Feminist, Posthumanist Autobiography and Intra-Sectional Identities: A Dystemporal Re-Membering

• In Event: Tangles of Difference: Transnational and Transgenerational Curriculum Relationalities

Abstract

Objectives: In this paper I embrace Author & Author’s notion of “working difference” alongside Howard’s appeal for us to not only explore “the multiplicity of ways that race intersects across multiple identities,” but also to reflect, empathize, care and act. To do this, I experiment with autobiography as feminist curriculum work by conceptualizing an “I” that is always relational as well as an “agential cut” (Barad, 2012, p. 77) of a “specific slice of life” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 137). This autobiographical “I,” experimentally theorized, methodologically “posted,” “sliced” and diffracted through feminist poststructural and new materialist frames, works to complicate unproblematized notions of relationally constituted subjectivities in education. Concurrently, an autobiographical “I” conceptualized in this way also works to “reshape the identity of humanistic [research] practices” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 145) by unsettling iterations of subjectivity traditionally conceptualized as non-contingent, categorical, ahistorical, and deterministic.

Perspectives: While posthumanist discourses are in the process of reshaping the recurrent philosophical theme of “the death of the subject,” emergent notions of posthumanist autobiography as both genre and method of inquiry continue to query what it means to be human while “gather[ing] together multiple, overlapping, and sometimes discrepant fields of critical activity” (Whitlock, 2012, p. vii). This, in turn, creates “a productive contradiction and instability embedded in the conjunction of ‘posthuman’ and ‘lives’” (p. v), an instability that “marks recognition that humanism, always already in disharmony with itself, forever sounds of other airs, other heirs” (Badmington, 2012, p. 22). Thus, by engaging with Barad’s notion of diffraction as a posthumanist, intra-disciplinary tool, I read disparate, often conflicting theories of knowledge through one another in order to gain new/different autobiographical insights.

Methods: I engage in a Baradian re-membering (2015, p. 406) of autobiographical “data” via memories, conversations, movements, sights, scents and sounds. Re-membering in this way consists of the patching together of disparate parts that are not “absolutely a-part” but rather cut intra-actively so that things are “cut together/apart (one move), a pattern of differentiated entangling [that] may not be recognized but is indeed re-membered….” (p. 406). This re-membered, autobiographical data will be read diffractively (Barad, 2014) through scholarship by women of color from the edited collection “This Bridge Called my Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color,” edited by Moraga and Anzaldúa (1981). This approach opens up thinking space for reading insights from different theoretical frames through one another and thus acknowledging the considerable attention paid to material/discursive entanglements in scholarship offered by women of color in the 1980’s currently absent in “new” engagements with feminist materialisms in education research.

Materials: Memories, conversations, yearnings, celebrations, crises, incarcerations, commutes, histories, becomings, and other material-semiotic entanglements.

Results and Significance: Autobiographical research practices engaged in this way seek to re-turn to situated knowledge projects (Haraway, 1988) and earlier feminist work by women of color. By exploring intra-sectional understandings of empathy, care and action, this work is concerned with both racialized and gendered “material existences in the thick now” (Barad, 2015, p. 388) and the enduring authority of white, middle-class, feminisms.

Author

• Mary J. Newbery, Quinnipiac University