Our Teacher Bodies and the Male Gaze: Knowing and Unknowing Ourselves Through Collective Memory Work

• In Event: 53.081 - Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: 53.081-19 - Research on Women and Higher Education

Abstract

This paper explores how women teachers construct our gendered, sexualized and raced teacher bodies with and through memories. Utilizing the process of collective memory work (CMW) methodology (Davies & Gannon, 2006; Haug, 1987, 1999), nine secondary English teachers produced memories as empirical material, analyzed these stories using Haug’s (1999) methods, and drew on critical, post-structural, and sociocultural theories of literacies and embodiment to understand how we use discourse (and how discourse uses us) to construct the stories we tell about our teacher bodies. Through this project we explored our lived experiences as a legitimate source of knowledge as we collectively analyzed the social, cultural, and historical discourses of the body that shape our lives and work as teachers.

Author

• Erin Beeman Stutelberg, Salisbury University