Messing with memories : feminist poststructuralism and memory-work

Memory-work, as I have taken it up, attends to unravelling the ways in which discourses have become sedimented and inscribed into our bodies and everyday practices. In my research into women's subjectivities and lived experience, I have worked with a feminist poststructural paradigm that disrupts the subjects, memories, truths and texts produced in and through memory-work (Davies & Gannon, 2004; 2007). My interest in textual aesthetics and ethics has led me to produce 'transgressive' texts by messing with memories to produce new texts (Gannon, 2001; 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2006a). The forms of data representation that I have adopted for some of my memory-work - poetry and theatre - are not conventionally valued in social science research, though it may be argued that they are more accessible to audiences beyond the academy