Part of my pedagogical project has been both to
help my students
"see" their own social constructedness and also to mobilize this
theoretical "preamble
to investigation," as Taussig says. Having the students focus on
the form of print
autobiography, and then encouraging them to develop our own form
of hypertextual
autobiography, achieves both of these purposes. Through the
reading of various "life
stories," students come to see that lives, like autobiographies,
are constructed. Early
in the term, students themselves are pointing to the
constructedness of categories
such as race, class, and gender. To leave them at the point of
this realization would
be to stop short. Instead, I ask them: how can we take this understanding of
constructedness and use it to create
a different kind of autobiography, one which takes the electronic
form of hypertext as
its point of departure and makes a different kind of statement
about subjectivity than
print autobiographies
do?
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