Out of Wordlock: Autobiography and the Syrophoenician Women

This article accepts the challenges of autobiographical criticism by exploring the influences and commitments that have informed and shaped a long period of research, in an Australian context, on Mark's account of Jesus' interaction with the Syrophoenician women (7:24–30). In the process I argue for the realisation that the self that is given to research and the research itself are significantly informed by multiple agencies, and that writing is an unstable means for fixing the self or truth. Furthermore, I maintain that somatic realities are not only equally as constructive as words but are what the text of words yearns for and needs for its life. The Syrophoenician women emerge from the process as themselves delivering a challenge to objectivist writing as well as delivering an independence of identity beyond the limits of textualisation.