.S. American war against – and the ensuing occupation of – Iraq (2003-2011). These studies are beginning to offer insightful analyses of several autobiographies written by Iraq War veterans; they focus almost exclusively on male combat veterans, perpetuating a bias that has shaped the genre of autobiographies of war in the United States and the subsequent scholarly analyses of these autobiographies for decades, if not centuries. My paper begins to address this bias by focusing on two autobiographies by female soldiers, namely Jane Blair’s Hesitation kills (2011) and Heidi Squier Kraft’s Rule number two (2007). As the nineteenth-century biographies that Jo Burr Margadant has analysed, these texts can be considered ‘collage[s] of familiar notions merged in unfamiliar ways’ (Margadant, 2000, p. 2), as both of them portray the experiences of female soldiers in a combat zone and thus trouble those assumptions about combat, identity, and gender that continue to structure more traditional American life-writing about war. In my analysis I show how the autobiographical subjects in these texts are constructed through what I call ‘military femininities’. Drawing in part on conceptual and theoretical work done by Judith Butler, Leigh Gilmore, and R.W. Connell, I argue that these military femininities are instrumental in creating female autobiographical subjects that are authorised to talk about war in the cultural context of the contemporary United States, and thus in establishing soldierly identities for American women more generally.

Following Carl Pletsch’s hypothesis of ‘The life lived in anticipation of one’s biographers’, we explore the ‘autobiographical lives’ of two couples of creative individuals who have and will become the subjects of biographies: these couples are the canonised and popular Austrian writers Friederike Mayröcker (b. 1925) and Ernst Jandl (b. 1925, d. 2000) and the relatively unknown exiles Salka Viertel (b. 1889, d. 1978) and Berthold Viertel (b. 1885, d. 1953). As more or less well-known actors in the cultural scene of Austria’s ‘long twentieth century’, they give us the opportunity to analyse gendered socialisation and examine how their lives and gendered life scripts shaped their respective personal archives. All four of them left behind substantial collections of documents. The particular archives of these four modern intellectuals are not only of very different shapes and sizes, but also stored in different memory institutions ranging from the Austrian National Library to the Viennese City Library and the German Literary Archive – they, by extension, also depict diverse politics of archival memory in the context of gender and nationality.

Life-writing documents are not difficult to find; they are part of any archive’s inventory. Nonetheless, a number of European countries have recently witnessed the rise of a new, genre-based type of archive: the diary archive. The Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (1984) in Italy was the first of this kind, and more were to follow, such as the Association pour l’autobiographie et le patrimoine autobiographique in France (APA, 1992), the Deutsches Tagebucharchiv (1998), and the Nederlands Dagboekarchief (Dutch Diary Archive, 2009). How and why did these archives come into being? What are their characteristic features, and what is the relevance of these form-based collections to gender studies? I asked Monica Soeting, co-founder of the Dutch Diary Archive, and contextualised the work of the Dutch in the broader field of European diary archives.