557322

research-article2014

CSCXXX10.1177/1532708614557322Cultural Studies <span class="symbol" cstyle="symbol"></span> Critical MethodologiesGonick

Article

Producing Neoliberal Subjectivities:

Literacy, Girlhood, and Collective
Biography

Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies

2015, Vol. 15(1) 6471
2014 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/1532708614557322
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Marnina Gonick1

Abstract
This article takes up the question of literacy and its relationships to gender, race, class sexuality, and neoliberal ideologies.
It traces the various feminist critiques of the relation between gender and literacy. It uses the memory stories of learning
to write written by young American women, in the context of a collective biography exercise done in a womens studies
university classroom. I analyze the stories for what they reveal about neoliberal subjectivity (and resistance to it), such
as self-regulation, competitive self-making, and the affective responses to both the constraints and possibilities of what it
means to encounter and work with literacy as a form of self-making.
Keywords
feminist studies, gender and sexuality, feminist methodologies, methodologies, feminist qualitative research, qualitative
research and education

Introduction
In this article, I am interested in exploring the relation
between literacy, neoliberalism, gender, and their intersections with race and class using the feminist methodology of
collective biography. I ask, in becoming literate, how are
girls also interpolated into discourses of neoliberal subjectivity? How is the current economic order playing a part in
shaping gendered subjectivities through literacy? In what
ways do educational discourses and practices simultaneously constitute students as gendered (raced and classed)
and literate subjects? In some education orthodoxies, writing is presented as primarily a means of accessing and discovering an already existing self and world. Literacy is also
often understood as libratory, particularly in relation to disenfranchised peoples (Freire, 1970) or nations that struggle
as members of the global economy (Hesford, 2011). In contrast, I am interested in investigating how girls take up language constructions in social ways and thus, through their
literacy practices, come to know themselves and their
worlds in particular gendered, raced, and classed ways. The
differences between the success of boys and girls in schooling (with girls success seen as coming at a cost to boys)
are a dominant and contested discourse within education
(Skelton & Francis, 2011). It has led to most gender and
literacy research to be focused exclusively on boys (Kehler,
2010; McCready, 2012; Weaver-Hightower, 2003). Here, I
am interested in literacy and the differences between girls. I
want to examine both dominant and oppositional discourses

of what it means to produce knowledge and culture through

writing, and explore the forms of practical relation to self
that are enabled and/or disabled through a writers negotiation with them.
Literacy, as de Castell (1996) points out, has been one of
Western cultures primary technologies for the formation of
the self. Foucault investigated and documented uses of literacy as a disciplined set of techniques for self-formation,
as a technology for care of the self that changed in different historical periods. In ancient times, he outlines, writing
was associated with the care of the self, the training of the
self by the self, and was essential to the art of living
(Foucault, 1988, p. 208). Writing was seen as a practice for
training the conscious, rational, thinking free man. It was
not a practice of delving into the depths of a self (Gannon,
2006), as it is often currently conceived. Foucault traces the
shift in early Christianity from care of the self to an ethical
imperative to know the self. Writing became one site for
the scrutiny and reconsideration of the body and the emotionsthe inner self as well as the outer self. Mills exemplifies this notion: Writing is among other things, always a
way of trying to understand your-self. You understand your
1

Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Corresponding Author:
Marnina Gonick, Mount Saint Vincent University, 166 Bedford Highway,
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3M 2J6.
Email: marnina.gonick@msvu.ca

