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Who Do You Think You Are? Feminist Memoir Writing
'This is not a memoir' is the opening sentence of my book, Making Thmblel Oh yes it is, my publishers said, fully aware that in recent years it is books packaged as memoir, which, as they like to say, 'shift units'. This Is Not About me', the Scottish novelist, Janice Galloway calls the childhood memoir she has just published, knowing that childhood is, precisely, all about those people and things around you, implanting themselves, being implanted, upon you. Galloway evokes the narratives engulfing her on reaching puberty: ? was turning into a moody cow like Aunt Kitty. IfI didn't get a grip, I'd be a cheeky bitch, like [older sister] Cora before I knew what had happened. I wouldn't trust me to behave at all'. (We know that story.) However, I had many other reasons, besides childhood's porousness, to be wary of the 'memoir' label tagged to Making Trouble, in which I wanted, primarily, to think about recent feminist history from the joyful rebirth of Svomen's liberation', now some four decades ago, right up to the present moment. I wanted, for instance, to suggest how strange is so much seen as feminism's contentious afterlife: for instance, think of those three women in the FTSE 100 index of top executives earning over diree million each last year. Has feminism failed because there are still only diree women up there? Or has feminism, once so preoccupied with issues of equality, failed because some women aspire to earn such obscene salaries, several million times more than the majority of women globally took home last year. (And I am not going to dwell upon any animals Svith lipstick', aquatic or agrarian, although the contradictions of Sarah Palin, when she stood for the vice presidency of the USA in 2008, with her explicidy antifeminist stances, are also part of feminism's ambiguous afterlife).
What makes feminist legacies so contentious? As different 'generations', those waves, as many like to depict them, kept on rolling in, rolling over, what went before, one so fast upon another. Making Trouble was hardly 'my' story, as one expendable cog on a journey, or at least moving along some crevice of the journeys, I was explo...See the full content of this document
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