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International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
ISSN: 0951-8398 (Print) 1366-5898 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tqse20
Deterritorializing collective biography
Susanne Gannon, Susan Walsh, Michele Byers & Mythili Rajiva
To cite this article: Susanne Gannon, Susan Walsh, Michele Byers & Mythili Rajiva (2014)
Deterritorializing collective biography, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education,
27:2, 181-195, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2012.737044
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2012.737044
Published online: 05 Dec 2012.
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Deterritorializing collective biography
Susanne Gannona
, Susan Walshb
, Michele Byersc
* and Mythili Rajivad
a
Education, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia; b
Education, Mount Saint
Vincent University, Halifax, Canada; c
Sociology & Criminology, Saint Mary’s University,
Halifax, Canada; d
Institute of Women’s Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
(Received 28 June 2011; ﬁnal version received 2 September 2012)
This paper proposes a new move in the methodological practice of collective
biography, by provoking a shift beyond any remnant attachment to the speaking/
writing subject towards her dispersal and displacement via textual interventions
that stress multivocality. These include the use of photographs, drama, and various
genres of writing. Using a story selected from a collective biography workshop on
sexuality and schooling, we document how we work across and among texts,
thereby widening and shifting interpretive and subjective spaces of inquiry. We
also consider how Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of territorialization/deterritorialization
and the nomadic subject might be useful in theorizing such methodological
moves in collective biography and our own investments in them.
Keywords: collective biography; Deleuze and Guattari; girls; sexuality; schooling
Introduction
I spent the entire session thinking that none of my stories had been chosen, without
recognizing, even when I was acting in it, that this was “my life” that was being
represented and reinterpreted … Afterwards the familiarity of this scene, which was
actually not at all like the story I had told … (but at the same time was utterly,
strangely, true to the memory), provoked another memory …
When she failed to recognize that the tableau I had created came from her story, I felt
a moment of utter failure, defeat. But then I realized that in rupturing her story I had
remade it into my own, but not my own; it was now something that belonged to all of
us. I had to break the “habit of thought” through which I understood success, failure,
and the process of the work itself. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, cited in Hickey-Moody
and Rasmussen 2008, 42)
In this paper, we “deterritorialize” collective biography through the introduction of
textual in(ter)ventions that invoke multiple genres of text and move us to new
interpretive spaces. Collective biography has a long history in feminist research,
emerging initially from the work of Haug et al. (1987) and developing in various
iterations over time. In 1991, Lather identiﬁed it as a productive emergent
methodology for disrupting subject–object relations and for bringing the body into
research, enabling groups of researchers to collectively analyze how their modes of
*Corresponding author. Email: Michele.byers@smu.ca
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2014
Vol. 27, No. 2, 181–195, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2012.737044
Ó 2012 Taylor & Francis
thinking and being in the world had been “colonized by dominant patterns of
thought” (1991, 95). The poststructural turn to discourse and its constitutive effects
have further inﬂuenced the methodological practices of collective biography,
particularly in education through the work of Davies and colleagues (e.g. Davies
1994; Davies and Gannon 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012). Other researchers have taken
memory work into different ﬁelds and in different directions (e.g. Crawford et al.
1992; Hyle et al. 2008; Stephenson and Papadopolous 2006). However, despite
occasional attempts to articulate “rules” for collective work with memories, it is
notable that Haug stressed from the beginning that there is: “no single,‘true’method
that is alone appropriate to this kind of work … the very heterogeneity of everyday
life demands similarly heterogeneous methods if it is to be understood” (Haug et al.
1987, 70–1). The in(ter)ventions that we suggest in this paper are not opposed to a
singular normative mode of collective biography that is “correct” but, rather, they
are experiments in pushing further methodologically and textually with the particular
intent of “deterritorializing,” in a Deleuzian sense, the texts of memory and
research process. In this paper, we highlight one particular story that emerged during
a collective biography workshop on sexuality and schooling in order to demonstrate
how our use of textual in(ter)ventions served to open the memories we had
initially written individually. Our textual in(ter)ventions took the form of Image
Theatre, photography, and various forms of “writing back” to the original story,
which we refer to as “the Sherry story.”
Throughout this paper, we employ conceptual tools offered by Deleuze and
Guattari as we attempt to think through what we were doing as we pushed at the
edges of collective biography. Recourse to a precise philosophical vocabulary from
the work of Deleuze and Guattari is central to our project but it risks alienating some
of our readers. We ask that you stay with us, keeping in mind St Pierre’s warning,
that calls for jargon-free “clarity” in educational research can operate, “to keep the
unfamiliar at a distance and illegitimate” (2000, 478). Rather than obfuscate, our
intention is to use philosophical concepts as resources or tools we can put to work to
think differently about what we are doing, and what we might do, in our research.
