From ‘self-made women’ to ‘women’s made-selves’? Audit selves, simulation and surveillance in the rise of public woman LIZ S TA NLEY

The analytic idea of ‘auto/biography’ (Stanley 1992a; Sociology 1993; Polkey 1999) shares with feminism a focus on the shifting and complex boundaries between self and other, past and present, writing and reading, fact and fiction. ‘Auto/biography’ in this analytic sense is concerned with basically epistemological matters in relation to a wide range of oral, visual and written accounts of lives. Rather than being preoccupied with the specifically written forms of these – ‘autobiographies’ and ‘biographies’ and their sub-groupings – this work has been focused on auto/biographical practices, that is the myriad of everyday and frequently fleeting social practices concerned with the articulation of (often competing, sometimes discontinuous) notions of ‘selves’ and ‘lives’.