Uploaded 1 December 2001

Introduction

Autobiographical videos by American women of the late twentieth century contribute to cultural archives that include “public” explorations of “private” spheres. These independently produced experiments often establish links between print and electronic media, adapting various forms of unpublished and published texts. In the crossover to video exhibition, the writing undergoes strategic transformations. Frequently drawing on the autobiographical subjects’ personal archives, which may include diaries, journals, and letters, the videos represent women looking back on their lives as well as on personal texts they wrote – and memorabilia they collected – during the periods that their reflections address. Thus integrating autobiographical and diaristic genres, the videos also accentuate intermedia convergences between video and print. In the process, edited versions of formerly “private” texts become “public” documents available for public reception (and inspection).

The videos Flag (USA 1989), by Linda Gibson, and Trick or Drink (USA 1984), by Vanalyne Green, explore such interplay. [1]  Both videos incorporate childhood diaries into women’s autobiographical narratives so that the mutually inflecting dynamics of diary writing and videomaking performed on camera constitute a vital component of the protagonists’ self-portraits. The archival documents that the videos appropriate, which include the diaries as well as a range of multimedia texts, contribute to the blurring of boundaries between “private” and “public” spheres and help to define the audiences that the videos target, issues that theorists of women’s autobiographical texts underscore. [2] At the same time, the archival documents promote exchanges between the autobiographical subjects and younger versions of themselves.

Produced in the 1980s during a pre-internet era, the videos exhibit similarities as well as differences. Flag uses actors to examine the political transformation of an African American girl who was born in 1952 to a middle-class family in the Northeast. Diary entries from the mid-1960s are used to contrast the girl’s beliefs about patriotism, race, and equality in the United States with the woman’s expanded perspectives. Shifting attitudes toward the American flag implicate the social context in which Gibson’s changes occur. Trick or Drink stages a one woman performance of the white videomaker who revisits her past with the aid of diaries that she kept in the early 1960s when she was a teenager struggling with the American dream. The child of alcoholic parents and a survivor of compulsive eating disorders, Green engages with the teenager’s personal world both to heal herself and to politicize the personal. Along the way, she forges collective alliances.

In both cases, postmodern autobiographies take shape while the storytellers embody subjects who construct multilayered histories about growing up female in America after the Second World War. [3]  Like the independent films and videos that Patricia Mellencamp examines, Flag and Trick or Drink involve:

a transgression of the boundaries between private and public spaces and experiences, entering with intimacy the ‘public sphere’ and unsettling these metaphorical and real spaces of power through confinement by looking and talking back. [4]

Flag and Trick or Drink remind viewers of places off stage, beyond the spotlight, where other languages are spoken and other logics endorsed: “private” and “public” inscriptions commingle. Displayed for audiences of independent video, the personal archives showcase materials, such as girls’ diaries and family albums, that generally have been excluded from public forums. Singularly and collectively, the archives thus gathered constitute alternative resources on which to draw for metaphors and (re)constructions of an imaginary. These cultural resources, which acknowledge the histories of women and recognize them as addressees, serve as counterpoints to more exclusive archives or cultural repertoires, such as that which Michèle Le Doeuff calls the “philosophical imaginary.” [5]  By incorporating personal archives into the narratives, Flag and Trick or Drink also help to broaden the critical perspectives of scholars who study women’s autobiography. With such an objective in mind, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson recommend the building of archives and documentary collections that incorporate works traditionally considered “‘merely personal’ and extraliterary.” Examples of such works include “diaries, letters, journals, memoirs, travel narratives, meditations, cookbooks, family histories, spiritual records, collages, art books, and others.” [6]

To suggest the scope of the resources that Flag and Trick or Drink preserve, detailed descriptions of the personal archives that each video assembles have been included in the analysis, which explores how personal, social, spatial, and historical strands may be interwoven to tell the story of a woman’s life. [7] Flag and Trick or Drink demonstrate how two American women from the same generation approach the task, undertakings that open up directions for others to explore further in a range of old and new media. Rather than point toward a shared feminine aesthetic or suggest essentialist characteristics related to women’s videomaking – objectives that Martha Gever persuasively disavows – Flag and Trick or Drink encourage viewers to acknowledge differences among women and their approaches to discourse. [8]  At the same time, the videos contribute to cultural archives that comprise autobiographical texts from the worlds of print, moving images, visual arts, and hypermedia. [9] The videos raise questions for future discussions about the impact that diary keeping during adolescence has on creative choices later in life and how the diaries, when saved, inform both the writers’ remembrances of the past and other readers’ views of the worlds the young diarists construct. Autobiographers of the early twenty-first century who choose to work with their diaries might turn not to personal archives that have evaded public inspection, as Gibson and Green have, but to entries they have posted online for the world to view. [10]

Background

Women’s autobiographical video

Flag and Trick or Drink belong to an independent tradition of videomaking that has compelled its supporters to cultivate audiences in diverse cultural and educational venues while typically receiving only minimal institutional support. [11] From the perspective of the mid-1990s, Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg argue that this often marginalized work merits critical attention for its potential to expand the cultural archives of alternative film and video and to catalyze debate. Neither privileging “video art” nor positioning video as an autonomous medium with essential properties, Renov and Suderburg relate the practice of video to “ongoing cultural, aesthetic, and political agendas and activities” (xvi-xvii). For their purposes, independent video production encompasses “single-channel video, ‘experimental’ video, broadcast intervention, cable, interactive video, computer-generated video, experimental documentary, home video” as well as work associated with the “video art” canon (xviii). The broad view that Renov and Suderburg support also takes into consideration video’s capacity to intervene in everyday life (xix). The areas of investigations they map out complement analytic frameworks that concentrate on independent video primarily in relation to the art world. An integrated approach provides an apt context for the discussion of Flag and Trick or Drink, which media critics have linked to a variety of cultural, aesthetic, and political agendas.

Gever, who examines several women’s autobiographical videos from the mid-to-late 1980s, associates Flag and Trick or Drink with the feminist performance art that flourished during the 1970s in the United States, where the tapes were produced. She claims that performances in which women speak for themselves introduce metaphors that oppose sexist representations of “the mute compliant female body.” In addition to challenging connotations of femininity that are prevalent in Western culture, Gever asserts, female performers establish a basis for alternative modes of representation (234-35). While associating Flag and Trick or Drink with this tradition, Gever also acknowledges how approaches to performance have changed. She points out that Flag and Trick or Drink, as well as other tapes from the period, were made with improved video equipment during a social era when the home video industry burgeoned and the production and distribution of small-format tapes became “part of the social landscape.” Nevertheless, the most significant differences between women’s videos from the 1970s and 1980s, she contends, have more to do with challenges to realist documentary traditions than with technological advancements (229-30). While examining how identity and American culture intersect, the tapes Gever studies address the problems of performance and generate a set of critical terms that she considers feminist. Related to historical and political issues, the terms include “conceptions of public and private spheres, the nuclear family, racial identity, national identity, consumer culture, corporate power” (227, 241). [12]

Issues that media critics such as Gever, Mellencamp, Julia Lesage, and Christine Tamblyn raise provide a theoretical context for the analysis of Flag and Trick or Drink in relation to women’s film and video on a broad scale. Mellencamp, for example, develops an analytical framework that engages with debates surrounding women and postmodernism. She identifies strategies of ‘heterogeneity’ in feminist film and video to refute theoretical approaches by scholars who elide differences among and within women. In addition to transgressing boundaries between private and public spheres, mentioned previously, feminist strategies that Mellencamp cites which are pertinent here include addressing women as subjects, employing collective identifications, and telling ‘stories’ rather than sanctioning grand master narratives (129-31). With regard to developments in the 1980s, when Flag and Trick or Drink were produced, Mellencamp claims that women accentuated the critical significance of female subjectivity and strove to become speaking subjects, artists, and writers. At the same time, a binary model of difference between male and female expanded to include “racial, cultural, and chronological as well as sexual differences.” [13]

Julia Lesage examines women’s autobiographical videos in which fragmented consciousness constitutes both a theme and a major structuring principle. [14]  Instead of working in realist modes, the autobiographers whom Lesage studies “pursue an epistemological investigation of what kinds of relations might constitute the self, using as a laboratory their own consciousness.” The experimental videomakers who produce such works reformulate relations among psychological, corporeal, emotional, historical, and familial strands of their lives (311). Lesage proposes that such explorations often reveal powerful insights into how society works. In fact, she claims that a fragmented consciousness may be a prerequisite for social activism rather than a hindrance to it (335). One of the four stylistic approaches that Lesage identifies entails the privileging of voice-off narration while a panoply of images from personal and public archives appear on screen. Diaries and letters sometimes provide source material. Lesage selects Trick or Drink to exemplify this approach (311-23). Stylistically, Flag employs similar devices. In both videos, however, a great deal more is going on than the reduction to “a rigidly fixed sound/image relation” allows (313). Elements of the video diary style also come into play, for example, although excerpts from the adolescents’ written diaries are conveyed retrospectively on a multilayered stage. From the vantage point of the 1980s, the autobiographical subjects revive self-inscriptions that they composed in the 1960s. The young diarists thus become members of the cast. Moreover, Flag, a performance that involves actors, experiments with a style that in some ways resembles the skillfully edited autobiographical fictions that Lesage describes (312-13). A model of stylistic hybrids would account for the complexity of the videos.

