Body Work: Diarising Self-Display and Risk

Babs Boter*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalComment / Letter to the editorAcademic

Abstract

This essay examines the various kinds of ‘body work’ that the Dutch travel journalist Mary Pos (1904–1987) displays in the diaries she kept from the 1930s until the early 1950s: the labour of daily activities such as travelling, diarising, letter writing, smoking and eating, and doing household chores; the labour of self-presentation, including dressing up; and the labour of negotiating other women’s bodies, and the ways in which her body is read by others. It discusses the diarist’s physical performance of self and her acts of rebellion in her writings, and applies Simone de Beauvoir’s two alternative routes for women—through vulnerability, risking the body in erotic love, and through conquest, risking the body in the world—to the Pos diaries. Both alternative routes clearly materialise in the Pos diaries, and even seem to enhance each other. In a second move, using work written by Maria Tamboukou, Sonia Wilson and others, this essay examines the process that constituted me as an intimate reader of the diaries—a process where personal memories and associations, sensuous impressions, imagination, and bodily proximity interact in the process of reading manuscript diaries. The intimate reader needs to be particularly self-reflexive and critical of their reading position and analysis.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)191-213
Number of pages23
JournalLife Writing
Volume19
Issue number2
Early online date29 Aug 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
I would like to thank Barbara Rouwendal for her expert knowledge of shorthand (?De Groot?), and her professional and patient work in translating three of the Mary Pos diaries. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the Life Writing journal for their valuable and astute comments on an earlier version of this article. Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues Ernestine Hoegen, Meritxell Simon-Martin and Leonieke Vermeer for their helpful suggestions.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

  • agency
  • body work
  • gender
  • intimate reader
  • Manuscript diary

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