Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

plicitly address this narrative in order to be able to traverse through and beyondnotions of feminism in the classroom. Since the argument in this chapter takesits departure in a workshop where we used memory work, I will start with ashort introduction to the methodology of memory work.Introducing memory work: a method aimed at studying how we becomethe persons we areMemory work is a feminist method and methodology introduced by a group ofacademic feminists in Germany, in the end of the 1970s. 5 The first publishedvolume in English on memory work is entitled Female Sexualization, and wasthe second volume on memory work published by the collective of authors. 6Memory work, as it is explained by Haug et al., is a visualization of howexperience interacts with social context and how it is always embedded inparticular situations, relations and structures. The method is based on autobiographicalstories, where the research collective’s own personal memoriesconstitute the material to be collectively analysed.While the poststructuralist critique asserts that there is no experiencethat is not already discursively constructed, the memory work collective alsoacknowledges a similar kind of anti-essentialism. This however is not at allfocused on the fractions that are characteristic for poststructuralists, but onmatter and materiality and is engaged in a study of the effects on women’ssocialization of colonized discourses, structures and relations. 7 To this groupof scholars, any attempt to fix femininity – irrespective if the aim was to lockfemininity in, or if it was to rescue femininity – was problematic. Indeed, every“naturalistic and ahistorical conception in which the body appears as the guardianof femininity’s ultimate truths” was rejected by this collective of scholars. 85Frigga Haug et al. Female sexualization. A Collective Work of Memory, (London: Verso, 1987), 33-72.6The German title of the book is Frauenformen. Alltagsgeschichten und Entwurf einer Theorie weiblicherSozialisation, ed. Frigga Haug 1980, and it is published at AS 45, Berlin/W. Recently, Frigga Haug has publisheda short article titled “Memory work”, see Australian Feminist Studies (2008), 23:58, 537-541, and published thechapter “Memory work: A detailed rendering of the method for social science research,” in the volume Dissecting themundane: International perspectives on memory-work, ed. Adrienne E. Hyle et al., (MD: University Press of America2008).7Frigga Haug, “Memory Work”, in Female sexualization. A Collective Work of Memory, ed. Frigga Haug et. al. (London:Verso, 1987), 54.8Erica Carter, “Translators foreword”, in Female sexualization. A Collective Work of Memory ed. Haug et. al (London:Verso, 1987), 13.77