Confessional Politics. Women's Sexual Self-Representations in Life-Writing and Popular Media ed. by Irene Gammell (review)

484 letters in canada 1999 Irene Gammell, editor. Confessional Politics. Women's Sexual Self-Representations in Life-Writing and Popular Media Southern Illinois University Press. xiv, 214. US $44.95, US $24.95 This book is an unusual collection of ten essays by different authors. Unlike many such anthologies, it is obviously a previously planned and selected combination of fairly long articles that each treat a subject in depth. The topics dealt with are both literary and from popular culture and the authors adopt different approaches; yet they achieve coherence of vision because they all address a central set of critical concepts developed in response to work on confessional writing by Foucault and Rita Felski. The focus is original, concentrating on representations involving female sexual experiences ranging from the erotic to the horrific, from conventional femininity to defiant deviance. The narrators discussed include several from Quebec (Lori Saint-Martin), poets from English Canada (Nathalie Cooke), performers from Germany (Irene Gammel) and the United States (Lynda Goldstein), and survivors of sexual abuse (Elizabeth Wilson). `Representations' range from The Diary of Ann Frank (Marion Bishop) to popular TV shows involving `telling all' (Cynthia Davis) or public controversy (the Hill-Thomas hearings, by Jessie Givner). Chapters on lesbian confessions (Marylynne Diggs) and male `crossvoicing ' (Lorraine Jantzen Kooistra) add to the diversity and richness of the discussion, which in every section raises new questions and responses to the three dimensions introduced: confessional interventions (unsettling variations on a theme/form), confessional modalities (shifting power relations), and confessional inversions (playful upsetting of normative expectations). The result is an eminently readable and connected series of first-rate contributions in an important area of feminist research on body politics and subjectivity. (VALERIE RAOUL) Angela Baldassarre. The Great Dictators: Interviews with Filmmakers of Italian Descent Guernica. 108. $15.00 The Great Dictators is a series of interviews that Angela Baldassarre conducted between 1991 and 1998 and first published in various venues. It is an intriguing and important publication for a number of reasons: first, while the stature of the directors differs for obvious reasons B none of which I would contend for aesthetic reasons, current or potential B their voices need to be heard; second, it obviously gives us some further insight into the ragion d'essere of the filmmaker's aesthetic credo; and third, the actual presence of such divergent directors in one book underscores a sense of commonality that has its origins in different geocultural space. ...