Body Work: Diarising Self-Display and Risk

This essay examines the various kinds of 'body work' that the Dutch travel journalist Mary Pos (1904-1987) displays in the diaries she kept from the 1930s until the early 1950s: the labour of daily activities such as travelling, diarising, letter writing, smoking and eating, and doing household chores; the labour of self-presentation, including dressing up; and the labour of negotiating other women's bodies, and the ways in which her body is read by others. It discusses the diarist's physical performance of self and her acts of rebellion in her writings, and applies Simone de Beauvoir's two alternative routes for women-through vulnerability, risking the body in erotic love, and through conquest, risking the body in the world-to the Pos diaries. Both alternative routes clearly materialise in the Pos diaries, and even seem to enhance each other. In a second move, using work written by Maria Tamboukou, Sonia Wilson and others, this essay examines the process that constituted me as an intimate reader of the diaries-a process where personal memories and associations, sensuous impressions, imagination, and bodily proximity interact in the process of reading manuscript diaries. The intimate reader needs to be particularly self-reflexive and critical of their reading position and analysis.

Automated summary

This essay examines the different types of 'body work' displayed in the diaries of Dutch travel journalist Mary Pos, including daily activities, self-presentation, and interactions with other women's bodies. It also explores the application of Simone de Beauvoir's theories to Pos's diaries, as well as the process of becoming an intimate reader of the diaries. The intimate reader must be self-reflexive and critical in their reading position and analysis.