Tamblyn discusses hybridity in relation to a video genre that conflates portraiture and social documentary. The makers reflect on the world and simultaneously portray themselves: “by ‘looking out,’ they are able to ‘look in.'” [15] Like other texts by women that unsettle generic conventions, the hybrids that Tamblyn identifies pose problems to some diagnosticians. According to Celeste Schenck, feminist reworkings of genre theory – which often involve “[m]ixed, unclassifiable, blurred, or hybrid genres” – have been designed “to deconstruct the normative (masculine) criteria of genre, which consign feminine practice to inferior, idiosyncratic, or debased use of forms.” [16]

Central to Tamblyn’s analysis is the notion associated with feminist consciousness-raising of the 1970s that ‘The personal is political.’ Touching on issues that Gever also covers, Tamblyn elaborates:

In the performance video that was influenced by these consciousness-raising methods, autobiographical themes, including the exorcism of constraining female stereotypes in confessional monologues or the expansion of self-potential through projective role-playing predominated. . . . By exercising their right to function as speaking subjects, the feminist artists who made autobiographical videotapes were thus using the medium for both aesthetic and political purposes. (406)

Tamblyn relates 1970s feminist video performance to the ‘narcissistic’ video that Rosalind Krauss describes in an influential essay that was published in 1976. Tamblyn draws connections between the state of video technology during the 1970s and the genre that Krauss proposes (406). [17] Accordingly, while recognizing theoretical shifts that problematized realist documentary conventions, Tamblyn connects advancements in video technology that occurred in the 1980s, notably lightweight cameras and accessible postproduction editing equipment, with the hybrid genre that she identifies. Unlike much of the earlier, low-tech performance video, which focused primarily on the artists’ bodies and used minimal editing and camera movement, many videos that women made in the 1980s involved extensive postproduction editing and questioned the transparency of representation, features that Tamblyn emphasizes (405-7). The evolving video apparatus, which encompasses modes of production, distribution, and exhibition, proved to be well suited for a generic hybrid that supports “the feminist project of constructing alternatives to the dominant dichotomous patriarchal world view” (417). Both Flag and Trick or Drink, which were made during the period Tamblyn addresses, experiment with the creative and conceptual possibilities that portraiture and social documentary afford. [18]

From the vantage point of the mid-1990s, Tamblyn proposes that videos by nonprofessional consumers who use camcorders, like videos by artists and independent makers who use small-format technology, serve as “vehicles for cultural intervention” in everyday life. To support her contention that “consumer video” and “video art” overlap in this way, she equates home video genres, such as diaries, family albums, and travelogues, with analogues by women and men from “the video art canon.” [19]  Since she examines artists’ videos in detail but refers to consumers’ videos only in passing, commonalities between “high” and “low” video culture remain speculative (17).

The literary or written diary, which informs both the artists’ and the consumers’ approaches to video diaries, receives only modest consideration and is unsupported by any acknowledged sources. Without providing much background, Tamblyn argues that literary diaries promote interiority because they are written and read by solitary individuals. Video diaries, in contrast, encourage social interaction during both the frequently collaborative production process and the often communal viewing experience, Tamblyn maintains (18-19). She does not consider forms that combine video performance with written texts, as Flag and Trick or Drink do. Moreover, she fails to consider in any depth what may be lost with the shift from written to video diaries.

The attention to audience, however, raises important questions about the distinctions between private and public social spheres in videos that involve self-representation and personal storytelling. Tamblyn reaffirms this point when she proposes that new forms of intersubjectivity connect the video artists to their audiences in ways that eradicate the kinds of boundaries between subjects that modes of interiority support. She argues that consumer video technologies, which make comparable experiments possible on a large scale, facilitate the integration of such practices into everyday life. According to Tamblyn, both the artists’ videos and the consumers’ videos suggest ways for makers “to reconcile mental space with the social sphere” (26- 27). Suitable for viewing in public venues and sometimes on television programs such as America’s Funniest Home Videos (15), productions by nonprofessionals may resemble artists’ videos in some ways, but the types of interventions that home videos catalyze warrant a more detailed examination that Tamblyn offers. Furthermore, since, overall, little or no postproduction editing is used in the consumer versions of the video genres she mentions, and sometimes not in the artists’ versions either, she brackets the concerns about postproduction editing and realist traditions that she addresses in her article “Significant others: social documentary as personal portraiture in women’s video of the 1980s,” discussed above.

Despite the blindspots in the argument, the analysis makes clear that “the democratization of video” is underway and cultural intervention and innovative self-representation may emerge anywhere. The view of the social landscape that Tamblyn sketches suggests that boundaries between high art and popular culture continue to break down in promising ways. Relatedly, new modes of producing, distributing, and exhibiting independent videos by professionals as well as nonprofessionals create opportunities for various audiences to encounter work they might miss otherwise. Yet, given the “quasi-obsolete technology of video” to which Tamblyn refers (13), the critic lays the groundwork for theoretical considerations that extend beyond the video apparatus and into the twenty-first century. Rather than dismiss either artists’ videos or consumers’ videos, Tamblyn implies that an analysis of shared characteristics might prove illuminating to producers and scholars of the future who look back on videos from the late twentieth century for direction. Flag and Trick or Drink, artists’ productions that feature girls’ written diaries and archival family albums, demonstrate how boundaries between high art and popular culture can be broken down in a single text, thus unsettling the already tenuous generic distinctions that Tamblyn makes. Moreover, in the process of staging convergences between writing and video technologies, Flag and Trick or Drink raise issues that theorists of women’s literary autobiography address. A multimedia perspective broadens the analysis. [20]

Women’s literary diaries and autobiographical writing

Although Flag and Trick or Drink are not video diaries in the ways that Lesage and Tamblyn define the genre, the videos nevertheless share certain attributes with productions that document ongoing lives. At the same time, Flag and Trick or Drink are informed by diaristic conventions that have applied to girls’ private writing in the age of print. With regard to girls who have kept diaries, Mary Jane Moffat states:

For all the differences in their individual temperaments, social circumstances and historical periods, the girl diarists sound as if they were in conversation with each other, asking the same question, ‘Who shall I be?’ in relationship to love and work. [21]

Writing about women’s diaries, Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff offer a perspective that relates to girls’ diaries as well. They argue that women’s diaries challenge scholars to question boundaries between private and public and to consider the consequences that such divisions have on social, political, and personal levels. Bunkers and Huff also charge that diaries raise questions about audience and the interactions between readers and writers, and in this way call attention to the social and historical contexts in which the reading and writing take place. Given the role that gender plays as an analytical category in the study of women’s diaries, Bunkers and Huff reframe traditional approaches to the genre and pose new questions as well. Besides rethinking issues such as the public/private dichotomy, they raise questions that concern interrelations among race, class, and gender and ask how the reading of women’s diaries contributes to this inquiry. [22]

Margo Culley both reinforces and challenges generic conventions when she distinguishes the personal diary or journal from other forms of autobiographical writing. [23]  According to Culley, the periodic creation and structure of a diary make unique demands on the reader and the writer. As she explains, “The writer’s relationship to ‘real time’ and representation of ‘time passing’ in the text create formal tensions and ironies not found in texts generated from an illusion of a fixed point in time” (220-21). Regarding the authenticity of women’s diaries, she warns that despite their value as historical sources that provide insights into women’s lives, diaries and journals are verbal constructs that raise questions about the selection and arrangement of information, real or implied audiences, and other ‘literary’ concerns such as narrative, persona, voice, imagery, and theme. Diary and journal writers thus are implicated in complex literary and psychological processes (217). Hence, whether they are conscious of their actions or not, many diarists inscribe “a self which is to some degree a fiction, a construction” (218). These concerns echo those of theorists and practitioners who examine autobiographical constructions of the subject that either by design or default blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, whether the “personal” texts are edited for the public or not. [24]

As autobiographical hybrids that integrate video performance and retrospective diary writing, Flag and Trick or Drink raise issues that resonate with autobiographical texts in other media, including print. Focusing on literary forms of life writing, Leigh Gilmore considers the parallel histories of autobiography and postmodernism with an emphasis on how the subject has been theorized. She associates the critical potential of postmodernism with “an emphasis on the subject as an agent in discourse, where the subject itself is understood as necessarily discursive.” She suggests that within this framework autobiographical texts facilitate the production of cultural identities. [25]  She argues, further, that postmodern debates have destabilized the foundations of autobiography studies by calling into question concepts that have been central to the tradition of autobiography, such as history and subjectivity. Attention to the relations among “ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, and differing forms of representation” also alters the paradigm. Consequently, texts that formerly would not have been regarded as properly autobiographical or worthy of critical attention now interest scholars. Gilmore stresses that such positions unsettle the Augustinian lineage of autobiography which naturalizes “the self-representation of (mainly) white, presumably heterosexual, elite men” (4-5). The alternative approaches she discusses not only challenge previous definitions of the genre but also the theory of genre itself, which imposes exclusionary standards that support identity hierarchies (5-9). [26]

Other theorists of women’s autobiography also recognize that the autobiographical subject is a complexly layered construct and in this way raises issues of particular concern to women, a view that Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck affirm. Brodzki and Schenck grapple with “the imperative situating of the female subject in spite of the postmodern campaign against the sovereign self.” They recommend a provisional way out of the dilemma that entails taking cues from contemporary theory and not promoting “a simplistic identification with the protagonist of the autobiographical text” while also providing “the emotional satisfaction historically missing for the female reader, that assurance and consolation that she does indeed exist in the world.” [27]  Gever, Mellencamp, Lesage, and Tamblyn articulate similar concerns when, in their own ways, they promote autobiographical videos that integrate theory and practice.