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own feelings and your own ideas only by writing them
down(Mills & Mills, 2000, p. 21). The intensification of
this relation in recent times can also be seen in the proliferation of books on journaling as a path to self-discovery
(Whitney, 2006).
Literacy practices have also been directly linked with
the economy. Michel de Certeau (1984) writes that for the
past three centuries learning to write has been the very
definition of entering into a capitalist and conquering
(masculine) society (p. 136). I am interested here in further investigating the linkages between literacy as a gendered technology of self-formation and what this might
mean in a neoliberal economic and social context. Broadly
speaking, neoliberalism is understood as a mode of political and economic rationality characterized by privatization, deregulation, and the withdrawal of the state from
many areas of social provision. It rose to prominence in the
1980s under the Reagan administration in the United States
and Thatcherism in the United Kingdom. It expanded its
global economic reach through international organizations
such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank,
which imposed structural adjustment policies and reshaped
development initiatives through neoliberal principles.
Although neoliberal ideology has spread, Ong (2006)
stresses that it does not take an identical form in every
region of the world it has reached. Rather, each iteration of
it may have local nuances.
Beyond their influence in economic and social policy,
neoliberal ideologies have also infiltrated notions of what it
means to be a person. Neoliberalism sees the principles of
the market as applicable to all spheres of human life. As
Jessica Ringrose (2013) suggests, Neoliberalism operates
as a totalizing discourse through which subjectivity is reconstituted in economic terms, where market values and
commodification thoroughly saturate the construction of
self and other (p. 3). Self-managing, autonomous, and
entrepreneurial are the idealized characteristics of the neoliberal subject. Under neoliberalism, profound changes to
global labor markets, local economies, and relations
between citizens and states have created a culture of uncertainty that requires the production of new forms of subjectivity (Gill & Scharff, 2011; Gonick, 2007; Walkerdine,
Lucey, & Melody, 2001). With the dismantling of state
infrastructure and programs, individuals are made responsible for their own life choices and are encouraged to
make sense of their individual biographies in terms of discourses of freedom and choiceno matter how many structural constraints may actually factor into the organization of
their lives (Rose, 1991). Such self-invention demands a particular kind of psychological subject: one that understands
itself as rational and autonomous and is able to transform
itself to meet the ever-changing demands of a flexible economy and endure the insecurity of rapidly shifting social
structures and relations.

Collective Biography and Girlhood

Stories of Learning to Write
I use girlhood stories of learning to write that were produced through collective biography (Davies & Gannon,
2006), to explore how girls literacy practices are imbricated in producing themselves as gendered, raced, and
classed neoliberal subjects. I worked with a group of undergraduate students, who were enrolled in my upper-level
womens studies course on feminist research at a large, publicly funded, U.S. university. There were 10 young women
in the class: The majority were White, 1 was African
American, and 1 was Asian American, an immigrant originally from Cambodia, who was a recipient of a scholarship
for the children of migrant workers. About half the students
were from middle-class families and the other half were
from working-class families. The girls from working-class
families were among the first in their families to be university educated. A few of the students identified as queer.
I had assigned Bronwyn Davies (2000b) book (In)scribing Body/Landscape Relations to introduce the students to
collective biography, a research method that draws on
memory stories to investigate processes of subjectification.
Collective biography had intrigued me for some time, but
this was the first time I had tried to use it. Most often, collective biography is organized around an intensive workshop where participants spend days together, sometimes
residing in a shared dwelling, rather than in a classroom
context. Thus, it was a modified version of collective biography that we were able to do. My students were keen to try
it, and as a means of understanding more about it, after we
had read the book, we used several classes to work on our
own collective biography. We chose the topic of writing/
becoming literate as our theme and during one class, we
shared stories from childhood memories and more recent
experiences within school and family contexts. Usually,
once a theme is picked, a series of readings on the topic are
read by the group with the idea that these readings will
inform the discussion and analysis of the stories. In this
instance, this did not occur because at the time we were
merely undertaking a research exercise. It was sometime
afterward that I decided to go further, and with the students
consent, I have turned the exercise into this article.
The specific strategies of collective biography (Davies
& Gannon, 2006) outline a writing and listening practice
that had the 11 of us exchanging stories verbally, listening
intensely, and questioning any aspects of the stories for
richer detail. We began simply with each of us telling a
story, our desks in a circle. Sometimes the memory of one
person would elicit memories of others. We each chose one
of our stories to write down, using rich detail to try and get
at the embodied memories. During the following class, we
shared the stories in written form.1 Some stories were
revised again based on others responses and to rid the

