Deterritorializing collective biography

Abstract

This paper proposes a new move in the methodological practice of collective biography, by provoking a shift beyond any remnant attachment to the speaking/ writing subject towards her dispersal and displacement via textual interventions that stress multivocality. These include the use of photographs, drama, and various genres of writing. Using a story selected from a collective biography workshop on sexuality and schooling, we document how we work across and among texts, thereby widening and shifting interpretive and subjective spaces of inquiry. We also consider how Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of territorialization/deterritorialization and the nomadic subject might be useful in theorizing such methodological moves in collective biography and our own investments in them.

Keywords:

• collective biography
• Deleuze and Guattari
• girls
• sexuality
• schooling

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Mount Saint Vincent University for the funding that made our research workshop possible and ACSANZ, the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand, whose 2010 International Research Linkage Grant assisted with travel expenses. We would also like to thank Susan Spence-Campbell for her facilitation during our workshop. Thanks to the audience at the International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry 2011, who were the initial respondents for this paper presented by Susan Walsh, and to our QSE reviewers and editor for advice that assisted us in redrafting the paper for publication.

Notes

1. Prior to the workshop, the facilitators (Susanne and Marnina) developed a series of writing prompts generated from particular workshop readings.

2. Haug’s original outline of memory work in Female Sexualization (1987, 70), however, recommends attending to points of view, interests, and motives of others when participants revise their own memory stories.

3. Our group comprised (in alphabetical order): Marion Brown, Dalhousie University; Michele Byers, Saint Mary’s University; Susanne Gannon, University of Western Sydney; Marnina Gonick, Mount Saint Vincent University; Mythili Rajiva, University of Ottawa; Susan Walsh, Mount Saint Vincent University; and Jacqueline Warwick, Dalhousie University.

4. It is amazing what another’s voice, pacing, intonation, and pronunciation can change in the telling of a story. It is also noteworthy that where the writer had already read his/her story aloud, the new reader often mentioned the desire to try and “copy” the original “voice” as closely as possible.

5. It is amazing what another’s voice, pacing, intonation, and pronunciation can change in the telling of a story. It is also noteworthy that where the writer had already read his/her story aloud, the new reader often mentioned the desire to try and “copy” the original “voice” as closely as possible.

6. The photographs we include in this paper have been “Photoshopped” in order to further disengage the photographic images of our embodied selves from the (illusion of) stable, coherent selves that we inhabit on a day-to-day basis. In doing so, we shift attention from our identities onto the shapes and forms of bodies in relation to one another, and the sensations, affects and intensities are mobilized.