The Textual Representation of Life-Story-Telling as Social Theory

Abstract

Dear Reader, In these pages are many voices. They are the voices of women telling stories which are not one but many auto/biographies; as a reading/writing scribe I have moved with, changed and been changed by each story. You have begun, already, a reading of my story: I am the Ungrateful Apprentice of this text's prolegomenon, which presents the births and reincarnations of my approaches to academic knowledge of the social and the political. In Part 1, my voice reflects the discomfort of my experience as a woman undergraduate, hungry for knowledge, encountering texts of the social and political which displaced, excluded or conjured away her understanding of the social world. It is a single voice which questions, interjects, and attempts to rework and disrupt the knowledges and positions to which she had access. It invokes new theories of language and power, and other women's stories, to explore the reclamation of knowing subject-positions. Part 2 re-members an experience of Florrie's and my story-telling and writing, and the often poetic representation of our social worlds: shared worlds, in which we reinvest each other's knowledge. It experiments with the introduction of other voices which are part of, and theorize our experience. Our stories evince both our discursive positioning, and the manoeuvres which are inspired by and explain our desire. Part 3 describes how, why and what Lucie and I chose to write together as auto/biography and, importantly, our pleasure in doing so. And in Part 4, the scribing of Lucie's spoken auto/biography coincides, and is interleaved, with my fictionalytical responses to her stories. The taking up of fictive, multiple speaking positions facilitates profoundly truthful representations of our experience and the social and political knowledges in which it is implicated. As a feminist practice, such writings and readings interrogate the organization of knowledge which denies and silences that implication. Part 5, dear reader, takes the form of my letter to a friend, the young anarchist lecturer who appears first in the prolegomenon, and is today a respected sociologist of some years standing. Now read on ...