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Book
ReviewGiving
Meaning To the Technologies of the Female SelfWomen, education and the self: a Foucauldian
perspective. Maria Tamboukou, 2003. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan; ISBN 1403901236, xii + 202 pp., £45.00 cloth
SAGE Publications, Inc.200510.1191/0967550705ab034XX
GabyWeiner
Umeå University, Sweden
I welcome
the opportunity of reading and reviewing this book for a number of reasons.
First, I have become fascinated by the use of auto- biography as a research
source, and its possibilities and limitations; in particular, how it may be
challenged by concepts of shattered personhood and fragmented subjectivities
that form the core of postmodern and post- structural scholarship. A writer
such as Maria Tamboukou, who attempts to put the two together, is therefore
particularly appealing, even more so as she has taken women's autobiography
as the focus of her study. To get the main judgements out of the way and before
I go on to comment more specifically about the book, this is an impressive,
schol- arly, well-written work by a writer-researcher who has a particularly
extensive knowledge of the work of Michel Foucault. She also has a love of,
and playfulness with, the written word, which comes out in the many artful
turns of phrase that lighten the script; `unbearable heaviness of intimacy'
(p. 114) and `dangerous “liaison” of maternal nature and teaching'
(p. 140) being two such instances. One of the interests of the volume is to
see how it turns out, that is to say, how a narrative style can be employed
(narrative here referring to how meaning is characterized) within a framework
that itself denies the coherence of narrative! Another interest is in the
outcome of a work that so openly and forcefully ties itself to one theoretical
source, however rich. A third is of seeing how concepts of theory are handled
by someone whose main research subjects engage mainly with the practice of,
for example, teaching, living, loving. In short, can the book deliver on its
ambitious promise of identifying and giving meaning to the `technologies of
the female self' as evident in selected women teachers' autobiographical texts
by means of a particular (Foucauldian) methodology, that of genealogy? The
book is divided into five chapters. The first maps the range of Foucault's
theoretical and empirical work, drawing on this to outline the intellectual
and methodology trajectories taken by the research. The second and third
chapters identify particular emergent themes; first, the personal and social
spaces represented in the women's writing, for
175
example,
in their wish to escape the restrictions of home and in their imagining a
new form of living, here termed heteretopias; and, secondly, their engagement
with sexuality and passion of one kind or another. Chapter Four turns towards
the present in constructing what Tamboukou terms the dispotif of genealogy,
in order to trace the different heteroge- neous elements that illuminate and
specify women educators' position more recently, while Chapter Five returns
to the more theoretical empha- sis of the first chapter to document what technologies
of the self might mean for women. Tamboukou uses the `female self' of the
women teachers, first, as a theoretical hypothesis for analysing the process
of specification and prob- lematization of women in discourse; and secondly,
as a political hypothe- sis to support women's real and multiple struggles,
historically and today. More specifically, she asks who or what were the first
women educators and university and college students, and how did they envisage
them- selves so that that they were able both to live within and yet, in their
het- erotopias, beyond the limits set by society? She positions the women
as imagining and actively seeking a future outside the conventional bound-
aries of late nineteenth-century (English) womanhood. The Victorian era was
saturated by a multiplicity of discourses, many times juxtaposing and contradicting
each other. It was amidst this war of discourses that the female self sought
to forge a place for herself, to negotiate subject positions, make life investments,
create new patterns of existence (p. 104). Tamboukou's aim in using genealogy
is to avoid a systematization of its characteristics; rather she focuses on
genealogy as a set of methodological strategies for research that are `attentive
to detail, many of them having remained unnoticed and unrecorded in the narratives
of mainstream history' (p. 10) and that `depend on a vast accumulation of
source material' (Foucault, 1986, quoted on p. 11). The life writing and autobiographies
of the women in her study are viewed as expressions of being, imagining and
resistance, rather than as a means of conveying a lived reality. Moving within,
but also beyond the textual realm, genealogy places the autobiographical
practices of writing the self in a cartography [Tamboukou also refers to herself
as a cartographer] of polyvalent and multifarious historical transformations,
depicting the conditions of possibility for the `figure' of the woman to emerge
(p. 34). The conclusions that Tamboukou comes to regarding how the women in
her study governed themselves concern, not unexpectedly, the multi- faceted
and complex nature of their lived and imagined lives. Grappling with the fragmentations
of her experience, she uses, among other strate- gies and practices, the technologies
of the self to weave together different patterns of her existence and form
temporary unities and parodic coalition.
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The self
she creates is fluid and nomadic. It is a self in a non-stop process of becoming
(p. 178). So did the book deliver on its promises? In some sense, yes but
also, no. It certainly gives us an insight into Foucauldian scholarship and
the kind of theorizing that lies behind doing history from a genealogical
perspective. It also offers us an interesting insight into the lives of a
range of women educators who were feminist innovators and activists of their
time, and whose influence is still with us today. But, while I enjoyed to
some extent the theoretical bits, my interest was much more engaged with the
more con- ventional historical employment and discussion of the autobiographical
texts, particularly inevitably perhaps, concerning their loves and obsessions.
I became not a little irritated sometimes with the continual reference to
what Foucault might have thought in the context of the specific study, and
the implication that there is a right way to think about and `read' the texts.
In this regard, the book goes against the principles of Foucault's work, one
might think, which is to open up rather than close down interpretation. There
are also minor editorial irritations, such as a tendency towards repetition
(e.g., Foucault's failure to engage with women in his work), and generaliza-
tion (e.g., `it is well known that ...'), overuse of italics as emphasis,
and editorial omissions (e.g., absence of reference to Noddings in the index).
However, this is a very rich source, and the limitations of a short review
have not allowed me to pick up on a number of other issues and ideas that
were stimulated for me by the book. For this, I am most grateful to the author
and this must also stand as a testimony to the book's value and quality.