Confession and Feminist Autobiography

In Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation, Leigh Gilmore argues that confessional discourse functions as a technology of the autobiography that aligns it with "truth," thereby authenticating or authorizing the story being told: "In order to stand as an authoritative producer of 'truth,'" Gilmore writes, "one must successfully position oneself as a confessing subject whose account adequately fulfills enough of the requirements of confession" (107-08). At the same time, confessional discourse is structured by both the "spiritual [and] . . . legal constraints of truth-telling," as well as dominant notions of gender identity (109). Thus, in bespeaking identity it constructs and polices identity.

Following the lead of Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, Gilmore is interested in the ways in which feminist autobiography works to expose truth and identity as performative constructs, contingent categories that are produced as effects of discourse. Through their presentation of confession as situated within a particular time and place, Gilmore contends, feminist autobiographers frequently stage "a canny raid on the discourses of truth and identity" (226). Although eneri's confession in "I am afraid of being afraid" is not necessarily staging its raid in exactly this way, its confessional masquerade results in the same effect. Whatever truth it references, it continually undoes through its looping movement from the unintelligible to the intelligible (or vice versa).

On the one hand, then, the design contest judge's comment does seem to recognize that eneri has created an effect: "it has the feeling of. . ." On the other hand, and more likely the case, the judge has read the personal/confessional elements of the site as a representation of truth — the real or true feelings of the author — feelings so personal that they are viewed by the judge as "scary." As I will demonstrate, however, Chan's work much more closely approximates that of Gilmore's feminist autobiographer in its many mediations of the authentic, not only at the levels of content and form but at the level of production itself.