Embodying Métissage: Entangling Memory, Identity and Difference in Feminist Intercultural Storymaking

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to unpack some of the dominant understandings of memory, identity and difference in intercultural lifewriting. The paper draws from my research in embodied lifewriting and narratives of resistance in marginalised women’s lives, and the works of Trinh T. Minh-ha and Karen Barad to unpack, unsettle and reconceptualise the notions of memory, identity, hybridity and difference in intercultural lifewriting. I am particularly interested in how the métissage of embodied, mythological and diffractive narratives function as an important feminist research methodology. The paper is framed within contemporary materialist feminist thinking and gestures towards an ontological and epistemological shift in the reconceptualisation of identity and difference that underpins how we craft and read intercultural lifewriting. Implicit in the hybridised process of storymaking is the interweaving of memory, imagination, identity, gender, race, history and culture. Memory, in this sense, becomes a loose and messy network of multiple strands that continually interweave, thread and hold the tapestry of storytelling and storymaking together. If personal stories are to be powerful tools for agency and resistance through the re-scripting of dominant cultural themes and identities, then we need to examine the many different ways a story can be told and retold.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural lifewriting
• feminist lifewriting
• feminist methodology
• materialist feminism
• mythology
• hybridity
• métissage
• memory
• identity
• difference

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Marilyn Metta is a feminist academic at Curtin University in Western Australia. She is a practising psychotherapist at the West Leederville Counselling Centre in Perth. Marilyn is the author of Writing Against, Alongside and Beyond Memory: Lifewriting as Reflexive, Poststructuralist Feminist Research Practice (Peter Lang 2010) which is the co-winner of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry 2011 Qualitative Book Award.