New York: Long Haul Press, 1983.Īllison, Dorothy. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1994.Īllison, Dorothy. Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature. New York: Plume-Penguin, 1992.Īllison, Dorothy. “Place.” Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History. “Gender, Desire, and Feminism: A Conversation with Dorothy Allison and Carmen Vasquez, oral history by Kelly Anderson.” Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.Īllison, Dorothy. “Foreword” to My Dangerous Desires by Amber Hollibaugh.

Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray. “Deciding to Live.” Walk till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. New York: University of New York Press, 2016. “A Cure for Bitterness.” Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence, Conflict and Memory in Everyday Life.

In creating this narrative, she creates an explicit dialogue with the audience, telling readers about her performative intentions within her texts.Īllison, Dorothy. In the performing of mother-the representation of motherhood in her prose-Allison can construct the story that tells the “loved version” of her life and avoid “becom them” (38), the women who so profoundly defined her. Her performance, therefore, acts as a rhetorical device to resist hegemonic discourses of motherhood. The chapter argues that for Allison, motherhood is a performance, one that she can “get right” in the same way that she can get the stories right. As she explores her relationship with her mother and her own potential to be a mother, she resists the definition of motherhood constructed for her by dominant culture. As she “performs” traditional narrative, she also subverts that narrative by inserting explicit commentary on the constructed nature of “story.” Similarly, Allison performs motherhood. In her memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she constructs an innovative form that challenges not only Southern stereotypes about “white trash” and lesbian identity but also narrative structures. This chapter discusses the ways that Dorothy Allison moves in and out of memory narratives and traditional storytelling.

Dorothy allison two or three things