Social contexts and confessional mediascapes

Writing in the mid-1990s, Smith and Watson address the prevalence of personal narratives in everyday life, which are communicated via diverse means: “on the body, on the air, in music, in print, on video, at meetings.” [28] While emphasizing that occasions for such confessional storytelling are multiple, Smith and Watson compare personal narrators to the bricoleur. In this role, the narrators create historically specific personal histories by assembling fragments of the identities and narrative forms that the culture makes available (13-14). As editors of Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, Smith and Watson concentrate on how consumers from all strata of American culture are eager both to construct their own narratives and to learn about the life stories that other people tell (3). Smith and Watson argue:

In postmodern America we are culturally obsessed with getting a life – and not just getting it, but sharing it with and advertising it to others. We are, as well, obsessed with consuming the lives that other people have gotten. The lives we consume are translated through our own lives into story. Getting a life is a necessary negotiation in the everyday practice of American culture/s.” (3, original emphasis)

Moreover, Smith and Watson claim, both officially sanctioned autobiographical discourses and personal versions that subvert authorized views enable consumers “to align the privatized consciousness with identities credited in the public sphere and to glimpse and critique the misidentifications of that alignment” (36). These disparate personal histories share the common feature of documenting the storyteller’s attempt to “get a life” (6). Autobiographical narrators thus position themselves as agents in and of the stories they tell, an element of control that often appeals to speakers who have stories to share that have been considered “culturally unspeakable” (14-15). In the telling of formerly “unrecited narratives of American culture/s,” which may include “histories of child abuse and spouse battering, interracial marriage, homosexuality, alcoholism, mental illness, and disability,” the narrators, as witnesses, reframe what is regarded as speakable and open up new ways to speak about it (14-15). Autobiographical narrators, whatever their stories, often connect with others in new ways as well, especially when their stories resonate with the stories of people in a compatible group or “a community of secret knowers” (15). In these ways, Smith and Watson contend, narratives provide a way to intervene in postmodern life, and the narrators “can facilitate changes in the mapping of knowledge and ignorance, of what is speakable or unspeakable, disclosed or masked, alienating or communally bonding” (15-16). Tamblyn contemplates similar interventions when she links autobiographical home videos to generically analogous artists’ videos that promote new forms of intersubjectivity between makers and their audiences ” (“Qualifying,” 26). [2] Smith and Watson, along with the contributors to the anthology that they edit, take the next step, however, by actually examining popular texts across a range of media.

Yet, unlike Tamblyn who, with respect to video, attempts to bridge gaps between “high” and “low” culture (“Qualifying,” 17), Smith and Watson reinforce these divisions. They distinguish between the “backyard ethnography” that they privilege – which focuses on “the everyday practices of autobiographical narrating in America” – and autobiographical texts that are aligned with “the ‘high culture’ of published, ‘artful’ autobiography” (17). Such distinctions do appear tenuous, though, in a postmodern culture that encourages “bricoleurs” from all strata of society to draw on a common multimedia repertoire for identities and narrative forms. Tamblyn expresses comparable sentiments when she proposes that “[c]onsumer video modes also connect the formerly elite practice of video art with more pedestrian uses of home video” (“Qualifying,” 27). She nevertheless shares Smith and Watson’s concern with how variously positioned autobiographical discourses prompt interventions in everyday life that bring like-minded people together either actually or virtually. This shared concern links the two inquiries together despite their differing analytical frames. Both Tamblyn’s and Smith and Watson’s arguments prove especially valuable in the analysis of cultural texts such as Flag and Trick or Drink which overtly exhibit ties to high art and popular culture without being limited to either side of a dichotomous cultural divide that enforces social hierarchies.

Michael Renov also focuses on autobiographical texts that promote new forms of social interaction in everyday life. More in tune with what he deems ‘literary’ approaches to personal narratives than with approaches he associates with popular culture, Renov distinguishes the low-end confessional videos by independent artists that he examines from “capital-intensive, industrially organized, mass market cultural commodities, on film or tape.” [30]  He limits his attention to such noncommercial first-person video confessions in order to account for the unique dynamics between confessors and their audiences that artists’ productions of this kind support. He claims that televisual confessions, in contrast, have been commodified to support the profit orientation of broadcast television and thus involve dynamics between confessors and their audiences that warrant another kind of analysis (82). The list of selected videos that fit his model includes the three titles that also appear on Tamblyn’s list of exemplary video diaries by artists. [31] Whereas Tamblyn considers how home video producers can continue on a large scale the types of interventions in everyday life that the artists have explored, Renov concentrates on how artists’ confessional video projects can function therapeutically for the makers as well as for the culture at large in a variety of contexts beyond the art world (97). [32] Trick or Drink appears on Renov’s selected list of video confessions by independent artists (87). While Flag shares the independent status of Trick or Drink and involves personal disclosures, the video contrasts with Renov’s model of a private “self-interrogation” or a “ritualized self-examination,” in which the usually solo performer employs direct address (88, 97). Rather than reduce either Flag or Trick or Drink to the confessional genre, such affiliations expand the parameters of the analysis. The positioning of autobiographical constructs in such multifaceted contexts supports the interconnected qualities both of these videos and the lives they enframe.

Flag

Linda Gibson, the videomaker and autobiographical subject of Flag, relies on actors to recreate a personal drama within the social context prevalent in America during the post-World War II, Civil Rights, and Viet Nam eras. The African American woman who stands in for Gibson as an adult participates in a dialogue with her younger counterpart, who is represented by diary entries from 1963 that are read off camera and transcribed on screen. [33] The eleven-year-old Gibson reflects on race, cultural identity, and patriotism. Additional comments from her high school years pick up where the diary leaves off. Appropriations of various historical documents, cultural texts, and personal memorabilia set up powerful juxtapositions that fuel political debates. Modulated by the African American woman’s expressive dance performances and the creative activities of a white flagmaker, the temporally collapsed intrapersonal dialogues, which take place inside a makeshift artist’s studio, are offset by journalistic interviews outside with a culturally diverse group of people from the surrounding community. Designed in this way, the video enables “Gibson” to participate in both interior and exterior dialogues that reach audiences the young diarist could not have imagined.

We learn that “Linda Gibson,” an African American girl, was born in 1952, raised in a middle-class family, and lived in the Northeast. As the narrative develops, the normative standards that informed her early thinking and writing are dethroned, even if the social order that promulgated such norms is not. Through strategic juxtapositions and counterpoints, the video questions the authority of the discourses cited and challenges the systems of thought that keep the discourses in place. The American flag referred to in the title undergoes symbolic alterations that parallel Gibson’s shifting views about the nation for which it stands. An elaborate image repertoire supports the story, which brings together the conflicts about racial identity that the young diarist expresses with the pride in her African American heritage that she exhibits as an adult.

Commenting on the writing of her own autobiography, cultural critic and feminist theorist bell hooks describes a process that resonates with Gibson’s journey backward and forward in time. hooks says:

The longing to tell one’s story and the process of telling is symbolically a gesture of longing to recover the past in such a way that one experiences both a sense of reunion and a sense of release. It was the longing for release that compelled the writing but concurrently it was the joy of reunion that enabled me to see that the act of writing one’s autobiography is a way to find again that aspect of self and experience that may no longer be an actual part of one’s life but is a living memory shaping and informing the present. [34]

The autobiographical writing enables hooks to recapture the black culture of her youth and in her mind to rescue the girl she once was. During the process of writing, this girl stops being the enemy within, whom the adult hooks previously had wanted to annihilate so the woman could “come into being” (159).

A similar transformation takes place in Flag, which the first diary reenactment sets in motion:

Dear Diary,

This is the first time I ever really decided to keep a diary. You will be the only friend I have that I can confide everything to. For that reason I give you the name I hold dear, “Heidi.” It was my name in German class. [35]

During the off-camera reading, an illustration of a blonde-haired Caucasian girl is introduced, suggesting a visual representation of Heidi, the alter ego and confidante to whom the diarist addresses her entries. (The image reappears during later diary readings as well.) Also in this sequence, an actual woman with features that resemble those of “Heidi” performs. She holds a notebook in which she crayons the title “My scrapbook.” This woman alternately poses as historical archivist, flagmaker, and counterpoint to the African American woman who also performs on this stage. While suggesting adult versions of Heidi and Gibson, respectively, these two performers engage with each other in ways that differentiate the African American woman from the alter ego the diarist invented.

After establishing the prominence of the Heidi figure in the narrative, the video dissolves to a series of photographs that feature Gibson as a child – pigtailed and smiling, celebrating a birthday, posing with Santa Claus, dressing for Halloween. Intercut with the snapshots we find video footage of the dancer. She moves self-assuredly, with dignity. Militantly, she carries an American flag. Notably engaged in a series of solo performances, this woman, as a surrogate for the mature Gibson, engages with the orally rendered diary extracts. The performance thus associates the voice-off readings with a racially distinct woman who is vital and strong. In this way, the performance makes explicit the racial and sexual identity of the young diary writer as a politically awakened woman. Like the autobiographical narrators in stories by twentieth-century black women that Nellie McKay identifies, Gibson rejects victimization and acts as a witness against, racism, sexism, and classism. [36] Additional sequences reinforce this theme.

While subscribing to the convention of a personal struggle involving a privatized, confessional itinerary – aspirations typically associated with autobiographical writing – the video also acknowledges the political dimension of subject formation and the collective character of self-representation, aspirations not typically associated with the autobiographical genre according to Watson and Smith[37]  Complexly layered scenes that capture various moments in Gibson’s social and psychic life story reveal suggestive patterns. In one instance, for example, a woman who speaks off-camera reads alternately from the Girl Scout Promise and the Pledge of Allegiance. Superimposed over a shot of the flagmaker while she assembles the historical scrapbook, text appears on camera that states: “The flag stands for America.” The video then dissolves to a crayoned drawing of an American pilgrim over which is superimposed a photo of the young Gibson and footage of the dancer in the act of pledging. Another dissolve leads back to the flagmaker. Now, though, she contributes to a collectively assembled multimedia installation designed to resemble the American flag. On the designated wall, she places the drawing of the pilgrim. Other participants, including the dancer, periodically add cultural artifacts of their own choosing. This collaborative version of the American flag recognizes many voices and many visions, including Gibson’s.

