Biographical Criticism and the Passion Project Now

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the future audience imagined for many of the biographical passion projects. It talks about more recent experiments in biographical writing by Lisa Cohen, Jenny Diski, Nathalie Léger, Monique Truong, and Kate Zambreno that share intellectual and affective motivations with the modernist practices. If the biographical and archival projects hope to assure a future readership for queer feminist life stories, then these contemporary writers volunteer as that readership through the generosity of their attention and the experimental forms of their continued custodianship. The chapter suggests that they write with the affective engagement and sense of generic activism that so many mid-century women harnessed to preserve the lives of their friends, partners, lovers, wives, and companions. In this sense, the chapter ends with a generation of women writers who, like their ancestors at midcentury, see the work of writing as inseparable from the work of recovery.