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stories of clichs and explanatory writing. In this way, we
worked toward a collectively generated theorization of
doing girlhood literacy, albeit from the perspective of different generations, classes, sexualities, nationalities, and
racialized backgrounds, that exceeded any autobiographical
account that any of us might have made individually. This
methodology makes a radical break with phenomenology,
which might search for a literal truth in the stories. Instead,
collective biography understands memory to create the
moment again each time it is remembered, and that memories are always bumping up against the affects of others
(Gonick, Walsh, & Brown, 2011), against new knowledges,
creating for the first time the moment in which the memory
is told, as well as the remembered moment. After we had
collectively analyzed our stories, and discussed the ways in
which they revealed how literacy is intricately entangled in
the process of becoming certain kinds of girls, each writer
also wrote a short reflective piece on the stories and her own
collective biography writing process.

Gender, Race, and Writing

There is, of course, a long history of the complex relationship between women and writing that also needs to be factored into making sense of the stories we wrote over those
few classes. As John Willinsky (1995) suggests in outlining
the feminist scholarship on the issue, what is at stake in
learning how to write is how writing is always already
structured within the social organization and production of
difference based on gender. He writes, The path of the
word is already written out of an extremely gendered history (p. 247). For Sara Ahmed (1998), both gender and
race are mutually implicated as differences that matter
within the discursive formations of authorship. That is, this
discursive relation of address in which authorship is implicated involves both colonial and gendered dimensions, and
these are always features of the already constituted meanings of writer. At issue, therefore, are not the inherent qualities or interests in the writing that are determined by gender,
but rather an attempt to bring attention to how writing is
always implicated in a discursive relation of address, which
is irreducible to sexual difference (Ahmed, 1998; Willinsky,
1995). Historically, as we have already seen, writing was
tied to certain kinds of masculinity, which has led some to
suggest that womens relationship to writing can be quite
fraught as a result. For example, Gilbert (1992) argues that
although girls are often considered good classroom writers,
it is men who have historically been regarded as the writers
of philosophy, psychology, science, history, poetry, and
drama. She goes on to suggest that many young women
learn to read and write as men in that they learn to apply
masculinist reading frames and to adopt masculinist generic
forms (p. 197). There is, however, a cost to women in writing to demonstrate and share knowledges that have

historically been associated with the masculine. As

Clipperton (1996) contends, Whenever women write, we
are breaking a primary social taboo. Whenever we publish
we challenge dominant notions of femininity (p. 79). The
result, according to Clipperton, is that women have had to
give up aspects of their identity to do it. In describing her
own devastating dissertation experience, Mona Kumpula
Scheffer (2000) reflects that her despair had to do with the
death of herself as a subject in the process of writing and
that while the chapters she wrote used proper, authorized
academic language, they were also infused with terror on
every page (p. 7).
A second current of feminist thought on writing is interested in the disruptive potential of language, one that breaks
apart old certainties and generates new ways of writing,
new forms, and new images that open up previously
unimagined possibilities. Hlne Cixous and Catherine
Clement (1986) see writing as a means to invent the world
anew and as a utopian space removed from patriarchal
structures of repression and violence. They are confident
that the authority currently structured through gender can
be reconstructed through new forms of writing:
Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically
or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That
is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. (p. ix)