We ask “What can a body do?” (Ringrose 2011), and, working with multiple
iterations of a single story in this paper we also ask “what can data do?” Our focus
is thus on methodological disruption, on “thinking with Deleuze” (Mazzei and
McCoy 2010) in developing our research methodology via Deleuze and Guattari’s
emphases on the schizophrenic “I” or nomadic subject. Rather than focusing on the
experiential quality of the stories we generated in the workshop, we use Deleuze to
generate “previously unthought questions, practices and knowledges” in our
empirical work together (Mazzei and McCoy 2010, 505).
In this work, we consider the body not as a discrete individual entity, but rather
as a mobile-affective site of writing and remembering. As the space we write from
and the space we “feel in,” the body is mobile in both time and space. As such, the
stories we write in collective biography erupt into the present, bringing forth a host
of affective memories with them, for both the writer and readers/listeners/rewriters.
The stories we work with in collective biography are ideal in that we invest in them
as part of our highly individuated patterns of selfhood. Ideal does not have to mean
perfect; it means perfectly ﬁtting into the carefully constructed story “I” have
created of my “I”-ness. In extending the work of collective biography through
textual interventions such as Image Theatre, photography, and various forms of
writing back, our stories are opened up, or deterritorialized, to include pieces which
182 S. Gannon et al.
depart from their idealized forms, including their intrinsic belonging to us, and our
ability to recognize them and ourselves within them. That sense of affectivemobility
is highlighted by encouraging the story, and the emotions it evokes as it is
told and retold, to move between tellers without being reterritorialized, or locked
down, without trying to ﬁnd its original truth, meaning, or owner.
Though we applied textual in(ter)ventions to a number of stories, we focus here
on one which emerged after the group discussed an article by Renolds and Ringrose
(2008) and their mapping of the ways that girls disrupt and reinscribe normative
femininity in what they called, “the brutal contexts of heterosexualized regulation”
(2008, 315). In response to a prompt derived from the article, “Remember a time
when an ‘alternative ﬁguration’ of girlhood became imaginable/doable,”1
each of us
wrote a memory story. One memory that emerged out of this was the Sherry story,
a vignette that captured the group’s imagination in its attention to sensory detail as
well as its ability to throw into sharp relief the norms governing proper or respectable
girlhood. The narrator, a pre-adolescent girl, “hears” of something shocking,
and potentially shameful, happening on the playground. She rushes over to discover
one of the girls, Sherry, hanging upside down on the monkey bars. Sherry’s legs
are wide open, revealing that under her dress, through her tights, Sherry’s genitals
can be seen by a crowd of girls watching her “with guilty pleasure.” This story and
our “writing back” to it, offered a venue for thinking through questions of contagion
among bodies/selves in girlhood and how we might use collective biography
to interrupt the “I”-ness of a story so that what emerges is something akin to what
Deleuze and Guattari call “interbeing” (1987, 25). We read this disruption as a
signiﬁcant move for collective biography, opening its practices to multiple new lines
of ﬂight.
In what follows, we ﬁrst contextualize our work within collective biography as a
research method, particularly recent writing on collective biography that is informed
by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (Davies and Gannon 2009, 2011, 2012). We
then discuss our interventions, in Deleuzoguattarian terms, as deterritorializing methodology.
Next, we illustrate more speciﬁcally how “writing back,” Image Theatre
and photographs worked to disperse authorial claims – to deterritorialize and therefore
enable us to reimagine possibilities, not only intellectually, but in more embodied
ways. We conclude with our thoughts about the multiplicities this process
engenders and their implications for future work in collective biography.
