ABSTRACT
The life history process1 makes class and gender visible as enmeshed and contingent, social and performative processes, and therefore implicated in, even a function of, women’s personal and social creativities. Class and gender may be viewed as performative, to the extent that they are ‘acted out’ and ‘improvised’ on the basis of culturally acquired codes, norms and taboos, within personal and social arenas not entirely or hardly of our own making. (Does this make them fact or fiction?) Class and gender may also be understood as instrumental and coercive: as social forces influencing and guiding those individual performances and versions. However problematic, contested and ambiguous, class is a body of experience/consciousness which is ours, individually and collectively. For women from working-class backgrounds, class is not simply a deficit position, but can and must be an important aspect of our power, our Wild Woman:
Wild Woman is the health of all women. (Pinkola Estés, 1994, p. 10) The Wild Woman carries the bundles for healing; she carries everything
a woman needs to be and know…. She carries stories and dreams and words and songs and signs and symbols. She is both vehicle and destination. (ibid., p. 12)
She is the one who thunders after injustice…. She is the one we leave home to look for. She is the one we come home to. She is the mucky root of all women. (ibid., p. 13)
In this chapter, I start by considering the importance of feeling and internalized narratives of oppression in the lives and works of women from working-class backgrounds, and the consequences for feminist work and relations between women. I sketch in my own hybrid class background, and some of the ways in which this contributes to my identity and understanding of class and gender now. I also consider the impact of education and feminism in my life, as both partial and essential. I conclude by advocating narrative resources which emphasize interpretation, creativity and healing, as both means and end.
