Braided Stories of Ghostly Disappointments and Dissonances Encountered in Formations of Gender, Class and Age

This article, based on a joint presentation to the 2024 BSA Auto/biography Study Group summer conference, is a response to the invitation to address the themes of ‘disappointment’ and dissonance’. In exploring our experiences of these in discussion with each other and in the initial writings we exchanged, the concepts of gender, class and ageing began to emerge – the last of these perhaps due to the fact that although we range in ages from our fifties to our seventies, we have each reached a stage in life when it is not uncommon to engage in evaluation of what has gone before and reflection on what might still be to come. In this interwoven text, our three voices are braided together as we explore, examine and confront the disappointments inherent in that powerful and pervasive notion of a grand narrative. A narrative often positioned as an ever-onward and upward trajectory, devoid of diversions, en route to the pinnacle we stand on, as the hero of our own story. A ‘masculinist’ narrative that doesn’t fit any of us. In this braiding, we juxtapose our voices and our narratives, rippling across each others’ identities, experiences, disappointments and dissonances, reaching back into the past, examining the present and speculating about the future in order to explore formations and representations of class, gender and age. Our voices are presented both individually and collectively.