ABSTRACT
The use of self-disclosure as voice is so ubiquitous that it has become an almost invisible genre in what Foucault called our “confessional culture.” Every day, justifi ed by the ideology of empowerment, we can expect people to demonstrate in narrative form their fi rst-hand knowledge of trauma, oppression, or injustice as a way to make a contribution to knowledge production and social change. On the news, on talk shows, in classrooms and workshops and treatment settings, in public or in one-on-one conversations, people are encouraged to tell about their painful experiences with the confi dence that, even if the process is diffi cult for the speaker, it will be good for them in the long run. It is understood that “we”—the general publicneed to know about these things and that “we”—the marginalized-need to talk about them. Some of the conventions of this confessional self-disclosure have always operated as a kind of shorthand, so that certain references to experience allow listeners to make assumptions about some predictable confl ation of identity/knowledge, some recognizable category of selfhood comprising a whole set of assumed skills and knowledges that can be inferred
CHAPTER 7
from the speaker’s narrative. For many people, this storied identifi cation has become a passport, a way of representing themselves to the world.
