PERFORMING SUBJECTIVITY ON AND BEYOND THE PAGE: CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN, LATINA, AND CARIBBEAN LIFE WRITERS AND NEW MEDIA

Utilizing Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s definition of performance, Diana Taylor’s performance as “world-making,” and Judith Butler’s complex and interactive constitution of the subject, this study explores how a total of six contemporary Latin American, Latina, and Caribbean women authors perform subjectivity (per Smith and Watson’s definition) on the traditional autobiographical page and via new media. The six women authors are from two generations. The first generational group of life writers includes three Latina and Latin American literary icons along with their following traditional autobiographical texts: Isabel Allende (b. 1942), Mi país inventado (2003); Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (2015); and Gioconda Belli (b. 1948), El país bajo mi piel (2001, 2002). The second group, a subsequent generation of Latin American, Latina, and Caribbean life writers, includes the following individuals and their respective autobiographical texts: Carmen Aguirre (b. 1967), Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (2011); Wendy Guerra (b. 1970), Todos se van (2006); and Yoani Sánchez (b. 1975), Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth about Cuba Today (2009, in Italian; 2010, in Spanish; 2011, in English). In addition to these autobiographical texts, I analyze how they perform subjectivity via their personal websites, blogs, (video) interviews, and Facebook; and how online interactivity with other online participants co-constructs their performed subjectivities. I discuss the significance of their autobiographical performances beyond the traditional autobiographical page via automediality, or the expansion of the self via new media, and argue that their performance of subjectivity as twenty-first century autobiographical authors involves the expansion of the traditional “paratext” to include the “intertext” of the Web 2.0, that is, the interactive Internet. The “intertext” is the collision of literary and non-literary texts and the meaning constructed from their interactive processes. I argue that the more complex the world becomes through the systems of globalization in which we live today the more we must acknowledge the expanded space through which individuals (e.g. authors) perform subjectivity; and consider how this process may facilitate “gain[ing] access to other cultural scripts” and “understand[ing] [one another] differently” (Smith and Watson 59).

INDEX WORDS: Autobiography, Life writing, Performance, Subjectivity, Identity, Embodiment, Relationality, Paratext, Intertext, Nation, Globalization, Transnationalism, Revolution, Cuba, Fidel Castro, Sandinismo, Communism, Socialism, Counterrevolution, New media, Automediality, Isabel Allende, Sandra Cisneros, Gioconda Belli, Carmen Aguirre, Wendy Guerra, Yoani Sánchez