Abstract
The feminist call to awareness that the “personal is political” not only led to changes in social attitudes, structures, and movements, but invited scholars to engage crucial epistemological questions regarding the relationship between personal life and professional commitment. The ways and the contexts within which one knows and learns have become vital to our work in the academy. This book helps take this notion a step further by problematizing the links between life and profession, using the personal to interrogate theory. Metta thus enacts a position from which “the personal is the theoretical,” inviting us to reexamine the ways in which we know and articulate women’s lives on multiple levels. The ungainly title does not do justice to the thoughtful proposals and creative approaches the book contains. Drawing from poststructuralist and contemporary feminist thought, the book highlights diverse interpretive and methodological strategies that are used in lifewriting practice and research, particularly issues related to the production and consumption of the representations of identity, gender, race, culture, and ethnicity. The book is divided into four main sections: a critical introduction to autobiography that focuses on the place of ethnic minority women’s writing in contemporary feminist scholarship and practice; an exercise in personal and relational lifewriting, since the author incorporates into the text her own story as well as that of her mother and father, complicating our notions of storytelling and what Metta calls “storymaking;” an examination of the paradigms of lifewriting research and its value beyond the academe; and a reflection on her own lifewriting experience.
Metta’s personal narratives lie at the heart of this highly self-conscious research project that explores the intersections of race, gender, and ethnicity with the social and cultural constructions of identity and selfhood: her life as a Chinese Australian woman, her experience of domestic violence, her contentious relationship with her mother, and her love for her father. Metta devises a “reflexive feminist narrative strategy” that she calls the triple braid, which requires the interweaving of the three lifewriting narratives she presents to challenge “the masculinist discourses of binary and hierarchical oppositions of male/female, self/other, masculine/feminine, nonfiction/fiction, and memory/imagination in which the first category takes precedence over and dominates the second” (p. 36). This approach, she argues, influenced by her psychotherapeutic practice, is valuable in therapy, since she deploys the writing of stories, particularly traumatic ones, as a method for self-reflection and understanding. It is important, Metta implies, that her theory is validated by its practice within the book itself.
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 later critical sections appear to try to blend in too many diverse strands that occasionally veer off in different directions. The book’s value lies in its comprehensive feminist methodological approach to the possibilities of lifewriting as research and practice.