Collective biography
Collective biography (Davies and Gannon 2006) is a research method where,
through a technology of speaking, writing, and listening to memory stories on a
selected topic, a group of researchers works together to identify and begin to
unpack the discursive threads and familiar cultural storylines through which subjects
are constituted and made recognizable to themselves and to others. It was inspired
by, and developed from, the collective memory work methodology of feminist
sociologist Frigga Haug and her colleagues in Germany (Haug et al. 1987). With
the methodological naming of our work as “collective biography” (e.g. Davies
1994; Davies and Gannon 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012), we signal a shift to the collective
interpretation of memory within an explicitly poststructural framework with its
attendant emphasis on deconstructing normative notions of power and knowledge,
on the processes of subjectiﬁcation, and on the constitutive effects of discourse.2
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 183
Despite the word “biography,” this method differs signiﬁcantly from life-history and
other research methods that focus on singular psychological individuals. Indeed the
method “jettisons” the notion of the, “unitary, rational subject who can be understood
in terms of his/her linear development” (Stephenson and Papadopolous 2006,
61–2). The focus shifts from individuals (telling their stories) to processes of subjectiﬁcation
within which subjects come into being, as collective biography draws
attention to historically and culturally speciﬁc grids of intelligibility such as gender
and sexuality. Collective biography, as we have noted, is inspired by Haug et al.’s
(1987) memory-work, but endeavors to move this work into an overtly poststructural
paradigm. While Haug (2008) stresses that memory-work emerges from everyday
language and experience and theory is emergent in the ﬁnal phases of analysis, collective
biography (Davies and Gannon 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012) foregrounds theoretical
and conceptual problems and elaborates these through memories of everyday
experience. Close attention to speciﬁc sensory, affective, and embodied detail is crucial
to this type of writing. The processes of collective biography produce embodied
accounts of being; each subject’s moments of singular sensation and memory are
opened up so that they begin to resonate with the memories and embodied accounts
of becoming of other members of the research group. In this approach, memories
are not merely assemblages of familiar stories, narrated by and about essential and
individualized selves; they become data for collective inquiry into processes of subjectiﬁcation.
The observations, questions, and comments that are provoked by each
memory-story are crucial to the process of opening these texts to alternative readings
and subsequent rewritings.
Collective biography is increasingly understood through the theoretical lens
provided by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (Davies and Gannon 2009, 2011,
2012; Wyatt et al. 2011). Lived experience is of interest, “insofar as it is a manifestation
of emergent being, where subjects come to exist, unfold, as virtual points
of intersection [or intensities] among concepts, precepts and affects” (Wyatt et al.
2011, 3). Collective biography works with the “virtual body” and with memories
of “virtual events” in that each time particular memories are evoked and elaborated
in telling and writing in the collective research setting, “they are re-made in their
virtual intensities” (Wyatt et al. 2011, 7–8). Close attention to affect, to the body
and to language in the telling and the writing of a particular memory aims to capture
the “haecceity” or “just-thisness” of the moment so that it resonates in its
intensity with the lived experience of members of the collective and not just the
individual storyteller (Halsey 2007, 145–6). Memory stories are spoken, written,
read aloud, listened to, discussed, and often rewritten by the original author in
order to allow other listeners/readers to come as close as possible to the immediacy,
intensity and intimacy of that embodied moment, to feel it within the folds of
their own bodies. The stories work towards a sense of open borders, of porosity
between subjects – of the subjects within the stories and also of the subjects who
come together to form the research group. Collective biography produces movements
of thought and movements of affect between subjects. Through the workshop
process, these become closely linked to the process of writing/listening; each
writer/listener begins to become, “someone other than themselves, a subject whose
co-implication in the lives of others has become visible” (Davies and Gannon
2011, 119). Thus decentring or destabilizing the “I,” the narrative subject able to
represent memories from a coherent or knowledgeable position, is part of the work
of collective biography.
184 S. Gannon et al.
Our particular process of collective biography entailed a week-long workshop in
Halifax, Canada on the topic of gender, sexuality, and schooling. Our transdisciplinary
“girl studies” group consisted of seven women from ﬁve different universities
working across various ﬁelds of study, including women and gender studies, cultural
studies, musicology, social work, sociology, and education.3
We were particularly
interested in how feminist scholars had put the theoretical apparatus derived from
Deleuze and Guattari to work as they analyzed empirical data from their research with
girls. As we generated stories from our own lived experiences of girlhood throughout
the workshop, we also considered the efﬁcacy of Deleuzoguattarian theoretical
approaches to understanding these stories and our own research process.
Each morning we began with a writing prompt derived from theoretical readings
on schooling and sexuality that we had gathered prior to the workshop, or that we
added throughout our week together (these included Best 2000; Coleman 2008a,
2008b; Hickey-Moody and Rasmussen 2008; Jackson 2005, 2010; Renolds and
Ringrose 2008; Ringrose 2011). We wrote memory stories and shared them with the
group, and sometimes rewrote and reread them, usually in order to open the story further
to others through, for example, the incorporation of details that were not part of
the original telling and/or to clarify points of confusion. In a Deleuzoguattarian reading
of this approach, if we consider the storyteller – the subject in whose experience
a memory originates – to be the “center” of a memory story, then the methodological
movements of collective biography are already somewhat like the, “nomadic waves
or ﬂows of derritorialization [that] go from the central layer to the periphery, then
from the new center to the new periphery, falling back to the old center, and launching
forth to the new” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 53). As the unity of the subject
begins to dissipate, the work of collective biography begins to have some afﬁnity
with the description that Deleuze and Guattari give of schizoanalysis: it can proceed:
only with great patience, great care, by successively undoing the representative
territorialities and reterritorializations through which a subject passes in his individual
history. For there are several layers, several planes of resistance that come from within
or are imposed from without. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 318)
It is because of the tendency towards undoing that emerged so urgently within the
context of this workshop that we began to think of our work as engaging in a
process of “deterritorializing” collective biography.