The participants in the group project mime on a small scale the video’s overall agenda – to construct a multimedia compendium that unpacks personal and socio-cultural reserves from previously excluded sources and thus enriches the cultural archives. Smith and Watson capture the spirit of this endeavor when they state:

Crucially, the writing and theorizing of women’s lives has often occurred in texts that place an emphasis on collective processes while questioning the sovereignty and universality of the solitary self. Autobiography has been employed by many women writers to write themselves into history. Not only feminism but also literary and cultural theory have felt the impact of women’s autobiography as a previously unacknowledged mode of making visible formerly invisible subjects. (“Introduction,” Women, 5)

Flag insistently offsets autobiographical probings with socio-cultural counterpoints, readily dissolving spatial and temporal borders. As Gibson wages intrapersonal battles, territorial boundaries between private and public spheres collapse. An implicit dialogue ensues between the diary writer and the woman she becomes, yet always with reference to social and discursive contexts. Culley proposes that the tendencies of diary writers to reread, emend, notate, recopy, and edit their entries later in time resembles psychoanalytic dialogues “with aspects of the self,” a process which involves “unlocking mysteries of the human psyche and becoming the occasion of profound knowledge, growth, and change” (219). From the perspective of documentary film studies, Janet Walker and Diane Waldman also discuss the importance of psychoanalysis, especially with regard to its emphasis on intersections of the past and the present. This emphasis, they argue, resonates with tendencies of the historical documentary “to retrieve a past that is both eminently tangible and ultimately ephemeral, and to laminate that past to an equally mediated present and an imagined future.” [38] Gibson’s involvement with comparable processes underlies the narrative’s development as the adult reengages with the diary writing and the memories that it evokes. Besides staging intrapersonal dialogues, Flag re-positions the girl’s intimate reflections in a social context and introduces the diary writing to new audiences, strategies that acknowledge the political dimensions of self-representation.

Temporal overlappings and voice-image dynamics mediate the layered exchange, as in a segment that begins with Gibson’s seventh-grade class photo. All the students are white except Gibson. Superimposed footage of the dancer follows. She sits at a student’s desk, an older version of the politically naïve seventh-grader whom we continue to see, simultaneously, in the photo. The corresponding audio track begins with chants from a civil rights protest rally. A woman’s voice-off reading of Gibson’s early diary resumes: “I think the flag stands for something, the United States. Therefore, if you have no respect for the flag, you’re showing a lack of respect for the country.” Angry chants from the rally continue: “The people, united, will never be defeated. . . .” Soon thereafter, we see an image of Marilyn Monroe, over which is positioned a headshot of the seventh-grade Gibson. The reading of the diary proceeds: “All men are created equal.” The young Gibson’s photo fades out and footage of the dancer, crying, takes its place. A photo of the pigtailed, smiling young Gibson then reappears as the diary excerpt concludes: “The concept of all men are created equal is important to America. Maybe all men are created equal, but who says they die that way?”

Functioning as an autobiographical narrative, Flag doubles as a study of the exclusive socio-cultural system in which Gibson is situated. Resembling the “out-law” genres that Caren Kaplan examines, the video renegotiates “the relationship between personal identity and the world, between personal and social history.” [39] At the same time, the video involves the type of “perspectival adjustment” that Watson and Smith recommend. In particular, Flag contributes to the long-term project of studying and practicing forms of “life writing” other than what has been associated with Western autobiography (“Introduction,” De/colonizing, xvii). Hence, Flag explores issues that Watson and Smith address when they assert:

Since Western autobiography rests upon the shared belief in a commonsense identification of one individual with another, all ‘I’s [i.e., universal human subject/Man] are potentially interesting autobiographers. And yet, not all are ‘I’s.’ Where Western eyes see Man as a unique individual rather than a member of a collectivity, of race or nation, of sex or sexual preference, Western eyes see the colonized as an amorphous, generalized collectivity. The colonized ‘other’ disappears into an anonymous, opaque collectivity of undifferentiated bodies. . . . Moreover, heterogeneous ‘others’ are collapsed and fashioned into an essentialized ‘other’ whose ‘I’ has no access to a privatized but privileged individuality. (xvii)

In a complex manner, then, Flag maps out variants of “Gibson” while also dispelling notions of a universal human subject and an undifferentiated collectivity of “others,” as Watson and Smith might say (xvii). At the same time, the video introduces into the public sphere voices seldom heard there and exposes conflicts about identity that Gibson kept secret for many years.

The first diary entry that acknowledges racial bigotry shifts the tone of the girl’s narrative from self-deprecation in the face of a dominant white culture to a search for collective affirmation of another heritage. The diary entry explains how two white boys followed Gibson while she was riding her bicycle. The narrator reads:

He started cutting in near my bike and ramming my back wheel, all the while shouting: ‘Go home, nigger. Get out, nigger. Fucking nigger, get out.’ Heidi, I was scared at first, but later I wanted to kill them.

When the reading begins we see a medium shot of the flagmaker who is dyeing fabric. Inserts follow: a high school graduation photo of the Gibson figure, archival photos, presumably of Gibson’s ancestors. Intercut with the photos appears dance footage of Gibson’s stand-in. She moves stealthily, the American flag wrapped around her body. Exterior shots of fire are superimposed briefly during the sequences. As the diary reading winds down, the previously inserted photo of Marilyn Monroe reappears. Gibson’s graduation photo is positioned over Monroe’s image, fleetingly this time. The movie star’s image breaks up electronically; Gibson’s photo remains intact. A photo of the black militant Angela Davis emerges. Gibson’s ideological shifts are reinforced by a later scene in which the teenager’s graduation photo is mounted over Davis’s face just as it had been placed over Monroe’s earlier. [40] The dialogue between the diarist and the woman she is in the process of becoming reinforces the power of this shift. For the self-affirmation that the girl demands comes belatedly, and then only after the woman’s unraveling of a naturalized white mystique that so strongly had captivated – and deceived – the young diary writer.

In addition to exploring Gibson’s changing attitudes toward dominant white society, the video also inscribes a spatial framework indicative of discursive politics of the late 1980s. The dynamics of this frame link the interior setting of Gibson’s narrative, an artist’s studio, with exterior shots of the community outside. Besides setting the performative facets of Gibson’s narrative inside an enclosed artist’s studio, Flag relies on choreographed movement, an art installation, and experimental music that is ethnically indistinct. Although these variables evoke associations with the fine arts, the video also uses techniques from the mass media, especially toward the end of the piece. Cut away interviews with people on the street, for example, appropriate styles from television news reports. The interviews also introduce a culturally diverse range of voices and bodies into Gibson’s narrative. Rhythmically, the video fades in and out of the interior studio setting and the exterior community, often layering one scene over the other or constructing triptych-like arrangements that alternately vary the enframing scene. Voice-image transpositions further bridge distances between “inside” and “outside,” whereby voices from one scene speak over the other. Flag thus reinforces its “out-law” status and incorporates elements of cultural autobiography, which, according to Kaplan, expands “the borders of life writing to include coalition, the cooperative activities of people and groups with different points of view” (132). Such territorial intermixing not only challenges oppositions between high art and mass media, but it also helps to broaden the young Gibson’s perspective.

The concluding scene takes place inside the artist’s studio, walls now bare, performers absent, spotlight on a crumpled version of the American flag, which lies on the floor. By the time the lights dim, a master narrative has given way to new versions of old stories and new spaces in which to tell them. Somewhere in between the private artist’s studio and the public city street “Gibson” finds the wherewithal to alter her pledges of allegiance and to seek out new addressees. Transformed, she opens her diary to others.

Trick or Drink

Like Flag, the video Trick or Drink, by Vanalyne Green, reactivates youthful diary writing to stage a performance in which a woman confronts younger versions of herself. Various personas emerge in both tapes and the body is inscribed as a socially constructed site of resistance and discord. To complement readings from the early diaries, Trick or Drink displays the teenager’s personal, multimedia archive, which the mature Green disinters on camera in a voice-off style. Unlike Flag, which involves actors who follow the videomaker’s autobiographical script and members of the community who participate in journalistic interviews, Trick or Drink involves a cast of one in which the videomaker plays herself.

The child of alcoholic parents and a survivor of compulsive eating disorders, Green looks backward to move ahead. Along the way, she explores family secrets and documents her own compulsive activities, which involve weight and beauty maintenance during adolescence, bulimic episodes in college, and possessive relationships as an adult. Although Trick or Drink concentrates on two distinct periods, setting the first in 1962 when Green is fourteen and the second twenty years later, the video self-portrait makes clear that the woman continues to struggle with ghosts from the past. At the same time, she finds strength in the diaries to which she once turned for refuge. Transformed into public disclosures, personal writing from the two periods contributes to an autobiographical case study in which the build toward direct address plays a liberating role. Attention to “who is making films for whom, who is looking and speaking, how, where, and to whom” accentuates the interplay between voice and image in a multilayered and temporally displaced exchange. [41]

While the mature Green revisits the past and “dialogues” with a younger version of herself, she enters an insular space. Archival documents, such as reference materials designed for teenaged girls circa the early 1960s, suggest social forces beyond the teenager’s nuclear family; yet, the narrative focuses on the teenager’s personal world. Initially positioned as a disembodied voice off camera in this one-woman performance, the adult Green re-reads entries from the teenager’s diaries. Later, after a turning point in the adult’s section, Green appears on camera for the first time. At this point, she addresses viewers directly. These dynamics implicate features of the video confession that Renov identifies and suggest parallels with feminist confessional writing as well.

The way that Trick or Drink engages in confessional discourse unsettles any one circumscription of the genre and invites an interdisciplinary, as well as an intermedia, discussion. Renov, for example, looks “beyond both church and [psychoanalytic] couch” in his examination of independently produced, low-end confessional video (81). He argues for “a uniquely charged linkage between ‘video’ and ‘confession'” based on the immediacy associated with portapaks, a feature that allows independent videomakers and home consumers to produce, view, and exhibit their work without the presence of technicians or other intermediaries. Only invited viewers see the video confession, at least during the production process (81, 84). A central premise of his argument is that “taped self-interrogations can achieve a depth and a nakedness of expression that is difficult to duplicate with a crew or even a camera operator present” (88). As a form of “self-interrogation” that builds toward direct address, Trick or Drink exemplifies characteristics of the video confession that Renov posits (87, 97).

In other ways, Trick or Drink resembles the confessional subgenre of autobiographical writing that Rita Felski relates to the feminist model of consciousness-raising. [42] Careful to avoid derogatory implications of the term “confessional,” Felski defines the (sub)genre as “a type of autobiographical writing which signals its intention to foreground the most personal and intimate details of the author’s life” and thus introduce private matters into the public sphere (83), an agenda that Trick or Drink shares.

