Body Work: Diarising Self-Display and Risk

Abstract

This essay examines the various kinds of 'body work' that the Dutch travel journalist Mary Pos displays in the diaries she kept from the 1930s until the early 1950s: the labour of daily activities such as travelling, diarising, letter writing, smoking and eating, and doing household chores; the labour of selfpresentation, including dressing up; and the labour of negotiating other women's bodies, and the ways in which her body is read by others. It discusses the diarist's physical performance of self and her acts of rebellion in her writings, and applies Simone de Beauvoir's two alternative routes for womenthrough vulnerability, risking the body in erotic love, and through conquest, risking the body in the world-to the Pos diaries. Both alternative routes clearly materialise in the Pos diaries, and even seem to enhance each other. In a second move, using work written by Maria Tamboukou, Sonia Wilson and others, this essay examines the process that constituted me as an intimate reader of the diaries-a process where personal memories and associations, sensuous impressions, imagination, and bodily proximity interact in the process of reading manuscript diaries. The intimate reader needs to be particularly self-reflexive and critical of their reading position and analysis.