Turning Older Women’s Life Stories into Hypermedia: Reflections on the Production of Feminist Creative Analytic Practices

Abstract

This article discusses our development of a new form of feminist Creative Analytic Practices (CAP) by creating knowledge through interactive video installation and web-based interactive re-storytelling ( https://kimchoi.net/a-story-of-ones-own/ ). Since the 1990s, qualitative social researchers have been developing alternative methods and forms to capture and represent the complexity of lived experiences. Through referencing feminist postconstructionist CAP, Deleuzian rhizomatic narrative inquiry, and feminist film theories and films, our project – consisting of reflexive writing experiments and re-enactment of 43 older Hong Kong women’s life stories in hypermedia – contributes to this expansive knowledge. Specifically, we describe our writing and production processes, including the strategies and tools considered, medium specificity and cinematic apparatuses used, and challenges encountered when attempting to create a nonlinear, multi-layered, polyphonic, and interactive narrative. Our main concerns are: How can researchers produce a self-conscious, research-based creative work that highlights women’s agency under socio-cultural constraints, whilst acknowledging selfhood as rhizomatic, knowledge as situated, and “truths” as partial and multiple under conditions of its own making? How can we produce alternative social science research practices that carry both logic and affect? How can we engage the audience to open up and interpret older women’s life stories in embodied and experiential ways?