First Generation Feminist? Auto-Ethnographic Reflections on Politicisation and Finding a Home within Feminism

Abstract

In spite of the apparent rise in feminism, who gets to know about feminism is still fraughtand impartial. How then, do we come to find ‘a home’ in and for feminism when it has been absentfrom our formative politicisation? How comfortable is that home for working-class academics? Inthis paper, I reflect on my feminist genealogy—from growing up as a working-class girl in a smallScottish town in an area of deprivation to becoming a first generation feminist academic in a RussellGroup University in the UK. This paper builds on the wealth of research exploring the trajectoriesof working-class women within academia by engaging genealogy research to explore how onedevelops as a feminist within academia—which can also be a strange place for first generationacademics. As an undergraduate coming of age in the ‘post-feminist’ 1990s, access to the languageand politics of feminism was beyond my grasp. I came to feminism relatively late in my life andacademic career—it was in my doctoral research that I really became engaged academically and asa named political identity. I employ auto-ethnography in this paper and reflect on how our intimateothers are always implicated in our own stories. This allows me to highlight how inheritedexperiences, memories, and embodiments are key. Intergenerational learning can make us implicitlyfeminist before we learn the formal language of feminism. The stories I choose to tell and ‘memories’I invoke here are re-crafted and recalled in response to what frustrates me now. That young womenare still telling the same stories that I tell here.

Narcofeminism: A feminist auto-ethnography on drugs

“…In this sense, auto-ethnography is also a methodological manifestation of the feminist political slogan, ‘the personal is political’, leaving open the question of ‘what is political’ and ‘breaking down false and arbitrary distinctions between scientific rigour and subjective experiences’ (Fraser, 2016, p. 8). As such it has been commonly used by feminist auto-ethnographers to transform their personal stories into political realities by revealing power inequalities and the complex web of emotions embedded in unequal relationships (Turbine, 2019). Using feminist auto-ethnography as a woman who uses drugs is a political act that holds power to ‘remake power relations’, both internally and externally, so that speaking about oneself can be transformed into narrative representations of political responsibility (Ettorre, 2010).…”