This book explores the gendered historical and social contexts and discursive traditions that have characterized journals and diaries in academic discourse. The tension between the term "journal," which has a variety of positive public and scholarly connotations, and the term "diary," which is currently understood as a feminized, trivial, and confessional kind of writing inappropriate for school, is a critical part of the problem. This book uses the developing and shifting notions of diary and journal to explore several critical questions about the larger relations between gender, language, canonicity, and academic discourse.