Following Lacan, Rhedding-Jones (2000) suggests that

writing offers girls engagements with the fantasies denied
by spoken language. She says, the girl/woman who begins
to write finds a mechanism of voicing the desires controlled
up until now by (spoken) symbolic order of language.
Though literacy girls enter more orderings of language, of
psyches, and of the unconscious (p. 269). Similarly, Davies
(2000a) suggests that writing is not about escape from being
constituted through discourse. Rather, in being subjected,
we can search out in writing the possibilities for creative
movement beyond the current terms of our subjection
(Davies, 2000a, p. 181). However, it is also precisely
because of the generative potential of writing that it is terrifying. Cixous and Calle-Gruber (1997) write,
To think that we have at our disposal the biggest thing in the
universe, and that it is language. What one can do with language
is . . . infinite. What one can do with the smallest sign!. . . This
may be why so many people do not write: because its
terrifying. And conversely, it is what makes certain people
write: because its intoxicating. Language is all powerful. You
can say everything, do everything, that has not yet been said,
not yet been done. (p. 12)

It is this combination of terror, possibility, regulation,

and rupture that I want to explore in the collective biography stories about learning to writeand how they link to
neoliberal subjectivity.

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The Blank Page: Girls, Writing, and

Producing the Self
The blank page as understood by de Certeau is a space of
its own [that] delimits a place of production for the subject
(cited in Davies & Saltmarsh, 2007, p. 9). Simultaneously a
site of isolation and distance from the world, as well as a
site of mastery and autonomy over the production of text,
the blank page is a means by which particular subject positions are made available. Thus, through the very space of
the page, the scriptural subject is, de Certeau says, constituted within a particular set of discursive understandings
and possibilities. However, in exploring the gendered
dimensions of literacy practices, Davies and Saltmarsh
(2007) take issue with de Certeaus assertion of the scriptural enterprise as capitalist and conquering (p. 10).
Such a perspective seems focused on the masculine and
cannot account for the ways girls may use literacy practices
as a means to accomplish themselves as appropriately gendered, as good girls, and as appropriately situated in relation to the economic world in ways that may differ from that
of the (masculinized) industrialist or philosopher positions suggested by de Certeau.
The multi-faceted relation of a writer to the blank page
was a feature of many of the stories produced in the class.
Teresa,2 a young, working-class lesbian, wrote in her reflective essay that her relationship to writing has always been a
difficult one. Although other forms of creative expression,
such as art and cartooning, came easy to her and were a
source of joy and amusement, writing has always been a
frustration and a struggle.
Sitting and facing the window with the feel of the hardwood chair under me, the table, my paper and pencil. My
grandmothers authoritative words, which I receive resentfully, You cant go out and play until you are finished writing your letters. Im five and filled with energy and
excitement for the warm spring weather. I can see the yard
from where I am sitting and the specks of sunlight shining
on the table are taunting me. I stare down at my paper at the
little cartoon man in the police uniform holding the stop
sign. He stares back. I hate his face. I have to learn the
alphabet and were only on the letter G. I squeeze my pencil
tightly and press hard on my paper, concentrating on every
curve. I struggle to finish the top line. I must be sure to make
my G touch the top, the dotted middle and the bottom lines
in all the right spots.
My grandfather walks by puffing his pipe and asks,
Hows your homework going Mugsy? I lie and say,
Okay, but he knows by the look on my face that Im struggling. Hence the name MugsyI never hide my feelings
well. So he stands behind me and takes my hand with the
pencil in it. He gently helps me make the first G and then the
second on the second line, explaining that I need to be
patient because its important to practice. I listen to his

