Introduction: Situated Histories of the Female Self

Abstract

My interest in Foucault coincided with a critical period in my life, when, dislocating myself from familiar spaces and places, I had felt the need to experiment with new modes of thinking and perhaps with new modes of being. It was the early 1990s and I had come to London to make a new start. In following Foucault, I think that I had become passionately interested in a wider shift in the European intellectual landscape: the return of ethics as a primary issue in the philosophical agenda. It is through my particular interest in ethics that I have attempted to excavate the ways people, and particularly women, have acted upon themselves so as to create a stylistics of life, become ethical subjects, become what they are. It was in the Foucauldian framework that the initial question of a doctoral research project was formulated: What is the present of women in education today? How have we become what we are and what are the possibilities of becoming other?