Gender, Narratives and Intersectionality: can Personal Experience Approaches to Research Contribute to “Undoing Gender”?

Abstract

This paper examines the use of narrative methodologies as one approach to exploring issues of gender, education and social justice and particularly insights into ‘undoing gender’. Drawing on feminist beliefs in the significance of experiential evidence, the paper examines the possibilities of exploring gender and its multiple intersections in a range of global and policy contexts through the use of personal experience approaches. The ‘storying’ of lived experience is examined as a means of challenging dominant discourses which can construct and other individuals and groups in relation to many aspects of gender and education. Drawing on intersectionality, as an ambiguous, complex and developing feminist theory, the paper considers ways in which narrative can illuminate often hidden complexities while seeking to avoid simplistic generalisations and essentialisms. The difficulties of using narrative in relation to these aims are explored being mindful of the warnings of feminist writers such as Michele Fine and bel hooks. The paper briefly considers narrative as both methodology and phenomenon, and finally, drawing on critical discourse analysis, discusses the potential of intersectionality and narrative in relation to undoing gender.