words and continue on after he and the smell of the pipe

leave the room. It seems like I have been sitting at the table
forever. The dirt and the grass and the trees are just a few
feet away and are fuelling my desire to finish. When I finally
make the last G I yell happily for my grandmother to come
give her approval. She emerges from the basement door
with jars of preserves in her hands, places them on the
table, looks at my hard work poured out in dark bold lines
and tells me I can go. So with satisfaction, I run out the
door.
Along with the letter G, much else is being learned here.
At 5 years old, the girl learning to write is also being educated in the habits necessary to become a self-regulating
subject. Although she yearns for the freedom of the outdoors and immersing herself in the corporeal pleasures
offered by the sun, dirt, grass, and trees, the girl must first
endure sitting on a hard chair at the table for what seems
like forever, dutifully and resentfully pressing pencil to
paper to carefully create the controlled hand movements
that will form the proper curves and shapes to meet the lines
on the paper and make letters. Contrary to de Certeaus
(1984) contention that the blank page offers a space for the
child to manage what is his own and distinct from all others and in which he can exercise his own will, (p. 134),
here the blank page seems a space of submission to authority. The stern and distant grandmother, the cartoon policeman, and the rules of writing impose restrictions on the girl,
impeding her body movement and taming her spirit. Even
the kindly grandfather counsels patience and forbearance in
the face of her struggle, attributes of the good girl student
and future worker. These restrictions are contrasted with the
liberties of the outdoors and the natural world with which
she feels such a powerful affinity. Through her entry into
literacy, she is learning what is perhaps the most important
of all school lessonstaking her pleasures within reason
(Foucault, 1985; McWilliam, 2000). She is learning the
rules of a certain kind of subjectivity, one that can regulate
its own desires, submit to the repetitive practice of rules,
and is obedient to authority. As Walkerdine et al. (2001)
show in their comparative study of working- and middleclass girls, working-class life is epitomized by overt forms
of power and authority, and a strong distinction between
paid work and play, which features in the mothering practices of working-class mothers. In contrast, distinctions
between work and play are muted in middle-class mothering practices (Walkerdine et al., 2001).
The blank page and learning to write in cursive are features of the story another student wrote. Eleanor grew up in
an upper-middle-class suburb with parents who are both
highly educated with advanced and professional degrees.
She is sitting at the child-size red table in the playroom
bent over a blank page. All her effort is concentrated into
writing beautiful cursive print. In her opinion, she is a much
better cursive writer than most of her friends, but a few of

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them are neater than she is, and so she needs to get it right.
She thinks of Eumy and McKenzie, who sit in her cluster of
desks during handwriting and effortlessly write beautiful
lines, never smudging or tearing little holes in the paper
from erasing too hard. She wants it to be that easy for her.
She wants to be the best. She pictures the teacher, Gail,
coming over to her desk and holding up her paper, as she
did with Eumys paper, showing it to the class as a perfect
example of cursive. She wants to be smart too. Yet, each
time she would try so hard and tension just built in her
hand, her grip sweaty and the pencil tip breaking. Her hand
aches from gripping the pencil so tight and she leans in
closer so her face is about three inches from the sheet. She
has to go to the bathroom, but she needs to get this right so
she shifts her weight and crosses her legs. Her frustration
grows as the sweat from her palm transfers over onto the
paper and smudges the writing, leaving a sooty mark. She
just cant get it perfect. As the paper rips once more, her
tension boils over. She stands up and grabs both ends of the
pencil and snaps it in half.
Here again, a girl is at a table practicing her writing. In
this case, however, there does not appear to be an external
force requiring her submission; her will to practice seems to
be internalized. The table she sits at is in the playroom, a
space dedicated to children, rather than the public space of
the kitchen table in the previous story. Class difference is
thus signaled despite some clear similarities between the
stories. As in the previous story, the girl is exerting great
effort to learn the proper form and to style her uncooperative body to produce it. A sweaty palm undermines her
effort, producing frustration and stress. She ignores her
bodys need to urinate and her aching hand. Here the anxious tension in this story is not just about the complications
of learning to write and the corporeal denial necessary to
become a self-regulating subject. There is an intensity to the
punishing norms of self-discipline that suggests nothing
less than excellence will do. As Walkerdine et al. outline in
their U.K. study, in the current time of economic change,
uncertainty, and restructuring of the labor market, the
expectation for the middle-class girls in their study was to
work really hard to achieve high standards. However, the
activities that were to produce this excellence were hidden
in a set of discourses that enshrined the notion of excellence
with middle-class normality (Walkerdine et al., 2001).
The girl in the story also emphasizes her task as a competitive endeavor in relation to her classmates. She wants to
be the best. And she wants the public recognition that ensues
from being singled out by the teacher as an example for others to follow. Interestingly, she positions herself as both
capable (she is a much better cursive writer than most of
her friends) and not capable at the same time.
This focus on being the best is, perhaps, reflective of the
development of an increasingly competitive educational
system and a drive toward the achievement of more and