According to Joan Landes, second-wave feminists who emerged in the 1960s claimed that ‘the personal is political’ to challenge myths regarding the family and personal life. For many, the private sphere represented sites of “sexual inequality, unremunerated work, and seething discontent.” As Landes explains, consciousness-raising groups and feminist organisations paved the way for women to engage in public activism. Divisions between private and public life became closely linked to problems associated with sexual subordination. Landes maintains that women broke the silences of personal life in support of their efforts to improve the private sphere as well as the democratic public sphere. [43]

These ideas influenced women in all walks of life, including writers, artists, and videomakers. Attentive to problems associated with the private sphere, many women also considered it a source of creative inspiration that was valuable to explore. Both Gever and Tamblyn, for example, discuss how the notion that ‘the personal is political’ informed 1970s feminist performance. Besides introducing metaphors to counter sexist representations of “the mute compliant female body,” as Gever proposes (234), such performances often experimented with a range of autobiographical themes that celebrated the private sphere, a tendency that Tamblyn notes (“Significant,” 406).

With reference to such a social, cultural, and political context, Felski argues that a central feature of the feminist literary confession involves the implied relationship between a female author and a female reader and an emphasis on “the referential and denotative dimension of textual communication rather than its formal specificity,” features that distinguish the confession from “more consciously stylized and ‘literary’ examples of twentieth-century women’s autobiography” (83). Trick or Drink has roots in the feminist art movement and a tradition of videomaking that reaches out to women viewers, like the confession that Felski describes. The video experiments with stylized techniques in ways that resemble the literary examples of women’s autobiography which Felski also mentions. [44]

Felski identifies two main groups of feminist confession. The first group resembles the diary or journal form, which is written in the present tense. The second unfolds retrospectively and synthesizes the author’s life (85-86). According to this model, Trick or Drink represents a hybrid of the two groups in that it discloses entries from the teenager’s diary and the woman’s journal and also allows the autobiographical subject as an adult to look back on her youth. Simultaneously, the feminist confession encodes an audience, as does the video. Felski asserts:

It [the feminist confession] self-consciously addresses a community of female readers rather than an undifferentiated general public. This sense of communality is accentuated through a tone of intimacy, shared allusions, and unexplained references with which the reader is assumed to be familiar. The implied reader of the feminist confession is the sympathetic female confidante and is often explicitly encoded in the text through appeals, questions, and direct address. The importance of the reader’s role is directly related to the belief that she will understand and share the author’s position. (86)

Felski recognizes the tension that the confessor experiences between a focus on subjectivity and an attempt to construct an identity that is communal rather than individualistic (92). Felski does stress, however, contrary to critics who denigrate the attention to subjectivity, that within the context of women’s history and the traditional relegation of women to the private sphere, the public focus on these private matters provides a welcomed opportunity for critical reflection (92).

Throughout Trick or Drink, tension between the individual and the collective becomes apparent. Green’s encounters with Alateen, an organisation for teens who have alcoholic parents, and with Al-Anon, the adult counterpart, provide striking examples. The encounters also expand the scope of the audience that the video addresses to include various forms of addicts and children of addicts. Moreover, the narrative style of twelve-step programs offers another model of confessional discourse that finds its way into the video. Robyn Warhol and Helena Michie, who analyze twelve-step narratives of recovery, argue that “recovery and narrative are indistinguishable.” [45]

The videomaker as a young diary writer (1962)

Initially, we see a mausoleum of still images that have been collected, organized, and dated. This section represents the teenager’s private world, which has been designed to be unpalatable. Ill-equipped to control her parents’ addictions or her own attachments to food, a tormented young women seeks through writing to tame the chaos she does not understand. Adopting a semblance of social conformity, she keeps a beauty diary. Methodically, she records the nuances of a body in revolt. Whether painstakingly noting the state of her complexion, establishing corrective imperatives, or admonishing herself for minor eating infractions, she writes in an obsessive tone that indicates more is at stake than meets the eye. Controlling the day by day narrative of her life in this way, she links bodily preoccupations with writing and record keeping. Mass produced “progress charts” reinforce these preoccupations, allowing the young Green to assign accounts of her body to socially constructed and labeled grids. The composition of the charts, like the printed spaces of other diaries for girls and young women, represents forms of social conditioning that influence how the young writer constructs her life and complies with cultural directives. [46]

Reference materials designed for teenaged girls and representations of these teens circa the early 1960s are highlighted as Green disinters her personal archives. The opening segment, for example, begins with the date “1962” and the heading “Your beauty diary.” Inserts follow, which include illustrated magazine and newspaper articles with titles such as “Girls grow up,” “Tips to help you look and feel your best every day,” and “How to feel self-confident about menstruation.” Photos of Green as a healthy-looking teenager are included along with her diligently kept “Progress chart.” The chart comprises a commercially prepared grid that is divided into columns with titles such as “Complexion analysis” and “Beauty plan.” The camera focuses on selected portions of Green’s handwritten comments, which we see in spaces the form allots. In the column for complexion analysis, Green’s notations include remarks such as “scarred but clearing” and “better, but still scabs.” In the column for her beauty plan, she writes, “more washing, better diet, constant care, no picking, right foods. . . .”

During the procession of Green’s archival remembrances across the video screen, the woman’s voice-off readings of the teen’s diary excerpts resound. The young Green’s preoccupation with diet becomes apparent. On 2 January 1962, for instance, the woman recounts:

I’ve been tapering off on my food. Instead of five doughnuts I had one. . . . Oh, I looked back on that watch your weight chart. I’ve got to go on a real diet. Whoa is me. I want to work on my face.

Variations of these themes recur in subsequent diary entries.

Photographs of the videomaker as a young woman provide no visible hints of the turmoil her writing discloses, and other than a passing reference to her mother’s drinking, the writing avoids references to the familial cause of Green’s suffering. The diary writer looks wholesome, thin, and well adjusted, and, as the video assemblage of snapshots and beauty guides implies, she tries hard to fit the image of the average (white, middle-class) American teen. On the video stage that supports the performance, internal tensions become apparent. The harder the teenager tries to conform, the more frantic her writing becomes.

The diary entries that accumulate both aurally and on the video monitor suggest that Green sublimates into her writing the conflicts she experiences about her family and her self-image. Examples from a personal diary that Green kept in 1963 illustrate these tendencies. From a group photo of Green and other smiling teens, the camera cuts to an insert of Green’s private writing. Starting with a close-up and then slowly zooming out, the camera frames madly scrawled text that reads:

Dear Diary,

I HATE THEM.

They’re driving me crazy.

I HATE THEM.

While the text appears on screen, Green reads diary entries that complement the graphically represented passage and call into question its meaning, as when she states, “I’m reading The Diary of Anne Frank. Very different than my diary. Very good. Those stupid raisins. I hate them. I haven’t gone off yet. I hate my parents. You know why.” The voice-off reading provides a context for the written diary entry that appears on screen, which could refer to either the raisins or Green’s parents. The diary entries thus allude to family secrets without disclosing specifics. Writing provides an outlet for a rage that the teenager cannot name.

As long as Green keeps the diary private, where the gatekeepers think it belongs, the writing poses little threat to the social order. Jacques Derrida identifies the stakes when he says:

In order to cure the latter [logos] of the pharmakon [writing] and rid it of the parasite, it is thus necessary to put the outside back in its place. To keep the outside out. This is the inaugural gesture of ‘logic’ itself, of good ‘sense’ insofar as it accords with the self-identity of that which is: being is what it is, the outside is outside and the inside inside. Writing must thus return to being what it should never have ceased to be an accessory, an accident, an excess. [47]  (original emphasis)

Although the teenager complies with such exclusionary logic, the woman opts for another approach. She defines “inside” and “outside” in her own way. With reference to Derrida, Linda Anderson reframes questions about the genre of autobiography. Instead of refining the classification, she asks how the ‘law of genre’ works “to legitimize certain autobiographical writings and not others.” She relates the question to Derrida’s “larger questioning of the borders of the text, of what belongs to the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside.'” [48]

Similar questions may be asked of territorial demarcations related to private and public social spheres. According to Shirely Ardener, for instance, notions of boundaries that classify space reflect how social life is given shape according to culturally determined rules that societies generate. [49] Green explores these boundaries – and eventually explodes them – during the course of the performance. Territorial commitments shift as the distinctions that Green makes between private and public help both to empower and entrap her. For in the act of diary writing she learns to inscribe a body language that she can represent nowhere else. Yet, she has no interlocutors, either. In the teenager’s section of the video, we hear only the disembodied voice of Green as a woman, uninterrupted by other speakers. She does not appear on camera visually. Passing through again the teen’s insular world, twenty years later and assisted by video, Green devises a scenario that exposes her earlier dissimulation and puts excluded fragments of a life on display. By confronting the private horrors that society could not accommodate, Green introduces into public discourse voices once confined to a hellish room (and diary) of her own. The archival texts are revived, and the social forces that threatened the teenager are subtly unmasked. In the process, components of the archive break out of encasements that the teenager deemed inviolable. The time traveler reveals a scene of writing shaped by voices that society has disavowed and by ready-made compartments in which to put the silenced voices. Hélène Cixous imagines a scenario that relates to the force of Trick or Drink:

When ‘The Repressed’ of their culture and their society come back, it is an explosive return, which is absolutely shattering, staggering, overturning, with a force never let loose before. . . . Throughout their [women’s] deafening dumb history, they have lived in dreams, embodied but still deadly silent, in silences, in voiceless rebellions. [50] (original emphasis)

The young diary writer as a videomaker (1982)

The adult’s section of Trick or Drink examines directly the private horrors that did not fit on the young diary writer’s charts or in the pages of her book. Green begins with the same time frame as in the first section and uses a comparatively methodical approach. She also discusses addictions that she develops later in life, which involve eating disorders and the relationship with a particular boyfriend. Strategically positioned appearances of Green on-camera unsettle the voice-off pattern that dominates the video performance.

