A Feminist Autoethnography of a Family Archive: Affects, Narratives and Practices During Two World Crises: World War II and Covid-19

Abstract

What happens when we, as researchers, are living through a world crisis such as Covid-19, whilst studying a family epistolary archive produced during World War Two, another world crisis? What epistemological and methodological bridges can be made between the personal experiences of two women (great aunt and great niece) living in two moments of history but who are connected by the process of writing and reading epistolary documents? By conducting a feminist autoethnography of my experience in the Covd-19 pandemic, I reflect upon what it has meant to do feminist historic and archival research of the experience of Trixie Mayer, the first Mexican volunteer to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in Great Britain from 1942 to 1946 and who produced more than 200 personal documents during her war work and afterwards kept them, together with the documents she received form her family in Mexico, for more than 70 years. I analyse how living through a pandemic has helped me understand my great aunt’s crisis experiences from a different perspective, questions, partialities and, at the same time, how these personal and familiar writings have helped me understand and question our current reality and PhD thesis from an alternative perspective.

Keywords

• feminist autoethnography
• epistolary archive
• world crises
• genealogy