Overview

Marilyn Metta is the cowinner of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry 2011 Qualitative Book Award. Memory, embedded in our scripts of the past, inscribed in our bodies and reflected in the collective memory of every family, group and community, occupies one of the most controversial and contested sites over what constitutes legitimate knowledge-making. Using a reflexive feminist research methodology, the author is involved with memory-work in creating three life narratives written in different narrative styles: her mother’s and father’s biographies and her own autobiography/autoethnography. By exploring the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity and culture in the social and cultural constructions of identities in lifewriting, this book maps the underlying politics of storytelling and storymaking, and investigates the political, social, pedagogical and therapeutic implications of writing personal life narratives for feminist scholarship, research and practice. As a Chinese-Australian woman engaging in reflexive, creative and imaginative lifewriting, the author hopes to create new spaces and add new voices to the small but emerging Asian Australian scholarly literature.

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9783034305150

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Metta's research is thorough - the theoretical chapter is a solid introduction to the key issues of feminist lifewriting today as well as to questions that are germane to current practice, such as relational narratives and the ethics of autobiographical engagement. [...] The book's value lies in its comprehensive feminist methodological approach to the possibilities of lifewriting as research and practice. (Rocio G. Davis, Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work) As an auto ethnographic researcher, I find that sometimes only a well written example will do. This is such a work. Metta has written a text that is both an intriguing insight into her life as she experienced it and a theoretical explanation of the process of writing about it. This makes her research accessible to a new audience interested in the process of writing and researching a single life that may previously have only considered the case study format. (Sandy Hutchinson Nunns, The Independent Practitioner) This is a significant book for several reasons. First, it contributes to the discourse about life writing as a transformative praxis; second, it engages critically and creatively with the literary and scholarly field of Asian Australian writing; and third, it adds to the major feminist poststructuralist project of rewriting subjectivity. (Christina Houen, Biography 34, 2011/3)

Metta's research is thorough - the theoretical chapter is a solid introduction to the key issues of feminist lifewriting today as well as to questions that are germane to current practice, such as relational narratives and the ethics of autobiographical engagement. [...] The book's value lies in its comprehensive feminist methodological approach to the possibilities of lifewriting as research and practice. (Rocio G. Davis, Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work) As an auto ethnographic researcher, I find that sometimes only a well written example will do. This is such a work. Metta has written a text that is both an intriguing insight into her life as she experienced it and a theoretical explanation of the process of writing about it. This makes her research accessible to a new audience interested in the process of writing and researching a single life that may previously have only considered the case study format. (Sandy Hutchinson Nunns, The Independent Practitioner)

Author Information

Marilyn Metta is a feminist academic in the School of Social Sciences and Asian Languages at Curtin University of Technology and the School of Psychology and Social Sciences at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. She is a practising psychotherapist at the West Leederville Counselling Centre in Perth.

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