“Picking at the Scabs”: A Poststructural Feminist Writing Project

This article takes up a number of autobiographical texts written at different times and in different styles about the same incident, the end of a marriage. The author traces discourses of femininity and romance as well as discourses about what it means to be “a writer” through fragments of these texts. In exploring the stultifying effects of the discourses that were taken up by the subject in each particular (con)text, the author struggles to open up alternative readings, writings, and possibilities.