Machinic Assemblages: Women, Art Education and Space.

In this paper I explore connections between women, art education and spatial relations drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of machinic assemblage as a useful analytical tool for making sense of the heterogeneity and meshwork of life narratives and their social milieus. In focusing on Mary Bradish Titcomb, a fin-de-sie`cle Bostonian woman who lived and worked in the interface of education and art, moving in between differentiated series of social, cultural and geographical spaces, I challenge an image of narratives as unified and coherent representations of lives and subjects; at the same time I am pointing to their importance in opening up microsociological analyses of deterritorializations and lines of flight. What I argue is that an attention to space opens up paths for an analytics of becomings, and enables the theorization of open processes, multiplicities and nomadic subjectivities in the field of gender and education.

Narrative Personae and Visual Signs: Reading Leonard’s intimate photo-memoir. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

: In this paper, I look at Joanne Leonard’s Being in Pictures and engage in a critical dialogue with an assemblage of visual and textual narratives that comprise her intimate photo memoir. In doing this I draw on Hannah Arendt’s take on narratives as tangible traces of uniqueness and plurality, political traits par excellence in the cultural histories of the human condition. Being aware of my role as a reader/viewer/interpreter of a woman artist’s auto/biographical narratives, I move beyond dilemmas of representation or questions of unveiling “the real Leonard”. The artist is instead configured as a narrative persona, whose narratives respond to three interrelated themes of inquiry, namely the visualization of spatial technologies, vulnerability and the gendering of memory. Key words: gendered memories, narrative persona, spatial technologies, photo memoir, vulnerability

The work of memory: embodiment, materiality and home in Jeanne Bouvier’s autobiographical writings

In this paper I follow trails in the memory of work by reading the books and papers of Jeanne Bouvier, a French seamstress, ardent trade-unionist and passionate writer, who left a rich body of labour literature including four published historical studies, as well as the memoirs of her life, work and struggles. Work, action and creativity are three interrelated planes on which Bouvier situates herself, while memory and imagination are interwoven in the way she seeks to understand herself in the world with others. What emerges as a particularly striking theme from Bouvier’s papers is a material matrix of mnemonic and imaginary practices, wherein bodies, places and objects are entangled in the narrative constitution of the self of the woman worker/writer.