The section opens with an interior shot of a study. We see a bookcase, desk, and patterns of light that are reflected on the floor. This is where Green writes. The camera focuses on this scene while Green reads an excerpt from her adult journal, continuing the voice-off pattern that she uses in the teenager’s section:

Today, I want to cover the emotional terrain of a particular experience. I want to talk about children of alcoholics. I want to talk about suffering from a state of walking inconclusion, similar to walking pneumonia, or carrying an invisible virus that may flare up at any unexpected moment of weakness. But the words get swallowed down in me and my hands dislocate from the alphabetical buttons. The thoughts locked in my throat don’t come from self-pity. Had I known there were other children, like myself, for whom no one intervened, other children who saw things that should have never been seen, perhaps my life would be different. My experience belongs to a private family horror known as alcoholism. In this journal there are ten pages of incomplete attempts trying to live with the emotional inheritance of my family.

From the vantage point that the passing of time affords, Green tells the teenager’s story differently. Moreover, she imagines new audiences for her personal writing, unlike the young diarist who felt compelled to write for herself.

In addition to privileging retrospective journal entries, the mature Green adds to her personal archive and provides a social context for the memories that surface. During the concluding segment in the household items series, Green associates white sheets with her mother who wore them “as she knocked on people’s doors at Halloween with an empty glass saying ‘Trick or Drink.'” (Hence the video’s title.) On camera we see a fleeting image of someone masquerading as a ghost with the aid of a white sheet.

Empowering aspects of Green’s private space begin to overtake its entrapping hold. We glimpse anew the phantasms that drive the narrator outside the debilitating constructs she has known. In the segment leading to Green’s on-camera appearance, the adult speaks off-camera to the teenager, whom we see in photos that alternate with photos of her parents. Some of the snapshots are misleadingly happy and other alarmingly abject. In the scenario that unravels, which Green describes as “a living surrealism,” Green’s voice-off periodically incants, “Pretend you are dreaming.” As a belated response to the teenager, the woman offers support. But the woman, too, wants to understand, as when she asks, “Why are they talking to you like that? Why are they laughing at you? Why are they mad? Don’t you have the right to have good parents?” Finally, Green simply imposes another fantasy: “You are a good child. You have a good family. You will wake up and this will end.” Her parents’ alcoholism underlies the despair that the anecdotes convey.

Unwilling to sustain an insular space that is dependent on archival images and haunted by her mother’s ghost, Green takes the power of self-inscription a step further. After declaring, “This is about trying to get help,” she makes room for new representations of her body in the text. Green’s talking head performances take place on a bare stage. She assumes stationary poses (a frontal shot at first, a silhouetted profile later). Green’s on-camera appearances unsettle a pattern that has been established. Shortly afterward, Lou Reed’s singing “The power of positive drinking” is introduced, an unexpected addition, since we have not yet heard “outside” voices. Together, these disruptions impose traces of an order beyond that of the hermetically displayed still lives that have been featured so far.

The altered dynamics parallel a shift in Green’s mode of address. For the first time, she speaks to the audience directly, her image and voice synchronized. Trained by diaristic beauty charts to represent her own body, she also has learned to keep such modes of representation to herself, to regard herself as the addressee. Now she looks at others.

Teresa de Lauretis’s writings on film suggest implications for such approaches to spectatorial address. She argues, for example, that the space constructed by a film may be not only a textual or filmic space of vision but also a critical space of analysis, “a horizon of possible meanings which includes or extends to the spectator.” According to de Lauretis, films that address spectators as women define character, image, camera, and other points of identification with the “female, feminine, or feminist” (133). The mode of address, more than portrayals of women either positively or negatively, concerns de Lauretis. She asks questions such as “who is making films for whom, who is looking and speaking, how, where, and to whom.” She regards cinema as a social technology and encourages others to “articulate the conditions and forms of vision for another social subject” (134-35). This process, she stresses, involves redefining aesthetic and formal knowledge while also acknowledging differences of women from Woman and understanding differences among women (136, 146).

Mode of address relates to Trick or Drink in two key ways – the target audience and the performer’s gaze. Although the story involves issues with which women can identify, Green also reaches out to other addicts, regardless of gender, and to women and men who have alcoholic parents or who have been affected by alcoholism in some way. In fact, Green incorporates into Trick or Treat the guidelines that she received from Alateen, an organisation for teenaged children of alcoholics. During her passage from invisibility to visibility on camera, she relies on the guidelines again.

Once on camera, Green identifies her affiliation with Alateen and explains its procedures. The camera cuts from Green to copies of the guidelines on screen. An important part of Green’s personal archive, the Alateen guidelines, and those of Al-Anon, its counterpart for adults, also inform Trick or Drink‘s confessional style and type of self-disclosure. The Alateen-defined problem that Green highlights includes the following assertions:

We live from the viewpoint of victims, and are attracted by that weakness in our love, friendship, and career relationships.

We either become alcoholics, marry them, or both, or find another compulsive activity such as compulsive overeating.

We judge ourselves harshly and have a very low sense of self-esteem. This is manifested in a preoccupation with ‘wrong’ behavior and obsessive need for reassurance.

In the background, Lou Reed’s singing accentuates Green’s transition from an insular, private space to a social, public space. The shift from self-address to direct address parallels this move. Green turns her gaze away from herself in an effort to engage with others. Hence, she acknowledges public reception. She also precipitates a turning point in the autobiographical narrative. As Mellencamp might say, she positions herself as a subject who looks and talks back (130-31). On the stage where Green performs, however, boundaries between private and public prove to be more virtual than real. Ghosts linger and laws break down. She finds comfort in a familiar passageway.

In the last section of the video, Green, again in a voice-off fashion, provides a detailed account of her experiences at a meeting for adult children of alcoholics. The self-portrait ends there, with Green in a room whose parameters are defined collectively by its inhabitants, of which she is now one. In her final voice-off, Green comments:

What sickness is this that I am at home in the smoke-filled back room of the progressive church? . . . How is it that in such a room I experience the only moments of complete and unspoken recognition? Finally, I am at home. Finally, I’m with my family.

The relationships that Green cultivates with Alateen and Al-Anon, in combination with the affiliations that she develops with the feminist art movement, suggest how she resolves tensions between an individual and a collective identity, tensions that Felski associates with feminist confession (92) and Warhol and Michie link to twelve-step narratives of recovery (348). New forms of intersubjectivity connect Green to her audiences while she attempts “to reconcile mental space with the social sphere.” [51] The “self-interrogations” that transpire during the course of the performance reveal “a nakedness of expression” typically associated with the type of video confessions that Renov examines (88). Like other tapes that he associates with this genre, Trick or Drink aids the confessor’s self-understanding and simultaneously encourages viewers to engage in two-way communication, forge human bonds, expedite emotional recovery, and understand “across the gaps of human difference, rather than simply capitalize on those differences in a rush to spectacle” (97).

As Trick or Drink enters the private homes of its viewers and participates in public exhibitions, it indirectly commemorates all the private spaces and smoke-filled back rooms that compelled Green to write. The video thus documents the latest transmutation of the teenager’s diary and the horrors stored there. In a move reminiscent of the ghosts that return to haunt Green, disavowed voices that she has suppressed return to haunt the gatekeepers. Along the way, Green positions herself as an autobiographical subject who moves back and forth between culturally determined and socially generated classifications of space. [52]  The renewed mobility between different spheres that the video documents hints at the type of change Kerstin Shands imagines when she says:
Women have not just been lacking spaces of their own . . . nor have they always been prohibited to enter male-dominated public spaces. The basic prohibition for woman has perhaps been precisely this kind of free movement between worlds. . . .” [53]

The performance unsettles “metaphorical and real spaces of power.” [5] Viewers discover new passageways.

Conclusion

Gibson’s Flag and Green’s Trick or Drink explore how personal, social, spatial, and historical strands may be interwoven to tell the story of a woman’s life. The personal archives that the videos showcase are particularly noteworthy for the inclusion of diaries from the videomakers’ adolescence, which instigate the adults’ remembrances of the past. In the case of Flag, the diary entries of an eleven-year-old girl disclose Gibson’s reflections on race, cultural identity, and patriotism in 1963. Writings from high school document shifting attitudes. To provide a context for the disclosure of Gibson’s thoughts, the video examines the social milieu of the mid-1960s and its aftermath, emphasizing the politics of race and protest in the United States. As if simulating the private space in which Gibson wrote her early diary, the actor who stands in for the adult Gibson performs inside a makeshift artist’s studio along with a woman who represents the white mystique that both captivated and misled the diary writer. To offset the private, interior spaces which the video makes public and to introduce a culturally diverse cast of characters, exterior scenes from the surrounding community are edited into the narrative. Both on camera and in a voice-off style over scenes inside the studio, members of the community express their feelings about the American flag and social equality. They, too, become part of the story. Instigated by the musings of an African American girl, two historical eras thus come together – the 1960s and the 1980s meet. In the process, discursive choices that the young diarist made carry over into the woman’s videomaking. Gibson advances from private, handwritten notes to “Heidi,” an imaginary confidant and alter ego, to independently produced videos for others. The journey from the first inscription of “Dear Diary” to the screening of Flag implicates the independent video movement that enabled the once passive consumer of media images to produce her own stories. To paraphrase Smith and Watson, she “writes” herself into history (“Introduction,” Women, 5).