higher qualifications for those wanting to achieve and/or

maintain middle-class status (Allatt, 1993). In the story,
learning to write in cursive is only experienced as competitive; no other dimensions of what it might mean are referenced. Ones own success is achieved at the cost of another,
as this model of education is expressly designed so that only
some can win. This story reveals how, in becoming literate,
the girl is also accomplishing herself as appropriately situated in relation to an economic world organized around
neoliberal global capitalist principles of competition.
In the following story, learning cursive is also a central
feature. Caitlyn is the youngest child in her upper-middleclass family. At the time this story was written, Caitlyn was
experiencing what she called severe writers block. In
tears, she tells me outside of class that not being able to write
has put her into a state of emotional and academic crisis and
that the block is not something new; rather, it had defined
her entire high school experience. In her early years of university, she had experienced some relief from this block, but
in this, her final year, it was back with a vengeance and was
so serious it was even jeopardizing her graduation. Despite
two attempts at taking a required writing course, she was
unable to complete it, which is all the more troubling given
that she was a top student and a good writer. She said that
when she could bring herself to attend this class at all, she
would sit in class crying uncontrollably. More often, she
could not even get herself to go. She could not do any of the
assignments. Alarmed by the situation, her mother had
arrived from out of town so she could sit at her daughters
side at the computer, as that was the only way Caitlyn was
able to do any school work that involved writing.
The teacher draws lines on the blackboard with a ruler.
The teacher traces the cursive letters on the board. Showing
the students how to make each part of the letter. The girl
looks at the board from her desk and down at her own
black-and-white lined paper. She carefully traces the letter
on her paper, over and over.
One day she hands in her homework to the teacher. She
had to write the homework in cursive. The teacher is kneeling on the carpet, putting the student homework into a box
on the floor, separating them. Teacher looks up and says
that cursive is important; in fifth grade, we will have to
write everything in cursive. Teacher says this with anger in
her voice. The girl feels very nervous. Her eyes open wide
and stare blankly, and she starts breathing faster. Her chest
feels tight. She starts thinking very fast. She wonders how
she will ever be able to write everything in cursive someday.
That is so hard! She does not look forward to fifth grade.
She is filled with terror.
After school waiting for the bus, someone in her class is
talking about fifth grade and writing in cursive. The girl
knows it is important. She knows it is serious, just like the
teacher warned them. She is very quiet and her mind fills
with worries. She thinks about how hard fifth grade will be.

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In Caitlyns reflection piece, she suggests that
the process of learning how to write in cursive marks the start
of when I learn to perceive an academic task as something that
will put my ability to do well at stake. The teacher frames the
future of schooling as one of difficult obstacles, and in effect, I
begin to view the future of my academic life with dread and
fear.

