A Prickly and Provisional Biography

• In Event: 71.013 - The Biographical and Documentary Research SIG Business Meeting Presents: The (Im)Possibilities of Biography: Persisting Methodological Issues in Representing Women's Lives

Abstract

Committed to biography conceived as a complex multi-faceted researching endeavor, I theoretically embrace the insight that any biography is as much about the biographer as it is about the “subject” (Alpern, et. al., 1992; Backscheider, 2001; Behar, 1993; Stanley, 1992, 2013). Such a stance invariably compels a biographer’s self-reflexive practices that aim for what Pillow (2003) urges as “reflexivities of discomfort.” These involve “practices of confounding disruptions…” (p. 192) that keep the critical intent of reflexivity in play. But Pillow (2015) too recognized limitations “of a reliance upon a modernist distinction between the ‘self/selves’ in reflection and self/reflexivity” (p. 3). She thus expanded her interrogations of reflexivity, in part to propose potentialities of examining what may be opened up “by putting fissures of irreducible differences alongside each other” (2015, p. 12).

Author

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University