Rethinking the political subject: narratives of parrhesiastic acts

In this paper I am exploring discourses and practices that constitute women as political subjects and as subjects of politics, particularly focusing on auto/biographical narratives of women educators at the dawn of the twentieth century in the UK. In following genealogical lines in the constitution of the political subject, I am making connections between the Arendtian conceptualization of political action and the notion of parrhesia as the act of telling the truth in risky situations that Foucault has used to theorize the political technologies of the individual. What I argue is that women teachers’ narratives emerge in the intersection of historically constructed dichotomies and separations between the private and the public, the political and the social; these narratives create non-canonical conditions for the political subject to emerge as both relational and narratable. Within the contemporary climate of a profound crisis of politics, rethinking the constitution of the political subject is becoming I suggest, increasingly timely and urgent.

Citation:
Tamboukou, M. (2005) ‘Rethinking the political subject: narratives of parrhesiastic acts.’ International Journal of Critical Psychology 14 138-157.