In psychoanalytic terms, writers block is an unconscious conflict that is so frightening that the writer comes to
a halt. Given that Caitlyn is both highly successful at school
yet racked by fear so pervasive she is literally unable to
write, what kinds of conflicts may be at work here? In their
study, Walkerdine et al. (2001) found that middle-class femininity is regulated in such a way as to produce educational
success allowing womens entry into professions that were
once the nearly exclusive province of men; however,
becoming the bourgeois feminine subject under the new
conditions of a feminized economy is not achieved easily
and not without a struggle. They argue that for the middleclass girls in their study, the imperative to succeed educationally often came with considerable emotional costs
(Walkerdine et al., 2001). Worry and fear surrounded middle-class educational achievement, because, they argue, in
the current climate of economic uncertainty, academic success is a defense against uncertainty and possible downward
mobility. Caught in cultural, structural, and class discourses,
Walkerdine et al.s (2001) middle-class participants were on
a roundabout of outstanding achievement while never sure
they had made the grade (p. 167). In middle-class families,
they found that what looked like seamless success covered
over a powerful fear of failure and deep anxieties that
seemed increasingly to underpin that very performance of
success (Walkerdine et al., 2001).
In many ways, this could also be Caitlyns story. On the
surface, her achievement appears to come easily. She eventually graduates with the highest grade point average in her
cohort.3 Throughout her ordeal, she is always impeccably
coiffed and dressed. Her makeup is never less than perfect
and except for her bouts of crying, she never appeared outwardly stressed. Her story demonstrates the imbrications of
excellence and rationality as a middle-class norm necessary
for the production of the bourgeois subject. Although formally attached exclusively to the masculine, the shift in the
labor market from production to service has positioned girls
like Caitlyn as the success stories of the new global economy. And yet below the surface lies an intense anxiety finding expression in the terror of the blank page.
The final story I want to discuss is quite different from
the others we have seen. It is written by Saronje, who came
to the United States from Cambodia as a child. At the time,
she was one of the few students of color in the womens
studies program. Her parents owned a small corner store in

a neighborhood known for intense poverty, drug abuse, and

violence. Her mother sometimes also worked the night shift
in a factory, leaving 8-year-old Saronje to look after her
younger brothers. She was able to attend the university
through a scholarship program. Just as her relation to the
economic rationality of neoliberalism is different from the
other girls in the class, her story shows that her relation to
literacy is also quite different.
There was a writing contest at school. All the students had
to write a short story about an animal. The best story from
each class would win. I wrote about a Cambodian driver
who hit a deer on his way home from work. After he hit the
deer, he hauled the dead creature into the back of his truck
and drove home. When he got home, he chopped the deer up
and gave some to his neighbors. It was a true story.
When it was my turn to read my story to the class, the
students said I was weird. My teacher thought I was being
obnoxious. I thought I was telling a funny story. I had deer
for dinner that same night.
Unlike the previous narratives, this is a story about writing a story and the consequences that ensue. The focus of
her story is not on her own feelings about writing it, but on
the responses of othersher classmates and teacher.
Saronje uses the collective biography exercise to retell her
story about the deer and how it was received by her teacher
and fellow students. I suspect she does so for reasons that
are similar to why she told it in the original context of her
middle school. In her reflection piece, Saronje writes,
I notice that my peers spoke about learning to write and the
emotions they felt, but for me, it was a different story. I did not
learn to write to try to be the best or to do it because I did not
want to be behind. I wrote because I wanted to be heard. In
thinking about my story, I feel that racism and sexism was the
main influence into what I felt and believed. I wrote from a
need to be heard, a need to speak out, and a need to be
recognized for who and what I am. I did not write to be the
smartest or most creative kid in class, I wrote because no one
listened to me. No one listened to Saronje.

Here, Saronje draws on feminist discourse of voice, sexism, and racism to position herself and her writing as different than her classmates. She is trying to write a different
story of girlhood, one that is decidedly not White, or middle-class, or focused on neoliberal principles of success or
competitive individualism. Although she is writing for a
story contest, she does not set out to win it nor does she
appear to want to. There is a certain knowingness in her
refusal to produce the expected genre of animal story
either domesticated, gentle, cute, and loving or wild, majestic, dangerous, and beautiful. In telling a story about
road-kill that is shared and eaten by neighbors, Saronjes
agenda is clearly not to be perfect or to succeed on the
expected terms of the school and her peers. She has an

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Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 15(1)

