More reading notes, this time on the impact of women's personal narrative and "truth".

Even in out world of printed facts and impersonal mass media, we consciously and unconsciously absorb knowledge of the world and how it works through exchanges of life stories. We constantly test reality against such stories, asserting and modifying our own perceptions in light of them. The significance of these exchanges for women in clarifying social realities and challenging hegemonic oppression has often been profound. Contemporary political movements have capitalized on life stories in their efforts to transform society and women within it. In the course of the Chinese Revolution, women came together to "speak bitterness," recounting lives of pain and persecution at the hands of patriarchal families. In the contemporary Western feminist movement, consciousness-raising groups allowed women to tall each other about their experience, doubts, and anger - without fear of judgment or punishment. And even when we are not gathered in groups for the explicit purpose of exchanging information about our lives, we do so informally all the time. These exchanges and the knowledge they impart about emotional and physical well-being, communal causes, aspiration, or power become part of our reality. They are as true as our lives (The Personal Narratives Group, 1989: 261-262).

Women's personal narratives embody and reflect the reality of difference and complexity and stress the centrality of gender in human life and thought. They are, therefore, critical to the elaboration of a more finely nuanced understanding of humanity and to a reconstruction of knowledge that admits the fact and value of difference into its definition. In other words, women's personal narratives provide immediate, diverse, and rich sources for feminist revisions of knowledge. In the face of women's life stories, the search for Truth requires truths - a symbolic as well as semantic revolution by which we both challenge and reconstruct the traditional definitions of reality (The Personal Narratives Group, 1989: 263),

Reference List

The Personal Narratives Group (1989). Truths. In Joy W. Barber, Amy Farrell, & Shirley N. Garner (Eds.), Interpreting women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narrative (pp. 261-264). Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.

Posted by prolurkr at May 1, 2005 10:53 AM

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