Deterritorializing methodology
The deterritorializing strategies – textual in(ter)ventions – that we describe in this
paper arose ﬁrstly because several of us have previously worked with innovative
forms of writing and other art forms in research in general and in collective
biography in particular, and secondly because we worked with a Boalian drama
practitioner on our ﬁnal afternoon together. After we had gathered a number of
written pieces over the course of several days, we began to disrupt one another’s
texts through dramatic performance and rewriting memories from different
perspectives and/or in different genres.
Reworking one another’s texts rather than our own was a signiﬁcant departure
from the usual collective biography process where the original author tends to rewrite
earlier drafts of her story (Davies and Gannon 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012; Haug 2008;
Haug et al. 1987).4
This strategy unhinged the writer from her text and allowed us to
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 185
recast what subject, text, and body/embodiment might mean in this work. The persistence
of the originating subject as the one who “knows,” and who remains most
authorized to speak and write the truth of memory has, at times, provided an
awkward undertow in collective biography work. Where it is taken up within a
poststructural paradigm, with a commitment to problematizing the individualized
humanist subject and interrogating the constitutive effects of discourse across subjects,
collective biography attempts to move beyond the purely biographical humanist
subject (Davies1994; Davies and Gannon 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012). However, as St
Pierre suggests, “humanism is the air we breathe, the language we speak… everywhere,
overwhelming in its totality” (2000, 478). Our strategies of deterritorializing
the texts precluded this slippage into an individualized, psychological, linear, or chronological
subject. Though the quotes from the workshop at the beginning of this
paper refer to “my life” and “her story,” the experience of misrecognition – of
loosening the self from the story – had a powerful effect. As we have discussed, in a
Deleuzoguattarian sense, collective biography undoes subjectivity and disrupts temporality.
Subjects are detached from a sense of ownership over their own memories,
that is, from a sense that “this happened to Me.” The authorial “I” of the story/memory
becomes a “We,” enabling a shared sense of being/becoming that resonates with
what Deleuze and Guattari would describe as a nomadic subjectivity: an exteriorizing
of feeling so that it is no longer locked in a closed system (i.e. a subject who has
feelings) but a powerful affect, with multiple intensities within the pack that, as Deleuze
and Guattari suggest, can serve to: “sweep me away so that the Self (Moi) is now
nothing more than a character whose actions and emotions are desubjectiﬁed, perhaps
even to the point of death” (1987, 356).
Below, we present the textual in(ter)ventions we applied to the Sherry story. We
consider these as providing evidence of ways the individual “I”s of the research
group members were interrupted, thus opening space for affective movement across,
among, beyond our own stories – a de/reterritorializing rhythm integrally connected
to nomadic subjectivity. As noted above, this particular story was written in
response to a prompt derived from an article by Renold and Ringrose (2008):
She had heard the rumours before she saw for herself. It was true. Sherry was doing
roll-overs and the splits upside down on the monkey bars. Her tunic skirt ﬂipping over
to reveal that underneath her leotards she is not wearing any underwear. The girl
hangs onto the pole watching and waiting with the other girls, pointing and laughing,
ﬂushing with guilty pleasure when Sherry does the splits and everyone can see her
vagina.
We use this as the basis for our discussion of textual in(ter)ventions in/to
collective biography as a methodological practice. The use of in(ter)vention – both
as a practice and as a term – is intended to evoke the sense of interruption,
disruption – even eruption – that happens when we open a text to multiple writers
and recast it in multiple forms. We think of “text” here in a broad sense, considering
it to include not only print, but also, for example, visual art, drama, dance, and
music. As our inter(ven)tions involve art practices such as drama and writing, it is
worth noting here that, for Deleuze and Guattari, art is not about representation as
such; rather, it is the movement of affect in the form of sensation, as one means
through which de/reterritorializing occurs. For them, art is connected to the natural/
physical world; it is a rhythm, a becoming-expressive, a time/space where sound
186 S. Gannon et al.
and color (for example) continuously mark and re/mark territories (de/reterritorializing),
affect rhythms, shift intensities, transform milieus (see Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 311–23). Grosz (2008) notes that, within a Deleuzian paradigm, artistic practices
have particular potential for deterritorializing habits of thought that separate
and individualize us. She suggests that art can surprise, intensify, and provoke
movements of affect across and between bodies:
[…] art is the most direct intensiﬁcation of the resonance, and dissonance, between
bodies and the cosmos, between one milieu or rhythm and another. It is that which
impacts the body most directly, that which intensiﬁes and affects most viscerally.
