Trying On—Being In—Becoming: Four Women’s Journey(s) in Feminist Poststructural Theory

The article discusses the narrative of four women in academia spanning a ten-year relational journey. As a performance collaborative autoethnography, it explores and presents theories of subjectivity and transitional space. Through journals, e-mails, and dialogue, the authors are trying on, being in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Qualitative inquiry 2009-11, Vol.15 (9), p.1455-1479
Main Authors: Kalmbach Phillips, Donna, Harris, Gennie, Legard Larson, Mindy, higgins, karen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Autobiographies
Autoethnography
Collaboration
College Faculty
Cooperation
Desire
Empowerment
Ethnography
Females
Feminism
Feminist Theory
Graphs
Guilt
History, theory and methodology
Internet
Literary criticism
Meaning
Meditation
Methodology
Mining
Narratives
Poetry
Post-structuralism
Poststructuralism
Power Structure
Self Concept
Self Efficacy
Social life & customs
Sociology
Studies
Subjectivity
Teacher Educators
Teachers
Teaching
Theory
Transformative Learning
Women
World Views
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Summary:The article discusses the narrative of four women in academia spanning a ten-year relational journey. As a performance collaborative autoethnography, it explores and presents theories of subjectivity and transitional space. Through journals, e-mails, and dialogue, the authors are trying on, being in, and becoming feminist poststructural thinkers/inquirers/teacher educators. The authors further explore the following: How has theory changed their subjectivity, lived experiences and relationships, and moved them from comfortable spaces of knowing to uncomfortable places of becoming? In a series of poetry and performance narratives, the authors chart their own linked journey(s) in pursuing these questions. As autoethnographers, the authors grapple with meanings and moments of loss, desire, guilt, and love as a practice of hypomnemata. This study represents a reflective mining of such treasures, capturing moments of rereading and meditation, and a pause, even if an illusionary one, in our intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and embodied journey(s). This work illustrates how the self looks in transitional space: in motion, contemporaneous, simultaneously in the making, and in relation to others. The authors continue this practice as a pedagogy for being and living out the fictions of their lives.
ISSN:1077-8004
1552-7565
DOI:10.1177/1077800409347097