Fictioning authority: Writing experience in feminist teaching and learning

Burman, Erica

doi:10.1080/13533330110041264

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 14 publications

(10 reference statements)

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“…Nevertheless there are times when this involvement overwhelms the task so that the academic quality of the assessment becomes secondary to its role as a containing vehicle (or transitional object in Winnicott's, 1975, sense) for the management of the emotions (see my discussion in Burman, 2001a). Our staff team now take great pains to make clear at the outset that we do not evaluate personal experience, but rather we assess what students do with this in their written work.…”

Section: Topics and Process: Common Terrainmentioning

confidence: 93%

Emotions in the Classroom: And the Institutional Politics of Knowledge

Burman¹

2001

Psychoanalytic Studies

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We now live in a temporal and cultural context in which emotions have changed places with reason to become an explicit, legitimate topic of discussion, of intervention, of manipulation and instrumentalisation. From being that which the modern rational unitary bourgeois subject strenuously denied or warded off, in the inexhaustible postmodern search for new technologies-for managing oneself or others-the repressed has been returned from the margins to a new and central market niche. No longer the opposite of reason, emotions are now seen as its indispensable ally, which-as the books on topics such as 'emotional intelligence' indicate-are amenable to application and technologisation. Emotions have even become separable from the people expressing them: for where once the notion of 'emotion mapping' would have evoked cognitive psychoeducational training, it now describes the superimposition of lm star's faces and reactions onto the stunt people performing their actions in best-seller movies.This might sound like a cynical place to start for a feminist academic committed to acknowledging the emotional character of research, teaching and learning processes; and a psychotherapist facilitating groups to explore their covert emotional tensions and themes. But we cannot ignore the broader socio-political conditions that foster the emergence of such academic and therapeutic contexts. Rather, these rare ed arenas are themselves perhaps merely the more exclusive places for the practice of the 'psy complex' (Rose, 1985(Rose, , 1990, with TV talk shows and shrink thriller lms and self help manuals forming the popular cultural climate for attending to, managing and improving one's 'self' and relationships (see broader discussion in Squire, 2001).But there is one further element in this complex cocktail of current cultural continuities between de nitions of therapeutic and educational knowledge that I want to mention before moving on. This is the elusive presence and absence of 'gender'-and here we might also want to consider how gender is typically foregrounded to stand in for other characteristics of 'otherness'. The clichéd association of women and femininity with the emotional is often taken as symptomatic of all that has been othered by the normalisation of white, middle class Euro-US experience within psychological, legal and bureaucratic models (e.g., Pateman, 1989;Broughton, 1988;Walkerdine, 1988), giving rise to claims of women 's 'different' voices (Gilligan, 1982) or gender-speci c relations to ethics and politics (see discussion in Bowden, 1997). Within psychoanalysis 'hysterical' women occupy a unique role in its epistemophilic generation (Moi, 1989), while Lacanian formulations position the analysand as speaking within the discourse of the hysteric (Fink, 1999).Clearly we are now a long way from xing feminine genres onto women (as the recent cases of men murdering as a result of unwelcome disclosures on the Jerry Springer Show testify). Indeed talk of the feminisation of labour itself highlights how the casual,

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Section: Topics and Process: Common Terrainmentioning

confidence: 93%

Emotions in the Classroom: And the Institutional Politics of Knowledge

Burman¹

2001

Psychoanalytic Studies

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“…There are fruitful features of memory-work as both an educational method and a therapeutic approach that takes the political construction of the individual and their gendered identities as its topic (Burman 2001). The method itself, as a form of group-work, bears comparison with group analysis (Foulkes 1986), and is clearly informed by psychoanalytic ideas (as is most German political and intellectual thinking) (see also Haug 1992).…”

Section: Memory-workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Therapy as Memory‐work: Dilemmas of Discovery, Recovery and Construction

Burman

2002

Brit J Psychotherapy

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In this paper I have sought to shift the focus on the construction of memory within psychotherapeutic practice in a number of different directions to draw some more general lessons for the process and status of therapeutic accounts. The precipitating context for the current scrutiny of memory-making within therapy may have limited its scope and fruitfulness. The fact that this issue was largely prompted by debates about the status of (usually) adult women's recovery of memories of early abuse within therapy is a relevant factor that has been compounded by issues of professional credibility and hierarchy. Clearly, at a cultural level, women's memories of childhood abuse function politically as well as personally, as reflected by the social and legal responses to this challenge.However, guidelines for professional practice cannot legislate for the indeterminacies surrounding the subjectivity of memory, while assumptions underlying the empirical psychological resources drawn upon to inform debates in psychotherapy require critical scrutiny. Clinical and interpretive dilemmas extend beyond the status accorded client memorial reports to therapists' memory-making practices as textualized via both supervision and clinical notetaking. Drawing on more recent (including feminist) discussions of memory that identify different political possibilities within third and first person accounts it was suggested that, rather than eschewing the subjectivity of memory, therapists can instead analyse this as a key interpretive and reflexive resource to inform their own practice. Now that the initial furore around 'false memory' debates has subsided (although the consequences reverberate on, Frankland & Cohen 1999), in this paper I try to go beyond the immediate polarizations of truth and falsehood, of legal versus psychotherapeutic truth and professional competencies and disciplinary procedures. Firstly, I consider forgotten histories the immediate crisis obscures, as well as the specific conditions that make such contests around memory possible and prominent. Secondly, I suggest how such analyses may be useful, not only to tighten up and strengthen therapeutic

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“…We assume the past is determinate, complete, and leaves a neutral, if somewhat inaccessible, archive in our minds. 170 "we remember what we need to remember, what is safe to remember, that which we have the cultural tools to express." Memory is shaped by our audience and our own "intellectual inquiries, personal needs, and moral imperatives".…”

Section: (Sophie Loses Her Thread a Little; Clears Her Throat Shufflmentioning

confidence: 99%

Playing the survivor : how (and if) women recover from spousal abuse

Tamas¹

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Fictioning authority: Writing experience in feminist teaching and learning

Cited by 7 publications

References 14 publications

Emotions in the Classroom: And the Institutional Politics of Knowledge

Emotions in the Classroom: And the Institutional Politics of Knowledge

Therapy as Memory‐work: Dilemmas of Discovery, Recovery and Construction

Playing the survivor : how (and if) women recover from spousal abuse

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