We recognize that memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and agency are not

separable constituents of autobiographical subjectivity. They areal implicated in one

another. But disentangling them in chapter 2, how-ever artificially, allowed us to frame
the psychic (memory), the temporal (experience), the spatial (identity), the material
(embodiment), and the transformative (agency) dimensions of autobiographical
subjectivity. Moreover, the concepts of memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and
agency enable us to begin probing the complexity of what happens in a particular
autobiographical act. Lets situate the autobiographical act in a story, a story in time and
place. This situatedness is especially crucial since life narratives are always symbolic
interactions in the world. They are culturally and
C

Autobiographical Acts
Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property
of the speakers intentions; it is populatedoverpopulatedwith the intentions of
others.
M. M. Bhakti, Discourse in the Novel
All these peopleproducers, coaxers, consumersare engaged in assembling life
story actions around lives, events and happeningsalthough they cannot grasp the
actual life. At the Centre of much of this action emerge the story products: the objects
which harbor the meanings that have to be handled through interaction. These congeal
or freeze already reconstituted moments of a life from the story teller and the coaxer
and await the handling of a reader or consumer.
Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories
We recognize that memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and agency are not
separable constituents of autobiographical subjectivity. They are all implicated in one
another. But disentangling them in chapter 2, how-ever artificially, allowed us to frame
the psychic (memory), the temporal (experience), the spatial (identity), the material
(embodiment), and the transformative (agency) dimensions of autobiographical
subjectivity. Moreover, the concepts of memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and
agency enable us to begin probing the complexity of what happens in a particular
autobiographical act. Lets situate the autobiographical act in a story, a story in time and
place. This situatedness is especially crucial since life narratives are always symbolic
interactions in the world. They are culturally and historically specific. They are rhetorical
in the broadest sense of
the word. That is, they are addressed to an audience/reader; they are engaged in an
argument about identity; and they are inevitably fractured by the play of meaning (see
Leitch and Myerson). Autobiographical acts, then, are anything but simple or
transparent. In Telling Sexual Stories, sociologist Ken Plummer, considering autobiographical
stories through the lens of a pragmatic symbolic inter-actionist ethnography, differentiates
three kinds of people who con-tribute to every story action (xi). There is the producer or

teller of the storywhat we call the autobiographical narrator. There is the coaxer, the
person or persons, or the institution, that elicits the story from the speaker. There are
the consumers, readers, or audiences who interpret the story (2021). While we take
Plummers tripartite schema as a starting point in the following discussion, we
complicate it by introducing other situational and interactional features of
autobiographical acts. The components of autobiographical acts include
the following: C o a x e r s / o c c a s i o n s S i t e s P r o d u c e r s o f t h e
s t o r y, a u t o b i o g r a p h i c a l I s T h e O t h e r s o f a u t o b i o g r a p h i c a l
Is A d d r e s s e e s Structuring modes of selfinquiry P a t t e r n s o f e m p l o t m e n t M e d i a C o n s u m e r s
/audiences
Coaxers, Coaches, and Coercers
Every day we are called upon to tell pieces of our life stories. Think of autobiographical
acts, then, as occasions when people are coaxed orcoerced into getting a life. The
coaxer/coercer, in Plummers terms, isany person or institution or set of cultural
imperatives that solicits orprovokes people to tell their stories (21). Telling may occur in
intimatesituations when someone solicits a personal narrativefor example, that