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Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS), Rothermere Institute, Oxford University, April 6-8, 2002.


The American Quest for Self : Some Aspects of Women’s Self-Representational Writing on the Internet


Viviane Serfaty

Abstract

Numerous sites devoted to diaries have sprouted up on the Internet over the past five years. The network thus offers anonymous diarists a space where the inner workings of self can be deployed and offered to the gaze of potentially innumerable readers. In addition, self-representational writing has played a crucial part both in the construction of the concept of femininity and in the construction of modern feminine identities.

I propose to study some of the diaries written by American women and posted on the Internet. Looking primarily at networks of imagery, figures of speech and thematic content, I will attempt to identify some of the strategies used by anonymous American women to construct identity on the Internet. I will also attempt to determine whether these highly public diaries function as gender-specific discourses.

In a second stage, I propose to examine the relationships between the practices of women diarists on the Internet and the traditional American quest for self.