Digging Up Tangled Roots: Feminism and Resistance to White Working-Class Culture

Abstract

If it is true that we can only look from a position of (relative) safety/confidence/power, it is no surprise that I came to the life history process after my father’s death in October 1990, and a three-year period during which I experienced a sudden and sharp sense of my own mortality. Life, health and professional circumstances had combined to create a crisis of confidence and meaning.¹ In 1993, I found myself simultaneously letting go of my institutional academic position (if not my academic identity), and starting my life history.² Later the same year, at a women’s art exhibition entitled Women Remember/ Women in Conflict, I encountered the work of artist Irene Runayker.³ Written across one of her mixed media images, I read:

In times of bereavement and broken dreams, our camouflage frays, decays and our history shows through. (The Forty Five Stars, Taoist text, cited in Runayker, 1994)

Life history process was precipitating a sense of opening rather than closure, expansion rather than contraction and withdrawal, hope rather than depression. This was academic work, but also an important part of my personal recovery and renewal.