Crimes against experience

Scott proposes that literary approaches offer us one way to read how identities are discursively constituted and understood as and of experience. She encourages us to read for and write how histories (personal, political, and social) are constructed and constructive. This article focuses on how difference, knowledge production, and witnessing produce identities as not something that was always already there simply waiting to be expressed, not something that will always exist in the form it was given. In particular, the author considers her experience as a mother alongside Julia Kristeva s essay Stabat Mater, which contrasts Catholic understandings of motherhood and femininity with her own experience of maternity, and Minne Bruce Pratt s poetry collection Crime Against Nature, which confronts the loss of Pratt s children following her coming out as a lesbian.