How women remember: media and the experience of the past

This thesis is an investigation of the relationship of women of different ages to the past from a theoretical and empirical perspective. It aims to deal with existing conceptions of time and temporality in late modernity in order to address the temporal relationships that human subjects are able to articulate between past and present. Women's experience forms the central focus of the study as a.response to the general neglect of women as subjects in cultural studies, and more specifically in the emerging field of memory studies. The concern with memory emerges from the identification of a contemporary temporal paradox. In everyday culture, memory and its textual forms has enjoyed a resurgence with critics hailing the emergence of a memory boom. At the same time, academic historians and cultural critics are suggesting that we have never been more divorced from our own past as we are in contemporary society. In light of this, the thesis addresses the nature and scope orevery(~l;ly, remembering in two complementary ways and is structured accordingly. Firstly, in chapters one to five, these seemingly divergent trends are theoretically investigated and, in some ways at least, resolved, by assessing and reconceiving contemporary conceptualisations of memory, such as nostalgia and the separation of memory and imagination. This also involves an evaluation of the historical limitations imposed and possibilities provided by photography and phonography as ubiquitous forms of mediated representation commonly involved in mnemonic activity. Secondly, in chapters six to ten, the ways in which women remember and experience the past in their everyday lives is addressed from an empirical perspective. Depth interviews were conducted with nineteen women of different generations and ethnic backgrounds on the subject of memory and everyday encounters with the past. The analysed transcripts are used to gain insights into how women relate to the past in their everyday lives, the role that this has in constructing contemporary identities, and the minutiae of the ways in which cultural, social and personal memory intersect in the enactment of mnemonic activity in everyday life.