Gender And Memory

Gender and Memory brings together contributions from around the world and from a range of disciplines--history and sociology, socio-linguistics and family therapy, literature--to create a volume that confronts all those concerned with autobiographical testimony and narrative, both spoken and written. The fundamental theme is the shaping of memory by gender. This paperback edition includes a new introduction by Selma Leydesdorff, coeditor of the Memory and Narrative series of which this volume is a part. Are the different ways in which men and women are recalled in public and private memory and the differences in men's and women's own memories of similar experiences, simply reflections of unequal lives in gendered societies, or are they more deeply rooted? The sharply differentiated life experiences of men and women in most human societies, the widespread tendencies for men to dominate in the public sphere and for women's lives to focus on family and household, suggest that these experiences may be reflected in different qualities of memory. The contributors maintain that memories are gendered, and that the gendering of memory makes a strong impact on the shaping of social spaces and expressive forms as the horizons of memory move from one generation to the next. They argue that in order to understand how memory becomes gendered, we need to travel through the realms of gendered experience and gendered language.

This volume addresses the complex relationship between memory, culture, and gender--as well as the representation of women in national memory--in several European countries. An international group of contributors explore the national allegories of memory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the relationship between violence and war in the recollections of both families and the state, and the methodological approaches that can be used to study a gendered culture of memory.

What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting—even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational exploration of the intersection of feminism, history, and memory, shows how the recollection of violent histories can generate possibilities for progressive futures. Questioning the politics of memory-making in relation to experiences of vulnerability and violence, this wide-ranging collection asks: How can memories of violence and its afterlives be mobilized for change? What strategies can disrupt and counter public forgetting? What role do the arts play in addressing the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new visions for future generations? Women Mobilizing Memory emerges from a multiyear feminist collaboration bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and activists from Chile, Turkey, and the United States. The essays in this book assemble and discuss a deep archive of works that activate memory across a variety of protest cultures, ranging from seemingly minor acts of defiance to broader resistance movements. The memory practices it highlights constitute acts of repair that demand justice but do not aim at restitution. They invite the creation of alternative histories that can reconfigure painful pasts and presents. Giving voice to silenced memories and reclaiming collective memories that have been misrepresented in official narratives, Women Mobilizing Memory offers an alternative to more monumental commemorative practices. It models a new direction for memory studies and testifies to a continuing hope for an alternative future.

This book asks how 21st century technologies such as the Internet, mobile phones and social media are transforming human memory and its relationship to gender. Each epoch brings with it new media technologies that have transformed human memory. Anna Reading examines the ways in which globalised digital cultures are changing the gender of memory and memories of gender through a lively set of original case studies in the ‘globital age’. The study analyses imaginaries of gender, memory and technology in utopian literature; it provides an examination of how foetal scanning alters the gendered memories of the human being. Reading draws on original research on women’s use of mobile phones to capture and share personal and family memories as well as analysing changes to journalism and gendered memories, focusing on the mobile witnessing of terrorism and state terror. The book concludes with a critical reflection on Anna Reading’s work as a playwright mobilising feminist memories as part of a digital theatre project 'Phenomenal Women with Fuel Theatre' which created live and digital memories of inspirational women. The book explains in depth Reading’s original concept of digitised and globalised memory - ‘globital memory’ - and suggests how the scholar may use mobile methodologies to understand how memories travel and change in the globital age.

Remembering the past in the Middle Ages is a subject that is usually perceived as a study of chronicles and annals written by monks in monasteries. Following in the footsteps of early Christian historians such as Eusebius and St Augustine, the medieval chroniclers are thought of as men isolated in their monastic institutions, writing about the world around them. As the sole members of their society versed in literacy, they had a monopoly on the knowledge of the past as preserved in learned histories, which they themselves updated and continued. A self-perpetuating cycle of monks writing chronicles, which were read, updated and continued by the next generation, so the argument goes, remained the vehicle for a narrative tradition of historical writing for the rest of the Middle Ages. Elisabeth van Houts forcefully challenges this view and emphasises the collaboration between men and women in the memorial tradition of the Middle Ages through both narrative sources (chronicles, saints' lives and miracles) and material culture (objects such as jewellery, memorial stones and sacred vessels). Men may have dominated the pages of literature from the period, but they would not have had half the stories to write about if women had not told them: thus the remembrance of the past was a human experience shared equally between men and women.

An exploration of the influence of gender on the workings of memory in the Middle Ages, focussing on the non-elite.