Tabloid female sex confessions and everyday pro-sex feminism: The case of the Apple Daily Taiwan

This article construes the reader-contributed female sex confessions of a Taiwanese tabloid newspaper as contingent cultural instruments, looking into how these confessions are implicated in the formulation of sex-positive feminism. The confessional discourse is interpreted as autobiographical acts with dialogic overtones. The article argues that the highly commercial and communal form of the tabloid confessions fortuitously facilitates positive discourse of female sexuality in a society in transition. It is demonstrated that part of the pro-sex feminism promoted by cultural elites, especially post-feminist discourse of entitlement, is echoed in the confessions. However, dealing with life situations of ordinary people, the community-based tabloid feminism differs from the model discourses in its pragmatism. Although female sexual desires are fully justified, they are balanced in consideration of other necessities, such as security, stability, or romantic love.

Inside the Wardrobe: Fashioning a Fashionable Life

This article looks to the manifestation of the personal wardrobe in digital fashion media. It focuses upon the example of British Vogue’s YouTube series ‘Inside the Wardrobe’ and episodes that feature, firstly Vogue Fashion Editor Sarah Harris and Vogue Contributing Editor and Freelance Stylist Bay Garnett, and, secondly, acclaimed fashion blogger Susie Lau aka Susie Bubble of StyleBubble.com. In doing so it addresses ways in which fashion is an ‘autobiographical act’ and explores how such acts participate in the production and consumption of life narratives, and in particular the narrative of a ‘fashionable life’. The article argues that fashion, in this sense, is a narrative tool employed in the fashioning of oneself and that this is strategically utilised, both consciously and subconsciously, in the field of fashion. Thus, when employed as strategic narrative tools the autobiographical acts that can fashion a self constitute the particular autobiographical form, or autobiography, that is the ‘fashionable life’. In doing so this article demonstrates the contribution that the study of fashion makes to a wider understanding and knowledge of self­identity, life narrative, autobiographical acts and autobiography in digital mediums and media.

Mohidin, Abdul Latiff bin Haji (1938--)

Born on 20 August 1941 in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan, Abdul Latiff bin Haji Mohidin, better known as Latiff Mohidin, is a Malaysian painter and poet whose works are emotional, expressive, and gestural. As a child prodigy, Latiff Mohidin was called a "Boy Wonder" from the age of eleven for his talent in art. He was sent on a German Academic Student Exchange Scholarship to Germany, where he began his studies at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin in 1960. In 1969, he took up printmaking at Atelier La Courrière, Paris, and Pratt Graphic Center, New York. His works are identifiable by his use of brushstrokes, swathes of color, texture, and layers of oil paint with lines that are dynamic and possess an energy of immediacy. His works combine visual elements as well as the verbal and gestural, and, in this way, successfully present different levels of perspective and meaning. Latiff Mohidin expresses his personal anguish on a blank canvas, paying little attention to form, style, or subject matter. It can be argued that his paintings, created in a series, are autobiographical acts of self-creation, operating as both expressions of his personality and artistic journeys into nature.

Expressing Selfhood in the Convent: Anonymous Chronicling and Subsumed Autobiography

Convent autobiography took many forms. We find it in conversion narratives and vidas por mandato, as well as in less obvious places, including chronicles, trans-lations, poetry, saints’ lives and the myriad forms of governance documents that structured convent life. Sometimes nuns wrote under their own names, but frequently they composed anonymously. How do we locate autobiographical acts within anonymous texts? This article proposes a new genre called ‘subsumed autobiography’ to describe anonymously composed texts whose authors shape and influence their work around themes that grow out of their personal interests, theology, politics and so on. It analyses the authorial strategies deployed by the first chronicler of the English Augustinian community of St Monica's (Louvain), and pays particular attention to the themes of Catholic education, Latinity, and the legacy of Sir Thomas More. This work is predicated on an earlier article in which the anonymous author of the chronicle was identified as Mary Copley (1591/2–1669).