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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