Politicizing biographies: the forming of transnational subjectivities as insiders out - Diana Mulinari and Nora Rathzel

We take our own life stories as points of departure to look at some of the ways in which women were politicized in Argentina and West Germany (our respective countries of origin), focusing on similarities as well as differences in our politicization processes. We aim at putting present discussions about global political movements into a historical perspective. We want also to illuminate the centrality of political identities in the construction of specific (gendered) identities critically re-read their own position and transform their own understanding of themselves and the world through the field of the political. Methodologically, we want to contribute to ways of re-thinking feminist methodologies by experimenting with a form of analysis in which we alternate the subject and the object of our reesearch process. The aim of this intervention is to transgress the binary oppositions between researcher/researched and challenge traditional understanding of social science where researchers provide analysis and informants have 'experience'. One of our conclusions is that the 68 movement provided subject positions for living alternative normalities as an ' insider-outside', that is, for those who belonged to normalized groups in their respective societies, but for different reasons (of which we analyse some concerning our formation as 'women') could not identify with the dominant normalities offered to them. At the same time, the dominant male instrumentality of the movement estranges (some) women and allowed them (or forced them into) a kind of distanced engagement that, perhaps paradoxically, provided a basis for sustaining their political subjectivities through transformative experiences of defeat.
From Feminist Review 86 2007, pp. 89-112