Bad Biographer: Hagiographical Refusals and Feminist Reconfigurings

• In Event: 63.070 - Bad Girl Theory and Practice: Qualitative Research in Post-Truth Times

Abstract

Purpose: Whether directly addressed or not, elements of both autobiography and biography entangle all aspects of qualitative inquiries and their variously identified genres, including self-study and biography, autoethnography, narrative, and participatory action research. I tackle such enmeshings via theorizings of post-oriented qualitative researchers (Lather, 2016; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, Jackson & Mazzei, 2016) and their multiple contestations of humanist assumptions of coherent and autonomous selves, for example. Such versions of selves supposedly can narrate fully complete and “truthful” renditions of their own or another’s “life story.” Here, I wrestle with implications of challenges to constructions of and by that humanist self that both infuse and greatly confound my attempts to fulfill a biography-writing request from a renowned “subject.”

Theoretical Framings: Feminist post-foundational interrogations of autobiography and biography (Alpern, et.al.,1992; Butler, 2005; Gilmore, 1994, 2001; Smith & Watson, 2001, 2010, 2017; Stanley, 1992, 2013; Zinsser, 2009) have impelled qualitative researchers’ wrestlings with aspects of what have been considered, for centuries, these “truth-telling” genres. Given the very presences of auto/biography and their related conundrums threading through all qualitative research processes and representations, feminists point to a number of issues requiring acute examination. These include assumptions of always coherent and autonomous memory-tellings of a past that is fully present for both the supposedly knowing research participants and researcher, for example. Additional feminist refusals include Western-only versions of “narratives” produced and told by which to make a life intelligible. Feminist theorists too have blurred “auto/biography,” given that any biography is as much about the biographer as it is about “the subject” (Backscheider, 2001; Behar, 1993). Such challenges to biography as the authoritative teleological narrative of an individual’s life have make it all but impossible for post-oriented biographers to construct unproblematized, reverential hagiographies (Halperin, 1995), especially of those typical during the Middle Ages that highlighted saints, gurus and other individuals believed to be imbued with sacred power. However, when many revere a specific “subject,” a feminist post-oriented biographer’s work gets super-sticky.

Modes of Inquiry: Employing feminist theorizings that suggest that “there is no origin in [any] story, and no fixed narrative as such,” and that reconfigurings of the “auto/biographical” entail an “ongoing openness of the narrative to future re-tellings . . .” (Barad, 2012, p. 11), I here conceptualize potentialities of “post-biography.”

Data: Transcribed audiotapes of conversations across years between “the subject” and myself; artifacts the subject supplied, including letters, photographs, unfinished manuscripts, lecture notes; drafts of the requested “biography.”

Significance: I work to contribute to post qualitative research inquiries that respond to calls for heightened curiosity and accompanying experimentations in the conceptualizings and becomings of existence (St. Pierre, Jackson and Mazzei, 2016). Assuming that aspects of auto/biography pervade all qualitative inquiries, I especially consider implications that “matter, the world and humans themselves are not dualistic (and fully knowable) entities . . . but rather materially embedded subjects-in-process circulating within webs of relation with forces, entities and encounters” (Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018, p. 8).

Author

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University