Body Memories and Doing Gender: Remembering the Past and Interpreting the Present in Order to Change the Future

Abstract

Narrative is one method of tapping individual and collective memory where human experience is organized into temporally meaningful episodes and where a "point" is often made. In research projects that I have carried out about working life, "body stories" are often spontaneously related in making a "point." These stories exemplify "doing gender"-that is how gendered relations (that revolve around equality/inequality, domination/suborclination, advantage/disadvantage) are actually created, recreated, contested and changed in everyday life. "Doing gender" is also linked to "body-reflexive practices"-the idea that the body is not only the object of symbolic practice and power but also participant. In other words, body-reflexive practices generate new courses of social conduct. In the second part of this paper, empirical examples taken from research projects on gender and professionals working in the health care and information technology (IT) sectors are provided to illustrate these concerns. The last example shows how a contestation of "doing gender" brings about change. More generally, one can say that without individual and collective memories, there would be no social change. Thus memory and the response that it invokes are pivotal in the unfolding of time. (Less)