Expanding the memory catalogue: Southern African women's contributions to memory-work writing as a feminist research methodology

Abstract

abstractMuch memory-work writing traces its origins to a systematic process of collaborative inquiry on female sexualisation undertaken by a group of feminist women in Germany in the 1980s. Other feminist researchers have since built on this work to explore gender and women's lived experiences. While a good deal of this work has continued to be collective, there is also more recent feminist memory-work writing that draws on ‘individual’ memories. From the outset then, memory-work writing has been positioned as an explicitly feminist methodology. To date, international scholarly conversations about memory-work writing as a feminist methodology have tended to be illustrated by exemplars from the academic ‘North’ – Europe, the USA, and Canada. We consider a range of exemplars of southern African women's written memory-work – as presented in published literature and unpublished theses and dissertations – that we see as contributing to a transnational ‘catalogue’ of methods for provoking feminist memory-work writing. We draw on this work to identify some generative strategies for, and features of, feminist memory-work writing. Our discussion also explores the potential significance and challenges of using such a methodology in southern African contexts, particularly in the context of a social change framework.