Through the plane of composition it casts, art is the way the universe most directly
intensiﬁes life, enervates organs, mobilizes forces. It is the passage from the house to
the universe, from territory to deterritorialization. (Grosz 2008, 23–4)
Our work with art in(ter)ventions interrupted the limits of the discursive and the
conceptual by mobilizing sensation, force, and intensity, opening up spaces where
we can imagine and feel outside the boundaries of our “selves,” our memories,
physical bodies, and also, more literally, the texts we wrote, individually, during the
workshop. In doing so, we work across the body, not as an individual body, but, in
Deleuzoguattarian terms, as a relational body, one that is affected by and affects
other bodies. Against an understanding of bodies as discrete entities with proprietary
histories, memories, and sensory perceptions, we intervene in texts as a way to
explore bodies as “relational becomings” (Coleman 2008b, 168). Memories become
processes that are collective/multiple rather than individual – in space and time –
through our imbrication with other bodies, subjects, and texts. Below, we discuss in
turn the writing and dramatic/photographic in(ter)ventions we undertook in relation
to the Sherry story.
Writing in(ter)ventions
In the ﬁnal stage of the collective biography workshop, we each wrote back to someone
else’s story, with the intention of expanding and/or transforming it – and thereby
manifesting new possibilities as to what the text might do. We chose from several
options: write from a different character’s point of view, write in a different genre
such as poetry or a script, or write into a particular image, feeling, or other moment
of the original text. We found that we were at times uncomfortable with moving into
another’s text, sometimes tentative and at others more conﬁdent and playful, as if
working with someone else’s memories liberated us from our everyday, habituated,
ways of knowing. Even listening to someone else read our original stories aloud,
ruptured the fabric of ownership, the sense of our stories, our memories as personal,
individual territories.5
Our in(ter)ventions thus took place on two levels: at the level
of the texts and also in the relations among us as researchers and colleagues, creating
new affective ﬂows across stories and among (and beyond) writers and texts. The
piece below emerged as an example of this process:
Sherry knows she’s better on the monkey bars than all the other girls. Her legs are
strong and she has practiced all through the summer on the old frame down back of
the yard at her grandma’s house. Her cousins nickname her “monkey” ‘cos she’s better
than most of them by now. She loves the feeling of hanging upside down and feeling
the blood rush to her head and looking at the world all topsy-turvy. She loves hanging
there feeling sun on her legs and air on her skin. She hates having to wear all these
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 187
clothes now she’s back at school. They get in the way. She’d take them off if she was
a real monkey. She dresses herself for school when she’s at her grandma’s place and
likes the sorts of clothes that feel like they are not even there. In the schoolyard the
other girls gather round her. They look funny upside down, giggling and pointing at
her. She doesn’t really care much what they think. They don’t play with her anyway.
But she sort of likes that they are watching her. That gives her a funny upside down
feeling in her tummy. She pushes her legs higher and higher so they can have an even
better look.
This in(ter)vention generates a new story from the point of view of a girl who
seems otherwise to have no voice or say in how she is positioned by the other girls
or the narrator (and who is voiceless in the original story). It opens a line of resistance
to others’ positioning of her. In this ﬁctionalized rewriting, Sherry becomes
agentic, despite her subordination by others, in articulating another perspective on
her play. She highlights the feeling of blood in her head when she hangs upside
down, the sun and air on her legs and arms, how much she loves clothes that, “feel
like they are not even there.” The textual in(ter)vention also mobilizes affective
ﬂows in different directions and enables different potential points of contact for
listener/readers with the story as well as potential points of rupture within the story
itself. It subverts the passionate attachment to the truth of the memory by imagining
other possible/plausible truths and perspectives. Like the group member in the
opening of this essay who described her failure to recognize that the tableau in
which she was participating came out of one of her own stories, in the process of
writing in(ter)ventions, we were thrown into the deterritorialized space of writing
through, or even beyond, what had been someone’s else’s story, as our own stories
were written, not “over” but “across” in complex ways, with bits and pieces left in
and out, rearranged, translated, turned inside out, and erased, but not completely. In
writing back to the memory stories, the writing, like our “selves,” entered into a
nomadic state, a state of becoming, which is a “constant state of movement and
transformation” entailing “novelty [and] the openness and uncertainty that this
produces” (Coleman 2008a, 89).
