Mistaken Identities: An Interactive CD-ROM Genealogy

The author describes the technical and rhetorical strategies she employed in her recent CD-ROM, Mistaken Identities. This project is organized around the lives and work of 10 famous women: Josephine Baker, Simone de Beauvoir, Catherine the Great, Colette, Marie Curie, Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, Frida Kahlo, Margaret Mead and Gertrude Stein. Although the author selected these female role models because of their emblematic status, the CD-ROM examines them as complex figures whose identities are not essential or fixed, but contingent and mutable. Representing her subjects in this way, the author subverts their commodification as cultural icons.