Abstract

In this paper I chart lines of flight in women artists’ narratives. In focusing on the complex interrelations between the social milieus of education and art, what I suggest is that they should be analysed as an assemblage where power relations and forces of desire are constantly at play in creating conditions of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in their lives to be actualized. As a novel approach to social ontology, the theory of assemblages offers and analytics of social complexity that accounts for open configurations, continuous connections and unstable hierarchies, structures and axes of difference. In reconsidering resistance as immanent in dispositifs of power and assemblages of desire, what I finally argue is that women artists’ narratives contribute to the constitution of minor knowledges and create archives of radical futurity.

Dr Maria Tamboukou is Reader in Sociology and Co-director of the Centre of Narrative Research, at the University of East London. Her research interests and publications are in auto/biographical narratives, feminist theories, foucauldian and deleuzian analytics, the sociology of gender and education, gender and space and the sociology of art. Publications include the monographs Women, Education, the Self: a Foucauldian Perspective (2003), In the Fold between Power and Desire: Women Artists’ Narratives (2010), Nomadic Narratives: Gwen John’s Letters and Paintings (2010) and three co-edited collections Dangerous Encounters: Genealogy and Ethnography (2003) Doing Narrative Research (2008) and Beyond Narrative Coherence. (2010). She is currently completing a short monograph on Carrington’s letters, drawings and paintings to be published in the BSA Auto/Biography monograph series.