Who Do You Think You Are? Feminist Memoir Writing

Bibliographic Data

ID20187570
AuthorsLynne Segal (corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume67
Issue67
Pages120-133
Publication date2009-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Formations (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0950-2378 • E-ISSN: 1741-0789
PublisherLawrence and Wishart (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3898/newf.67.11.2009
OpenAlexW2078782925
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited11

journeys, I was exploring.Of course, I was once again probing issues I've addressed often enough before, though this time in a less theoretical, more personal voice, mapping out my own engagement in, distance from, the particular patterns, conflicts, alliances and misalliances, of that movement quickly labelled '2nd-wave feminism'.It was, as most of you'll know, a movement that later veered off into a jumble of popular and academic feminisms, multiplying and dividing, as movements do (its offshoots battling with each other, soon seemingly far distant from their original roots).One branch contained the vast diversity of grass-roots campaigning, whether workplace or community based, alongside policy reform initiatives, and much more.Another branch, first moulding while sharing common experiences as women; later, if entering scholarly domains, often embracing Derridean or Foucauldian deconstructions of 'experience', while soon questioning the meaning of 'gender', 'sexuality', indeed, any notion of 'identity' at all, as always -to borrow Judith Butler's influential framingscontingent, provisional, illusory, 'performative', at the very least, permanently problematic.Putting myself in the frame, then, I was exploring how ideas, especially those political ideas that influence our lives, arise, mutate, then often fade away before our very eyes, though we may struggle, as best we can, to keep a hold on them.Even our own memories are not safe from the re-writings of history, as Walter Benjamin once said, though in somewhat different words and a very different context. 1 This thought is expressed in the old Soviet joke I kept hearing till recently: 'The future is certain, it is only the past that is unpredictable'. 2(The joke's disappeared suddenly, however, since right now , following the financial crisis begun in 2008, even the future is looking just a little less certain, though sadly not through any actions we've chosen.)MEMORY VERSUS HISTORY Anyway, my resistance to the memoir packaging for my own reflections on the reverberations of feminism went beyond knowledge of the extreme unreliability of the 'truth telling' of personal memory.There is, obviously, a difference between memory and history, even though this distinction has been increasingly probed and problematised of late.Despite the current fascination, even obsession, with memory over the last two decades, it is seen, correctly, as a fragile thing, vulnerable to all the illusions

Art · Literature · Memoir · Sociology · Gender Studies · Irish and British Studies · Philosophy

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