While generating a similar sense of uncertainty as the writing in(ter)ventions
around the process of deterritorializing embodied stories, memories, and “selves,”
the drama workshop took us into a space that was even less familiar and – for
many group members – much less comfortable (at least initially) than the writing.
By moving (into) our physical bodies, we were pushed into sensuous, and more
direct, even vulnerable, relations with one another. The energy generated in this
way was vibrant, something less attached to the discursive or the conceptual – and
something that exceeded any of our individual “selves.”
Drama and photographic in(ter)ventions
In the ﬁnal afternoon of our workshop, we invited a Boalian theatre practitioner to
work with us on a sample of the texts we had written through the week. Facilitator
Susan Spence-Campbell led us into drama through a series of exercises that
involved physical movement and stillness, voice and silence, individual, partner,
and small group work. Signiﬁcantly, she introduced us to Image Theatre as a means
of working with speciﬁc phrases and fragments that she had chosen from our
writing. For Boal (2006), image, feeling, and imagination became important in the
context of his cross-cultural and multilingual work with Theatre of the Oppressed.
188 S. Gannon et al.
Speciﬁcally relevant to our work with textual in(ter)ventions is his interest in: “the
multiple mirror of the gaze of others – a number of people looking at the same
image, and offering their feelings, what is evoked for them, what their imaginations
throw up around that image” (2006, 175; italics in original). We understand the
“multiple mirror of the gaze of others” as ﬂuid, shifting, and multidimensional, a
movement across physical bodies, subjects, and bodies of text, something set in
motion by affect, by new iterations of bodies-in-relation.
In Image Theatre, one person silently sculpts others into a tableau (frozen picture)
inspired by an idea, story, memory, or experience (Boal 2006) – in our case,
the excerpts from our stories. Later, the tableau comes to life, is “dynamized”
through improvization – the characters in the tableau talk, move, and interact to
explore the multiple potentialities of the moment (Schutzman and Cohen Cruz
2006). In relation to the original story about Sherry, our task in the drama
workshop was to move the single line: “ﬂushing with guilty pleasure when Sherry
does the splits and everyone can see her vagina” into a tableau where each participant
created and held a position according to the director/participant’s vision.
Spence-Campbell chose the fragments from the texts such as the one above based
on their possibilities for tableaux, not because of a personal investment in the
group dynamics, the writing process, or the texts themselves, as she knew only
one member of the group and had not participated in the writing process earlier in
the week. In doing so, she assisted in the process of removing us from ownership
of the original texts and of moving subjects across the bodies (textual, physical,
and other) that were present in the space and time available. Further, because each
of us chose a phrase that did not come from our own writing as a basis for
directing others into a tableau, we worked through the story like we did with the
writing in(ter)ventions described above – albeit through different artistic media, this
time using our bodies and voices rather than the written word. In the Sherry tableau,
a new character emerged – that of a teacher who looked over her eyeglasses
at Sherry’s exploits on the monkey bars, thus introducing another perspective on
Sherry’s transgression that could be juxtaposed with that of the two small groups
of girls who gathered in the scene.
Additional layers and possibilities also emerged through photographs of the
tableaux6
that Spence-Campbell took with her iPhone. She shot from several angles,
thus providing multiple perspectives, further fracturing existing narrative coherences.
As they could be immediately projected through a computer onto a screen,
the photographs were starting points for discussions whereby we offered varying
and multiple interpretations about the characters we had just “played,” considering
their motivations, feelings, next actions, and so on. In the Sherry tableau, we were
struck by the expression on Sherry’s face in the photo: how did she experience this
event? As a moment of freedom and joy, oblivious to the onlookers? As deﬁance?
As a means of getting attention? What was the teacher thinking? Would she ask
Sherry to get down from the monkey bars? Discipline the group of girls? Was she
deriving her own secret pleasure? And what was going on with the two groups of
girls, the onlookers, individually and collectively? What affects were created
through their “looking”? For instance, while the pictures, at ﬁrst glance, seem to
convey a conventional response in the onlookers, in the form of shock and even
ridicule or contempt, was there also a secret delight in Sherry’s disruption of the
gendered status quo? Across all the photographs, including the one of “Sherry,” it
is possible to read what Deleuze and Guattari would call a “contagion of affect”
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 189
(1987, 241), where the individual feeling of bodily satisfaction and freedom experienced
by Sherry (Figure 1) spreads to the two groups, creating a nomadic movement
of joyful rebellion, even if it is quickly reterritorialized by molar structures,
present in the onlookers’ possible fear of what will happen to Sherry or the teacher’s
censoring gaze (Figure 2).
