Margaretta Jolly

What I Never Wanted to Tell You: Therapeutic Letter Writing in Cultural Context

Therapeutic letter writing has been viewed by psychologists as a powerful form of creative writing in health care settings. I explore the cultural contexts that have aided its popularization to shed fresh light on debates about its psychological function and efficacy. I draw on the sociologist Frank Furedi’s analysis of ‘therapy culture’ to argue that contemporary ideologies of the vulnerable self have stimulated this practice, particularly in the form of letters written not-to-be-sent. I conclude by considering models of developmental letter writing that attempt to challenge these ideologies, including narrative therapists’ provocative method of corresponding with clients.

Consenting Voices? Activist Life Stories and Complex Dissent

What can life stories reveal about political dissenters who were once on the margins but have moved centrewards? This journey is one that many activist autobiographers have taken, from the academic Karla Jay (formerly in the lesbian rights group Lavender Menace) to the spectacular example of President Obama after writing his memoir Dreams From My Father. Do life stories help us to understand patterns of dissent and consent? Can they indeed balance judgements about insiders, outsiders and traitors to the cause? I will argue that they can, particularly when illuminated by theories of social movement cycles and the life course. I will also reflect upon my own life story work with feminist ‘veterans’ to open a space for thinking about the subtle relation between consent and dissent, especially when we take the long view of activism by ageing and aged subjects.

Beyond hagiography: new books on gay and lesbian life writing

Review of: Gay Lives: homosexual autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette PAUL ROBINSON, 1999 Chicago: University of Chicago Press Female Fortune: land, gender, and authority. The Anne Lister diaries and other writings, 1833–36 ANNE LISTER & JILL LIDDINGTON, 1998 London: Rivers Oram Press Lesbian Lives: identity and auto/biography in the twentieth century NICKY HALLETT, 1999 London: Pluto

THE EXILE AND THE GHOSTWRITER: EAST-WEST BIOGRAPHICAL POLITICS AND THE PRIVATE LIFE OF CHAIRMAN MAO

Despite the official condemnation of Li and his bestselling The Private Life of Chairman Life of Chairman Mao by the Chinese authorities, I argue in this paper that it is not unrepresentative of current trends in Chinese biography, which are increasingly debunking in aim, whether for critical or commercial reasons. However the degree to which this text does this, particularly in its revelations of Maos sex life, and the latent liberal ideology behind it, reflects its construction in the United States, both in terms of general American biographical practices and the particular role of its ghost writer, Anne Thurston. The fictional techniques of docu-drama suggest not only the marketing policies of Random House but the general Western establishment of biography as a populist genre of history told through individuals lives, despite the scholarship that Thurston and her research team brought to it. This makes it ironic that Thurston herself has expressed deep reservations about the book within which she played such an integral, if mostly unrecognised part. Her disappointment at Lis failure to confess in addition to testifying, raises provocative questions about the general lack of critical Cultural Revolution autobiography in China. But it also suggests once again, a broader conflict of views on life writing West and East, in which the potential for social healing in the Western (Christian) tradition of confessional life writing is perhaps being over-idealised or at least over-applied in the Chinese context.

Voices in movement: feminist family stories in oral history and sound art

Voices in Movement, a sound installation directed by artist Lizzie Thynne with music by Ed Hughes, draws on memories recorded for Sisterhood and After: The Womens Liberation Oral History Project. Both the installation and oral history foreground family stories as central to feminist politics, though in diverse and shifting ways. As the producer of the installation and director of the oral history project, I explore how these representations of the family emerge, as well as the differences between oral history and sound installation as forms of life story-telling.

Desert Island Texts

The following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a number of key figures in feminism today, to write on a text that had been formative for their thinking as feminists. The chosen ...

Nuclear Nights: The Women's Peace Movement and the History of Dreaming

This paper draws on materialist theories of dreaming to contextualise records of nightmares about nuclear war from the early 1980s British and North American womens peace movement, in particular the dreams recorded in Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirks book Greenham Women Everywhere (1983). Such nightmares do not only suggest evidence of collective dreaming but provide a remarkable case of the collective interpretation of dreams as they were taken up as a basis for political action. It concludes that in particular historical contexts, dreams can be especially visible indications of a political unconscious and, encouraged by feminist recognition of emotional life, of the unconscious as a political resource.

We Are the Web: Letter-Writing and the 1980s Women's Peace Movement

This essay considers the unsung role of letter-writing in the construction of feminist communities formed in protest. Using the example of the Greenham and Seneca womens peace protests of the early 1980s, I show that the vibrant sense of community symbolised by the womens web was partly constructed through personal letters and epistolary publicity sent to and from peace camps. Like the web, letter-writing was symbolic as well as practical, the virtual extension of a profound identification across an international network of women. However, as a means of outreach and negotiation, letters also show conflicts with locals and within the movement itself to reveal the adversarial and unconscious dimensions of community-making as well as the more manipulative aspects of letters. In either case, letter-writing functions simultaneously as a basic technology of campaigning and a form of creative life-writing, testifying to the interdependence of writing and political direct action.

Hearing her: comparing feminist oral history in the UK and China

Abstract This article compares the China Women’s Oral History Project, directed by librarians at the China Women’s University in Beijing, and Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project, directed by scholars at the University of Sussex in the UK. While the projects share aspects of method, our practices wrestle with distinct historiographical structures which are entwined with a history of state feminism in China and with dissenting, nongovernmental networks in the UK, as well as differing institutional contexts. As we have sought to develop a relationship as feminist oral historians, we have had to decenter our own frameworks to understand the local conditions under which we each work. The article concludes by analyzing what we share: the wish to find progressive spaces within universities and national funding structures, particularly as oral history work connects with community activists.

Epistolarity: life after death of the letter?

Exploring what is at stake in the common lament that letter writing is dead, we cautiously celebrate a new age of ‘e-epistolarity’. In doing so, we build on our collaborative article of 2006, ‘Letters as/Not a Genre’, to consider the ongoing pacts, politics and arts in written relationship and the mixed methods that academics might adopt in analysing the growing archives of digital and digitised communication. As with our earlier piece, the essay is written as a dialogue, enacting our view that epistolarity enables the performance of self, though one that depends quite obviously on another.