“Who gets to speak and why?” oversharing in contemporary North American women’s writing

Abstract

This article asks how oversharing, the revelation of “too much” personal information, functions as an experimental literary practice in contemporary North American women’s writing. I provide a brief history of oversharing as a cultural term and discuss how the label oversharer is what Michael Zimmer and Anthony Hoffman term an “ideologically charged accusation” that is primarily associated with women. I argue that women are more likely to be accused of oversharing than men no matter what the content of their self-disclosures. Through brief analysis of popular texts by Lena Dunham, Emily Gould, and Sheila Heti, I contend that many mainstream women writers are derogatively labeled as literary oversharers by their reviewers and critics. However, rather than reject oversharing as a critical term, the second strand of this article turns away from the popularity of Dunham and Heti to ask whether experimental writing by women can embody a poetics of oversharing that is characterized by an excess of autobiographical, sexual, and embodied confessions. Through an analysis of Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel I Love Dick, the final part of this article asks to what extent oversharing constitutes a mode of dissent in contemporary culture and, if so, whether oversharing can ever transgress patriarchal norms. Kraus’s experimental writing parodies the act of self-disclosure to a much greater extent than that of Gould, Heti, or Dunham. This article thus reads Kraus’s novel as a reclamation of the right to share whatever and, perhaps most important, however much the female subject desires.