The Importance of Author Self-Identification in Feminist Oral History Writing

• In Event: Poster Session

Abstract

A crucial consideration for those working on feminist oral history writing is interviewer/author self-identification. Without this act of transparency, crucial considerations of context and positionality are lost, and the oral history project cannot make claims to social justice or feminist aspirations.
Oral history is a collaboration between two parties, the interviewer and the interviewee. The separation between them—especially any power imbalances that might exist—must not be ignored (Gluck & Patai, 1991), for “none of us is innocent or politically pure, even if at times we forget that and pretend to be” (Rohrer, 2016, p. 165). Since “there is no such thing as an entirely objective treatment” and “we write from a certain position, constructed by our history, nationality, race, gender, class, education, beliefs” (Lee, 2009, p. 12), oral historians must attempt to clarify their positionality. And as feminist scholars, we must scrutinize our own practices (Patai, 1991).
In 2018 I completed an oral history biography of a Japanese American librarian in Hawaii, a colonized archipelago. Since neither the interviewee nor I (a haole/white person) was objective nor “innocent,” it was important for me to identify myself to the reader. Vis-à-vis an author self-identification section in the thesis, I hoped to avoid what Rohrer (2016) describes as “the danger in not discussing my positionality,” which would be “complicity with native dispossession and fictions of objectivity tied to nonnative “expertise.”” (p. 16). In providing context—which introduces the interviewer and the milieu from which they emerge—the reader is invited as a third party to a collaborative learning process. The reader approaches the oral history writing from their own unique context, so no two readings are the same, but each is engaging, and productive from a feminist standpoint.
This poster will include some explanatory text, a reference list, and images.

Author

• Valerie Brett Shaindlin, University of Hawaii