‘On Election Day the Husband Tied His Wife to a Table Leg to Stop Her from Voting’: Political Narratives, Gender and Archived Heritage in Finland

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the relationship between gender and political narratives by drawing on autobiographical memoirs generated by way of a collection project called Politics and Power Games, which was organised by the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society in 2006-2007. The materials stored in the memory institution with a long history of collecting cultural heritage open up a terrain for experiences of political culture and traces of gendered political heritage as occurring in ordinary people's minds and narratives. By highlighting experiences of gender-based political culture, the article aims to show the importance of collecting and archiving political narratives as part of history culture and heritage. When writing to an archive, narrators participate in a dialogue not only between the present and the past but also between the personal and the public sphere.

The Return: Intertextuality of the Reminiscing of Karelian Evacuees in Finland

“…They also frequently refer to performances or situations of oral communication (see Latvala 2005:65). A specific feature of Finnish (and more generally Nordic-Baltic) scholarship of personal narrative is the application of ideas and premises from oral history research to the study of written reminiscence narratives (Heimo 2016;Kuusisto-Arponen and Savolainen 2016;Peltonen 1996;Latvala 2005), with emphasis on narrative form and structure in addition to thematic content.…”