70
altogether different agendato be heard and to have her
difference acknowledged. She is resisting the tyranny of
sameness, as she writes in another part of the collective
biography series: What did you get for Christmas, Saronje?
How many teachers asked me that, never bothering to learn
that we dont celebrate Christmas?
The strategy Saronje uses in her deer story is one that
Judith Halberstam (2011) calls the queer art of failure. It
is a counterintuitive mode of knowing that is a refusal of
mastery, a critique of connection within capitalism between
success and profit[,] . . . and a counter hegemonic discourse
of losing (p. 12). Saronjes choice of animal story does not
seem to be about the lack of knowledge or cultural capital to
produce a winning story, but about using subjugated knowledge to expressly insist on the value of disqualified content,
modes of knowing, and orderings of recognition. She writes
of a relation to animals from a hood perspective
(Richardson, 2009, p. 754), one that has no middle-class
sentimentality, and a relation to a story contest that challenges conventional understandings of success. She writes
to provoke and here she is quite triumphant.

Conclusion: Gender, Neoliberalism,

and Literacy Practices
A narration is never a passive reflection of a reality.
T. Minh-ha Trinh (1991), When the Moon Waxes Red

Writing, argues Pam Gilbert (1992), is not a singular activity, nor is it necessarily a personal one. Rather, she continues, language has a social meaning system and every time
we write we use the available social signifying system we
share. As I have argued in this article, the collective biography stories about writing also show that how one makes use
of the social signifying system of what it means to write is
not uniform across gendered social positions. Rather, the
relationship between writers and the texts they produce is
affected by the system of social relations within which writing takes place. Writing is intricately entangled with the
way in which becoming certain kinds of girls is accomplished and with producing the knowledge of how one
accomplishes agency and power in relation to ones social
group and to the economic order. As Davies and Saltmarsh
(2007) contend, being gendered (and I would add raced,
classed, and sexed) shapes engagement in literate practices.
Literate practices in turn shape the ways in which one
becomes gendered, raced, and classed. In other words, literacy, gender, and social power are mutually constitutive.
In presenting the stories of differently classed, raced, and
sexed young women, I am not intending to essentialize or to
render uniform the differing experiences of the story writers to
all others who may inhabit the same social positions. Rather, I
am aiming to show how classed, raced, and gendered literate

subjectivities are tied in different ways to the neoliberal social

and economic contexts in which we live. My aim is also to
re-introduce girls into literacy discussions within the field of
education, as the debates have, for too long focused exclusively on boys relation to reading and writing as a crisis of
masculinity. If we understand literacy as a technology of selfmaking, then it is also important to explore the evolving relations of various femininities to the contested meaning of
writer and what it means to produce knowledge and culture
through writing. The girlhood stories about learning to write
that I present here reveal a practical relation to the self that
incorporates elements of neoliberal subjectivity (and resistance to it). The stories show how girls who are differently
positioned along the intersections of race, class, and sexuality
become literate subjects through also becoming or not becoming self-regulating, competitive, and disciplined. They show
the affective responses to both the constraints and possibilities
of what it means to encounter and work with and against the
blank page.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1.

I participated in the story telling and writing sharing sessions

with the students, and although it is not un-common to do so
in Collective Biography, I have chosen not to analyze my own
stories in this article. There were some overlapping themes
with the stories my students wrote; however, my learning to
write took place in quite a different time and place than that
of the students in the class.
2. All names are pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of the
participants.
3. Caitlyn never does complete the required writing course;
instead, she is allowed to take a mathematics course, a course
she excels at and does not cause her any anxiety.

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Author Biography
Marnina Gonick is Canada Research Chair in Gender at Mount
Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is the author
of Between Femininities: Identity, Ambivalence and the Education
of Girls, published by SUNY press; the co-author of Young
Femininity: Girlhood, Power and Social Change published by
Palgrave; and co-editor of the forthcoming Becoming Girl:
Collective Biography and the Production of Girlhood published
by Canadian Scholars Press/Womens Press. Her articles have
appeared in journals such as Gender and Education, Feminist
Media Studies, Qualitative Inquiry, and Girlhood Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Journal.

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