Green plays herself in a one-woman performance that brings together diary notes that she wrote in 1962 and 1963, beginning when she was fourteen, with journals entries that she wrote in 1982. Divided into two sections, which might be subtitled “The videomaker as a young diary writer” and “The young diary writer as a videomaker,” Trick or Drink releases into the public sphere painfully graphic notes about the personal horrors with which Green struggled as a teenager and as an adult. The first section focuses on entries in a beauty diary for young women that she kept in 1962 but also includes excerpts from a more traditional diary that she kept a year later. Preoccupations with her complexion and her weight are offset by allusions to her alcoholic parents and the family’s inability to comply with the American dream. Like the young Gibson, she, too, embraces the standards of beauty that idealized a certain type of white female. Instead of dealing with conflicts about racial differences, though, as Gibson does, Green feels different from dominant representations of young Americans for reasons related to her parents’ alcoholism and addictive traits of her own. Although Trick or Drink focuses on the teenager’s private world of the early 1960s, the social order beyond the confines of Green’s diary always looms, a presence reinforced by the disinterment of Green’s personal archives, which include popular articles for young women as well as the beauty diary itself, which, like the articles, reinforces cultural notions of what a teenager should be. Media images of all-American nuclear families contribute further to the understanding of how the teenager perceived her place in society. References to Alateen (and later to Al-Anon, the adult counterpart of this organisation for children of alcoholics) suggest collective identifications, as does the type of confessional performance that Green uses, which has roots in feminist traditions of the 1970s based on the notion that “the personal is political.” The division of the video into two historical moments, 1962 and 1982, introduces spatial configurations to support the discourses that are associated with each period. During the course of her time travels, Green makes the transition from a disembodied, off-camera voice over the teenager’s private world to an on-camera performer who addresses directly audiences in the public sphere. She revisits the past to prepare for the future.

Attention to the autobiographical designs of Flag and Trick or Drink provides signposts to both theorists and practitioners who study women’s personal narratives. In addition to complementing analytical models that critics and scholars have proffered, constructions that interweave personal, social, spatial, and historical strands open up creative directions for autobiographers to develop further, whatever their discursive medium. Flag and Trick or Drink demonstrate how two American women from the same post-World War II generation approach the task. At the same time, the videos contribute to cultural archives that comprise autobiographical texts from the worlds of print, moving images, visual arts, and hypermedia. Such assemblages may be international in scope, configured according to a variety of historical periods, and based on considerations other than or in addition to the subject’s gender.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, Smith and Watson recognize that “the theoretical grounds” beneath the study of women’s autobiographical practices continue to shift. They consider ways for scholars to secure the future of the discipline. In addition to broadening the parameters of archives and documentary collections, among other objectives, Smith and Watson encourage scholars to apply to all autobiographical texts the questions they have raised in relation to women’s texts, with special attention to intersections among gender and other components of identity (“Introduction,” Women, 38-39, 41). The perspectives Smith and Watson support a few years earlier in Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography represent an attempt to extend such critiques to the culture at large. Tamblyn also reframes the parameters of her analysis in the mid-1990s to acknowledge changes related to her field of inquiry. Concerned about the “quasi-obsolete technology of video” and the shifting mediascape that the precarious status of video portends, she adds to her consideration of the video apparatus consumers’ home videos (“Qualifying,” 13), a move that coincides with Smith and Watson’s expanded view of autobiographical interventions in everyday life (“Getting,” 15-16).

Produced in the 1980s before online multimedia superseded video as the next frontier and a host of new media technologies appeared on the scene in the 1990s, [55]  Flag and Trick or Drink represent the kind of autobiographical passageways that artists constructed during a certain historical period. Amidst changes in the “public” sphere that preceded the theoretical shifts and technological breakthroughs to which Smith and Watson and Tamblyn allude, the videos stage “private” transitions that women undergo. The narratives hint at routes that lead not only to a new communications era but one in which women investigate autobiographical theories and practices for the twenty-first century. Blurring genres and experimenting with multimedia approaches to portraiture, the videos rework autobiographical, as well as diaristic, conventions. For twenty-first-century producers who look back on Flag and Trick or Drink, the videos identify what Tamblyn deems “new spaces for cultural intervention” (“Qualifying,” 13). Thus, in addition to unsettling barriers between private and public spheres, between high art and popular culture, and between print and video, Flag and Trick or Drink bridge gaps between videomaking during a pre-internet era and multimedia production in the age of the World Wide Web.

Endnotes

[1] Flag, prod. and dir. Linda Gibson, 24 min., 1989, videocassette. The video is distributed by Gibson. Contact her c/o Media Alliance, at WNET/Thirteen, 450 West 33rd Street, New York, New York, 10001, USA, phone: (212) 560-2929,
(20 August 2001).
Trick or Drink, prod. and dir. Vanalyne Green, 20 min., 1984, videocassette. The video is distributed by the Video Data Bank, affiliated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 112 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Illinois 60603, USA, 312-345-355 (phone), 312-541-8073 (fax), (17 August 2001); and Women Make Movies, 462 Broadway Suite 500, New York, NY 10013, USA, 212-925-0606 (phone), 212-925-2052 (Fax), (17 August 2001).
[2] For an introduction to theories of women’s autobiography, see Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 1998). For a general introduction to theories of autobiography that considers feminist positions, see Linda Anderson, Autobiography: The New Critical Idiom (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). The analyses in both books focus primarily on written texts, although the issues that are discussed pertain to a range of media. Further references to these texts appear as page numbers in parentheses.
[3] For an introduction to postmodern autobiographies, see Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters, eds., Autobiography and Postmodernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
[4] Patricia Mellencamp, “Uncanny Feminism,” in Indiscretions: Avant-garde Film, Video, and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), 131. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses. For another perspective on women and postmodernism, see Andreas Huyssen, “Mass culture as woman: modernism’s other,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture,” ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), 188-207.
[5] Le Doeuff examines “the philosophical imaginary” to emphasize its gendered presuppositions and implicit focus on masculine addressees. She regards the imaginary not as a psychoanalytical term but more as a rhetorical term that entails the use of figures or imagery in texts, a thinking-in-images that involves narrative, pictorial, or analogical components, which, when studied systematically, constitute the exclusive repository of images available to philosophy or the image banks on which philosophical discourses rely, however unwittingly. See Michèle Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 115; and Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc., trans. Trista Selous (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991). Marita Sturken discusses how early video collectives in the 1970s compiled databanks of images in order to build “an alternative visual history to the nationalist history produced by broadcast television” and thus paved the way for makers to experiment with the politics of individual and collective memory in later years. See Marita Sturken, “The politics of video memory: electronic erasures and inscriptions,” in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, eds. Renov and Suderburg (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3-12.
[6] Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “Introduction: situating subjectivity in women’s autobiographical practices,” introduction to Smith and Watson,Women, 38-39. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses.
[7]  For an interdisciplinary examination of spatiality, see Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996). Soja reinforces the simultaneity and interrelatedness of the spatial, the historical, and the social (3). In addition to adding spatiality to the historical/social pair and to combining postmodernist and modernist perspectives, the model he devises recombines Firstspace concerns with the ‘real’ and Secondspace concerns with ‘imagined’ representations of spatiality (6). He also examines a “Postmodern spatial feminist critique” (111). See also Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the spaces of femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 50-90.
[8] Martha Gever, “The feminism factor: video and its relation to feminism,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, eds. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York: Aperture, in association with Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990), 241. Theorists of women’s literary autobiography and theorists of women’s film and video emphasize differences among women. For literary views, see note 2 above. For approaches related to film, see Teresa de Lauretis, “Rethinking women’s cinema: aesthetics and feminist theory,” in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 136. For a consideration of both film and video, see Mellencamp, 29-30. Further references to these texts appear as page numbers in parentheses.
[9] The often overlooked contingent of independent video risks erasure from history, largely because of insufficient resources to document and preserve the work, particularly videos that lack distributors and are housed in small, nonprofit or personal archives. For background and related links pertaining to video (and film) preservation in the United States, see Independent Media Arts Preservation (IMAP, sponsored by Electronic Arts Intermix),
(18 August 2001); Experimental Television Center, Ltd., “Video history project,”
(18 August 2001); and the American Film Institute (AFI), “Preservation,” (17 August 2001). Major distributors of women’s independent video in the United States include the Video Data Bank and Women Make Movies. (See note 1 above for complete citations.) Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), in New York, is another leading resource for artists’ video and new media. See the Web site for additional information,
< http://www.eai.org/> (18 August 2001).
[10] Innumerable women and men, girls and boys, chronicle their lives on the Web and correspond with one another via diary lists or “burbs” (organized around common interests), “prompts” (offered as inspiration for diary entries), Webrings, and other electronic forums that promote communication among diarists globally. Often including photographs of themselves, family albums, and other multimedia additions, these online diarists either experiment independently with formats that they design themselves or publish on preconfigured sites that several companies host free of charge. The term “weblog” or “blog” describes a form of diary or journal writing that features Web pages on which short, frequent, chronologically ordered entries are posted, usually of a personal nature. For examples of online diaries and blogs, see Diarist.Net, “Diarist.Net: diaries and journals online,” 27 August 2001,
(27 August 2001); Diaryland, “Diaryland: get your own fun, easy online diary,”
(27 August 2001); The diary project (for teens), “The diary project: over 39981 diary entries posted since 1995,” 25 August 2001,
(27 August 2001); and Pyra Labs, “Blogger: push button publishing for the people,” 27 August 2001,
(27 August 2001). See also Nan Fischer, “Inspired to journal,” 27 August 2001,
(27 August 2001), and Elayne Zalis, “Autobiographical / biographical Webs: selected links,” 20 August 2001,
(27 August 2001).
[11] Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, “Resolving video,” introduction to Renov and Suderburg, Resolutions, xvii. For a general background on independent video, see the collection of essays in the anthology. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses. See also the essays in Hall and Fifer. Renov and Suderburg distinguish between the two anthologies as follows: “Illuminating Video made available the most diverse and insightful critical writing on video written with the art context to date [1990]. The direction of our collective project could now more sensibly expand to encompass new investigative sites well beyond the scope of broadcast television or the art world” (xviii).
[12] For an overview of feminist performance art in the United States, see Moira Roth, ed. The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970-1980, A Source Book (Los Angeles: Astro Arts, 1983). For a survey of the “first generation” of women videomakers, which curator JoAnn Hanley associates with the period 1970-75, see JoAnn Hanley and Ann-Sargent Wooster, The First Generation: Women and Video, 1970-75 (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1993). The exhibition and accompanying catalogue focus on the work of twenty-one women, many of whom engage in performance. For an informative discussion of performance in relation to African American documentary films, see Gloria J. Gibson, “Identities unmasked/empowerment unleashed: the documentary style of Michelle Parkerson,” in Feminism and Documentary,” eds. Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 150-55. See also Jacqueline Bobo, ed., Black Women Film and Video Artists (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
[13] Mellencamp, “Prologue: speaking personally,” prologue to Indiscretions, xi.
[14] Julia Lesage, “Women’s fragmented consciousness in feminist experimental autobiographical video,” in Waldman and Walker, 310. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses.
[15] Christine Tamblyn, “Significant others: social documentary as personal portraiture in women’s video of the 1980s,” in Hall and Fifer, 405. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses.
[16] Celeste Schenck, “All of a piece: women’s poetry and autobiography,” in Life/lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, eds. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1988), 283-86. See also Shari Benstock, Textualizing the Feminine: On the Limits of Genre (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); and Jacques Derrida, “The law of genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7 (autumn 1980): 55-81. Further references to these texts appear as page numbers in parentheses.
[17] See Rosalind Krauss, “Video: the aesthetics of narcissism, October 1 (spring 1976): 50-64.
[18] Acknowledging the generic possibilities that women explore, Smith and Watson state, “A wide and growing range of narrative projects have generated new or hybrid forms for addressing diverse audiences – forms such as pathography, collective histories, collaborative life writing projects, testimonial and witnessing, manifesto, bilingual projects, survival narratives, performance art, ethnography, scriptotherapy, and legal testimony.” See Smith and Watson, “Introduction,” Women, 37.
[19] Christine Tamblyn, “Qualifying the quotidian: artist’s video and the production of social space,” in Renov and Suderburg, Resolutions, 13-14, 17. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses. Other home video genres that Tamblyn mentions include letters, wills, pornography, and documentation of special occasions as well as of natural disasters and police brutality (14). Her research encompasses broadcasts on America’s Funniest Home Videos and submissions to Sony’s Visions of the U.S.  home video contest. The artists’ tapes that Tamblyn cites in the video diaries genre are: George Kuchar’s Weather Diary #3 (USA 1988); Lynn Hershman’s Binge (USA 1987); and Sadie Benning’s It Wasn’t Love (USA 1992). The artists’ tapes that she includes in the family album genre are: Jeanine Mellinger’s In Those Days (USA 1988) and Janice Tanaka’s Memories from the Department of Amnesia (USA 1989). Other artists’ genres that she covers include therapeutic videos and travelogues (17).
[20] Smith and Watson note that terms related to ‘women’s autobiography’ are shifting. Alternatives include ‘women’s autobiographical practices,’ ‘women’s personal narratives,’ and ‘women’s lifewriting.’ Alternatives to the word “autobiography” distinguish the texts from approaches that represent “an uncritical Western understanding of the subject of autobiography.” See Smith and Watson, “Introduction,” Women, 29. Regarding writing technologies, see Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001).
[21] Mary Jane Moffat, foreword to Revelations: Diaries of Women, eds. Moffat and Charlotte Painter (New York: Vintage, 1974), 8. The international collection of previously published diary writing covers a broad age distribution (from seven years old to eighty) and historical range. See also Laurel Holliday, ed., Heart Songs:The Intimate Diaries of Young Girls (New York: Methuen, 1980). The anthology includes excerpts from an international selection of ten girls’ diaries (e.g., Anaïs Nin, Marie Bashkirtseff, Nelly Ptaschkina) that spans five centuries. The selections are out-of-print or considered rare and accessible only to scholars (ix). For a study of nineteenth-century French girls who kept diaries, see Philippe Lejeune, “The ‘journal de jeune fille’ in nineteenth-century France,” trans. Martine Breillac, in Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries, eds. Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff (Amherst: U of Massachusetts

