Moving Girlhoods in Twenty-First-Century Life Writing

This thesis explores twenty-first-century life writing by ‘Third Culture’ women and girls from diverse backgrounds that concerns the experience of growing up in at least three countries, cultures and languages – a phenomenon I term ‘moving girlhoods’. It reframes existing ‘Third Culture Literature’ theories, which have so far only been applied to fiction by authors raised as ‘expatriates’, while also integrating critical debates in postcolonial, transcultural, and girlhood scholarship into the field of life writing for the first time, to analyse how moving girlhoods shape autobiographical texts. Specifically, I explore the aesthetic and generic elements employed to portray the concerns of these particular migrant girls. Each chapter focuses on a distinct category of mobility and genre of life writing. Despite the different reasons for migration, in their various ways the texts portray ‘moving girlhoods’ as always an unsettling experience, however privileged the context of mobility. I argue that the writers magnify contradictions in their life writing to articulate the experience of growing up in conflictual conditions. In turn, genres of life writing are used to disrupt dichotomies, to challenge misjudgements and ill-fitting classifications, and to speak out against marginalisation.
I analyse Elizabeth Liang’s play Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey (2013); Abeer Hoque’s Olive Witch: A Memoir (2016); Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (2017); and Susan Abulhawa’s essay ‘Memories in an Un-Palestinian Story, in a Can of Tuna’ (2013). I also examine modern-day forms of life writing by girls, such as TED talks. I conclude by contending that writers who grow up crossing borders and outside the mainstream create distinctive texts about bridging individual and collective differences. While describing multiple polarisations, life writing about moving girlhoods also empowers unique opportunities to explore and engage in the new perspectives and critical global conflicts of the twenty-first century.