Collective biography as a feminist methodology

Abstract

Collective biography has, since its origins, been an intervention into sexist knowledge practices. Groups of women have gathered to generate knowledge of their own lived experience and interrogate the discourses and practices through which they have become (more or less) recognisable as appropriately feminised subjects. Working in a post-structural paradigm, the authors have utilised collective biography to bring theory into productive collision with everyday life, bringing in bodies and memories to flesh out theory. Collectives have deployed deconstructive and creative experiments in order to resist naïve claims to voice or settlements for singular truths. This chapter revisits the Canadian-Australian collective biographies on girlhood sexualities, examining them through a feminist methodological lens, acknowledging where processes faltered, and the complexities and paradoxes of feminist work in academia.