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Trying On—Being In—Becoming

Four Women’s Journey(s) in Feminist Poststructural Theory

Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon

Gennie Harris

Linfield College, McMinnville, Oregon

Mindy Legard Larson

Linfield College, McMinnville, Oregon, milarson{at}linfield.edu

karen higgins

Oregon State University, Corvallis

The article discusses the narrative of four women in academia spanning a ten-year relational journey. As a performance collaborative autoethnography, it explores and presents theories of subjectivity and transitional space. Through journals, e-mails, and dialogue, the authors are trying on, being in, and becoming feminist poststructural thinkers/inquirers/teacher educators. The authors further explore the following: How has theory changed their subjectivity, lived experiences and relationships, and moved them from comfortable spaces of knowing to uncomfortable places of becoming? In a series of poetry and performance narratives, the authors chart their own linked journey(s) in pursuing these questions. As autoethnographers, the authors grapple with meanings and moments of loss, desire, guilt, and love as a practice of hypomnemata. This study represents a reflective mining of such treasures, capturing moments of rereading and meditation, and a pause, even if an illusionary one, in our intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and embodied journey(s). This work illustrates how the self looks in transitional space: in motion, contemporaneous, simultaneously in the making, and in relation to others. The authors continue this practice as a pedagogy for being and living out the fictions of their lives.

Key Words: performance autoethnography • feminist • poststructural theory • subjectivity

Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 9, 1455-1479 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1077800409347097


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