Stories of life Stories of living: Women’ narratives and feminist biography

Narrative structure in biographical accounts is currently a much debated theme. This article brings together methodological debates in life story research and discussions within feminism about women's narratives and feminist biography. Connections between gendered conceptions of time and structures in narrative accounts are explored, and seen in relation to the context of interviewing. The latter is problematized as a setting that affects both the form and content of the biographical accounts given by informants. From this approach the opportunity arises for illuminating connections between “private troubles” in people's lives and “public issues” in society. An empirical discussion based on biographical interviews with white, Norwegian, middle‐class women, is carried out to illustrate the points made.     

Slide-writing as Site-writing: A Performative Reading of the Women’s Art Library Slides

Abstract

The artist’s 35?mm slide consists of a photographic image framed by a slide mount she inscribes with writing and symbols that direct the slide’s future use. In this article, I consider how these artists’ writings that are held, suspended, in the WAL slide collection are a vibrant reading material that performs the slides as a feminist text. In my joint role as curator and researcher, I explore how I used photography to initiate a performative reading of the slide collection that politicizes the work of image reproductions.