A Face for My Autobiography: Lucy Grealy and Embodied Vulnerability

Abstract

In this reflective essay, Andrea Avery considers how teaching Lucy Grealy’s 1994 Autobiography of a Face in a memoir class functions to cultivate embodied vulnerability among high school seniors. She discusses her own identity as a disabled/chronically ill teacher and how her positioning of and interaction with Grealy’s text invites her students to “see” her body and to use autobiographical writing to see and claim their own bodies. She reflects on the particular challenges she has faced in pursuit of the goal of liberatory educational practice wherein, as theorized by bell hooks, the empowerment of all people in the space depends on the teacher’s willingness to make herself vulnerable alongside her students.