[22] Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, “Issues in studying women’s diaries: a theoretical and critical introduction,” introduction to Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996) pp. 2-3. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses.
[23] Margo Culley, “Introduction to A Day at a Time: Diary Literature of American Women, from 1764-1985,” in Smith and Watson, Women, 217-21. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses. See also A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women form 1764 to the Present, ed. Margo Culley (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1985).
[24] For an introductory examination of related issues, see Anderson. See also Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 152-53. Consider, for example, the statement Barthes makes regarding his autobiographical musings: “It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel-or rather by several characters” (an abbreviated form appears first in opening pages, n.p. and then this version on p.119). For background on fictional diaries, see Lorna Martens, The Diary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,) 1985.
[25] Leigh Gilmore, “The mark of autobiography: postmodernism, autobiography, and genre,” introduction to Ashley, Gilmore, and Peters, 3. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses. See also Leigh Gilmore, “Autobiographics,” in Smith and Watson, Women, 183-89; and Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994).
[26] For further background, see note 2 above.
[27] Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, introduction to Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, eds. Brodzki and Schenck (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1988), 14.
[28] Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, introduction to Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, eds. Smith and Watson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota P, 1996), 2. Further references to these texts appear as page numbers in parentheses. For other collaborations between Smith and Watson that deal with autobiographical texts, refer to Smith and Watson,Women (see note 2 above), and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., De/colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1992).
[29] Independent filmmaker Michelle Citron suggests that autobiographical films and videos, which often expose “untidy and contradictory” experiences and feelings, tend to break silences. The autobiographical explorations thus “lessen the isolation and despair that we often experience, both personally and culturally.” By speaking about what usually is hidden socially, these films and videos also threaten the status quo, she claims. See Michelle Citron, “Fleeing from documentary: autobiographical film/video and the ‘ethics of responsibility,'” in Waldman and Walker, 271-72.
[30]Michael Renov, “Video confessions,” in Renov and Suderburg, Resolutions, 81-82. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses. See also Leigh Gilmore, “Policing Truth: Confession, Gender, and Autobiographical Authority,” in Ashley, Gilmore, and Peters, 54-78. . For a discussion of how video technology is contributing to cultural transformations on a global scale, see Renov and Suderburg, “Introduction,” xiii-xvi.
[31] For Renov’s list, see p. 87. For Tamblyn’s list, see “Qualifying,” p. 17. See also note 19 above. Both essays appear in Renov and Suderburg, Resolutions.
[32] Renov’s analysis of Wendy Clarke’s participatory video projects, “The love tapes” (USA 1978+) and “One on one” (USA 1990s), shows how Clarke, an artist and videomaker as well as a psychotherapist, bridges gaps between various social strata by providing a platform for a cross-section of Americans to “confess” in a public forum. “One on one” allows prison inmates to exchange confessional video letters with people on the outside (89-97).
[33] Linda Gibson is listed in the credits as one of the voice-off narrators, so she participates aurally rather than corporeally.
[34] bell hooks, “Writing autobiography,” in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 158. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses. See also bell hooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996).
[35] Culley claims that notes to ‘Dear Diary’ address an ideal audience that is “always available, always listening, always sympathetic” (217). She emphasizes the important role that the sense of audience plays in influencing the type of self-construction the diarist chooses: “Friend, lover, mother, God, a future self -+ whatever role the audience assumes for the writer – that presence becomes a powerful ‘thou’ to the ‘I’ of the diarist” (218). Culley notes that it is not uncommon for diarists to name their diaries. The name that Gibson selects and the reason she selects it suggest that she envisions her ideal audience as another version of herself.
[36] Nellie McKay, “The narrative self: race, politics, and culture in black american women’s autobiography,” in Smith and Watson, Women, 104-5. See also Joanne M. Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
[37] Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, “De/colonization and the politics of discourse in women’s autobiographical practices,” introduction to Watson and Smith, De/colonizing, xx. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses.
[38] Janet Walker and Diane Waldman, introduction to Walker and Waldman, 25-26, original emphasis.
[39] Caren Kaplan, “Resisting autobiography: out-law genres and transnational feminist subjects,” in Smith and Watson, De/colonizing, 130. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses.
[40] For background, see Arlyn Diamond, “Choosing sides, choosing lives: women’s autobiographies of the civil rights movement,” in American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Margo Culley (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992), 218-31.
[41] De Lauretis, 135.
[42] Rita Felski, “On confession,” in Smith and Watson, Women, 83. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses.
[43] Joan B. Landes, introduction to Feminism: The Public and the Private, ed. Landes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1.
[44] See Green’s interview in the documentary Women of Vision: Eighteen Histories in Feminist Film and Video (USA 1998), written, prod., dir., nar. Alexandra Juhasz, 80 min, videocassette. See also the transcription of the interview in Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, ed. Alexandra Juhasz (Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
[45] Robyn R. Warhol and Helena Michie, “Twelve-step teleology: narratives of recovery/recovery as narrative,” in Smith and Watson, Getting, 348. Further references to this text appear as page numbers in parentheses. See also Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, Inc.,
“Al-Anon/Alateen: hope and help for families and friends of alcoholics,”
< http://www.al-anon.alateen.org/> (15 August 2001).
[46] See Cynthia Huff, “Textual boundaries: space in nineteenth-century women’s manuscript diaries,” in Bunkers and Huff, 123.
[47] Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s pharmacy,” trans. Barbara Johnson, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 128.
[48] Anderson, 9-10. See also Jacques Derrida, “Law ,” 55-81.
[49] Shirley Ardener, “Ground rules and social maps for women,” introduction to Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps, ed. Shirley Ardener (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 11-12.
[50] Hélène Cixous, “Sorties: out and out: attacks/ways out/forays,” trans. Betsy Wing, The Newly Born Woman, eds. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 95.
[51] Tamblyn, “Qualifying,” 27.
[52] Ardener, 11-12.
[53] Kerstin W. Shands, Embracing Space: Spatial Metaphors in Feminist Discourse (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood P, 1999), 66.
[54] Mellencamp, “Uncanny,” 131.
[55] For background on the explosion of electronic media in the 1990s, see Renov and Suderburg, “Introduction,” xi-xxiii.

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