After the tableaux and ensuing discussions about what was happening in the
pictures, we found ourselves needing to understand what all the characters might
have been thinking; rather than acting or “role play,” we felt ourselves becoming
the characters we were embodying, that, in fact, they were taking us over, or in
Deleuzoguattarian terms, infecting us (Figure 3). We needed to move, act, and
speak through the characters, and this contagion moved us to the next phase of
Image Theatre, where we dynamized the tableaux, thereby investigating what each
might have been thinking or feeling and what she might have said or done prior to,
or after, the moment that had been captured in stillness through the tableaux and
the photographs. In this way, different forces and intensities were mobilized through
what we had collectively imagined into existence, across the bodies of the characters,
our own assemblages of “self,” and the bodies of text in the form of the written
story, the tableaux, and the photographs.
In the process of writing collective biography, we are never just writing. The
process begins with the sharing of stories, some of which get written down, some
not. In the creation of tableaux, we wondered: could a greater ﬂuidity, a deterritorializing,
of the stories told and written down emerge? Could we allow ourselves,
consciously or not, to draw from the broader pool of collective narrativization? One
memory provoked by looking at the photographs of our tableaux in the writing of
this paper is the sense of fun we had in performing them. We were struck by the
gusto with which we threw ourselves into the roles, and the ways in which we
imagined our bodies physically into particular shapes, forms, and relations with
others. This is an example of how expanding collective biography practices might
create both “ruptures and reterritorializations as a molecular rhythm” (Renold and
Figure 1. Sherry upside down on the monkey bars.
190 S. Gannon et al.
Ringrose 2008, 332). The pleasure in the play, and the memory of the play, is partly
the pleasure of exposing the, “molar (normalized) ideals and discourses of gendered
and sexualized identity” (Ringrose 2011, 602).
Figure 2. Cluster of three girls looking at Sherry.
Figure 3. Cluster of two girls and teacher looking at Sherry (on right).
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 191
Taking part in the drama workshop provided a potent context for generating a
nomadic subjectivity in our work on girls, sexuality, and schooling, as each
participant took on, expressed, and articulated the gestures, modes of thought,
affects, and emotions that had originated with another’s memory. In this space of
multiple mo(ve)ments, we experienced our bodies, not as ﬁxed biographical entities
located in time and space, but as ﬂuid, time-traveling nomadic becomings, both
acting upon, and being acted upon by, stories generated by the group. When we took
up and lived other subjects’ stories through drama and writing in(ter)ventions, we
became part of them and they part of us; in doing so, we multiplied stories and
subjectivities, deterritorializing the “I” of each story by blurring, if not erasing, the
lines between individual biographical selves.
Conclusion
In engaging in textual in(ter)ventions in collective biography via Image Theatre, photographs,
and writing, we deterritorialize what is imagined as inside, as authentic and
belonging unilaterally to the individual self who remembers. Instead, we consider the
nomadic subject, not as a discrete rational subject but as a “cartographic ﬁguration”
(Braidotti 2008, 27) perpetually engaged in self-reﬂexivity, always in motion and
always in relation. This is a “non-unitary” subjectivity that is a “dynamic, timebound,
embodied and embedded subject in process” (Braidotti 2008, 27), where the
binaries of self/other, subject/object dissolve, where the taken-for-granted connections
between a memory, in its “original” textual form, and an individual subject/body
rupture and may even be rendered unintelligible or unrecognizable to its “author.” As
Goodchild says of deterritorializations:
When forces meet and interact, the relation that they construct affects their own nature
and changes them in the process … one force acts on another by lending it a fragment
of its code, offering some of its conventions and habits. It imposes senses and values
on the other force. The latter then responds by acting on the former, imposing its own
sense and values. Through this exchange of fragments of code, the overall memory or
territory belonging to each force is expanded, possibly in a way that overrides former
codes and conventions … each force is transformed in its essence: it is deterritorialized.
(1996, 38)
Thus our memories operate like forces that exchange fragments of code and alter
each other in the exchange. De-linking individual subjects and bodies from their
memories, and having other bodies take up and inhabit these memory spaces, grafts
new affects and sensations onto these memories and serves as a powerful reminder
of the mobility of subjective experience. It is a nomadological approach to subjectivity
that emphasizes a body/subject/assemblage that is, “constantly transforming;
is (capable of) constantly being known, understood and experienced differently”
(Coleman 2008b, 171). Using this approach to collective biography moves us from
writing and re-working individual stories as a means of identifying “grids” of intelligibility,
to a more forceful intervention, a jarring of the text/subject/body in a
manner that we might, somewhat provocatively, describe as a “becoming violence.”
That is to say, the wrenching of a story out of a biographical narrative of the self
into a collective mo(ve)ment creates both pain and pleasure for the individual
subject/narrator, but opens up new stories, new voices, and new perspectives that
do not erase as much as co-exist with, and “feed upon,” the “original” story.
192 S. Gannon et al.
If, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 93), a schizophrenic is one who
refuses the “I,” a nomadological approach to collective memory work entails
radically disrupting the ownership of a memory by the subject to whom the memory
“belongs.” A Deleuzian re-imagining of collective biography embraces a
schizophrenic conception of individual memory as a collectively created assemblage,
a kind of contagion that creates multiplicity without absorbing or equaling the
original story (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 239–41). These becoming stories do not
replace the “ﬁrst” story; they do not leave this story intact and enter it via another
voice (i.e. synthesizing); instead, they use the story to proliferate, to give birth to
themselves, while remaining rhizomatically “in alliance” (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 25) with both the teller and the story to which they are connected. This type
of work offers us lines of ﬂight out of the molar memories of “things that stay”
(Coleman 2008a); those painfully gendered and heterosexualized memories that were
so much a part of the week we spent exploring sexuality and schooling through
collective biography. These are ﬁrst steps; there are many more to take.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Mount Saint Vincent University for the funding that made our research
workshop possible and ACSANZ, the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and
New Zealand, whose 2010 International Research Linkage Grant assisted with travel
expenses. We would also like to thank Susan Spence-Campbell for her facilitation during
our workshop. Thanks to the audience at the International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry
2011, who were the initial respondents for this paper presented by Susan Walsh, and to our
QSE reviewers and editor for advice that assisted us in redrafting the paper for publication.
Notes
1. Prior to the workshop, the facilitators (Susanne and Marnina) developed a series of
writing prompts generated from particular workshop readings.
2. See St Pierre (2000) for a thorough elaboration of poststructural theoretical concepts in
education.
3. Our group comprised (in alphabetical order): Marion Brown, Dalhousie University;
Michele Byers, Saint Mary’s University; Susanne Gannon, University of Western
Sydney; Marnina Gonick, Mount Saint Vincent University; Mythili Rajiva, University of
Ottawa; Susan Walsh, Mount Saint Vincent University; and Jacqueline Warwick,
Dalhousie University.
4. Haug’s original outline of memory work in Female Sexualization (1987, 70), however,
recommends attending to points of view, interests, and motives of others when participants
revise their own memory stories.
5. It is amazing what another’s voice, pacing, intonation, and pronunciation can change in
the telling of a story. It is also noteworthy that where the writer had already read his/her
story aloud, the new reader often mentioned the desire to try and “copy” the original
“voice” as closely as possible.
6. The photographs we include in this paper have been “Photoshopped” in order to further
disengage the photographic images of our embodied selves from the (illusion of) stable,
coherent selves that we inhabit on a day-to-day basis. In doing so, we shift attention
from our identities onto the shapes and forms of bodies in relation to one another, and
the sensations, affects and intensities are mobilized.
Notes on contributors
Susanne Gannon is an associate professor and equity strand leader in the Centre for
Educational Research at UWS. She has published widely on collective biography
methodology. She researches gender, ethnicity and equity, innovative writing practices and
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 193
pedagogies, and English education. Her most recent ARC grant explored pedagogies of
place in schooling and teacher education in Australia.
Susan Walsh is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at Mount Saint Vincent
University. Her research involves the arts and writing as creative/critical modes of inquiry,
particularly in relation to women and teaching. She was principal investigator on a SSHRC
grant that focused on the experiences of internationally educated female teachers. Her work
has appeared in venues such as Qualitative Inquiry, Teaching and Teacher Education and
Changing English.
Michele Byers is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at
Saint Mary’s University. She has published widely in the areas of television, media, culture,
and identity and has held several SSHRC grants for the study of Canadian television, the
most recent of which focuses on television and ethnicity.
Mythili Rajiva is an associate professor at the Institute of Women’s Studies, at the
University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on girlhood, the Canadian South Asian diaspora,
and racialized identities, and has appeared in such journals as Girlhood Studies and Feminist
Media Studies. She is also co-editor of Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives on a Canadian
Murder (CSP, 2010).
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