<&>Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English Version One <&>Copyright 1998 School of Linguistics & Applied Language Studies <&>Victoria University of Wellington <&>side one <&>0:45 towards a theory of maori women's studies <,,> for me it's a great honour to be able to be here talking about this work and <&>1:00 it's an honour for a number of reasons firstly because when we start to theorise about maori women's studies in a very real way we put our women <,> back into the history books and given that it's nineteen ninety and given the way in which our society has developed and as students in a women's studies course you will be coming to terms with the way in which <.>m women generally have been made invisible in our society the road that one needs to tread to find out about maori women the women that i'm descended from inhales the nature of our journeys the nature of our struggles and indeed the very complex processes that keep us invisible in this society means that we have to <&>2:00 be able <,,> to be <,,> treading a number of paths at the same time i believe i've treaded some of those this morning cos i went to where you were last year laughs then i went to h m six then i saw ros running along and i thought where goes ros there goes women's studies laughs so i arrived here <,,> on a more serious note when we come to the theorising about maori women's studies and to the creation of a theory of maori women's studies inhales for me <,,> <&>background noise we have to be able to do a number of things and one of those is a very exciting thing for women to be able to do together and that is to theorise <,,> because <,> when we think about the <&>3:00 role of theory in our education and particularly in a university context theory is seen to be one of the essential tools that a higher education offers people to help us to be able to interpret our world and the way in which we see our place within it <,> one of the things that i think we can observe about theory for a range of reasons that we can't go into in depth today is that theory has come to be seen as the tool of men <,> men theorise and women don't men theorise about their world have the power and the ability to be able to see theory as a very real tool that helps us to understand <&>4:00 that world and women are the people if you like who feel the effects of what theory as a conceptual tool can do but who haven't been able to be in a position to reclaim the role of theorising and to feel okay about it and one of the things i want to do today is to introduce some ideas about a theory of maori women's studies because if we look <.>at and i accept that these are assertions they will be debated they will be debated FIERCELY in a place like this to be <.>a because to suggest that theorising has been a task that men have taken over will be to suggest some things that attack <&>5:00 the very nature of an institution like this so i realise that some of this stuff will be hotly contested in a place like this however i do believe it's <.>able that it is important for us to be able to say these things none the less for maori women particularly and to be able to justify OUR position for saying it okay i don't accept for a minute that everybody's going to believe this overnight never mind what's important for ME is that maori women have a chance to do this theorising and that maori women have a chance to HEAR the way in which other maori women are theorising so we look then <&>writes on blackboard two seconds at theory and this is a little diagram that tries to set out in a pictorial way what theories do and you see there that theories are about observations <&>6:00 they're about ideas they're about speculations hunches experiences over here <&>writes on blackboard one second data problems incidents and a theory is something that helps us to clarify all of those things to interpret what we are seeing around us and to suggest hypotheses that ought to be tested theory can be seen from that kind of <,> layout then as the sum total of our observations interpretations clarification and the integration of those things into a coherent set of ideas <,> in which what is happening is <&>7:00 tied in some way to an understanding of the world now when we start to be able to take back the role of theorising in our lives and to be able to say theory isn't just something that einstein did or that plato did as a philosopher or that rousseau did as an educational thinker that theory is something that we all do in our own lives we theorise at an individual level <,> before i had children my sister was astounded by my theories on child development and <,> how to bring children up now that i have some children of my own she laughs because my theories of course have changed very quickly so we have theories at an individual level and what's <&>8:00 important in a situation like this is that we share those theories those theories that we may have as individuals and try to set out a theory that has more power because it is relevant to a whole group of people so i have individual theories about all sorts of things which as a maori woman i believe is my right i don't share a lot of those with people because i have found that as i've shared my ideas coming to terms with being a feminist coming to terms with being a maori that the sharing of my ideas my theories if you like at a personal level has often meant that i become the subject of ATTACK because people think WHAT? you want to talk about the day when maori women may constitute fifty percent of parliament i'm not sure why anybody would want to go into parliament but as <&>9:00 a source of central decision making AND a place where the laws of this land are made part of some people within the maori revolution's dream is for our women to at least have half the seats in that place but that's one idea that's a part of a theory at a personal level for a number of maori women about how to change the nature of our society we also have to be able to <.>d link into ideas that offer powerful interpretation for whole groups of people so at one level our personal theories can <,> be very important to us and very useful to us but they're not the ONLY way in which we can look at theory so what i want to set out here today then is an attempt <,> just an attempt to sketch out the framework of some key elements that i think are necessary for a theory of maori <&>10:00 women's studies <&>writes on blackboard and it's called towards a theory of maori women's studies so that hopefully some of the attacking that goes on when women stand up in our society and say i know <,> won't happen because by saying towards a theory i'm only saying i think i know so i'm hoping that it won't mean that these ideas are discounted because they have the words maori women connected to the associations that go with creating theory so we're calling it then towards a theory of maori women's studies <,,><&>10 and <&>11:00 they come from observations over my life from ideas and situations and hunches that i've been through as well as things that i have experienced and read and things that other people have theorised about so i'm coming to you here if you want to see me in this way as a practitioner in maori women's studies who through the practice of wanting to identify as a maori woman has become clearer about the theory and i want <,> to just spend a minute talking about that um <,> because in my life's experiences the way in which i have been reared and the way in which i have been taught to view women has very much been at the hands of my <&>12:00 mother my sisters and my grandmother and her sisters i don't come to you as somebody with postgraduate degrees in feminist theory and i have no problem with that they just weren't around when i was coming through as a student i come as somebody who has been brought <&>pronounced bought up to be able to see and feel the role of women as a powerful enriching and creative thing and it's been at points in my life when others have NOT seen the role of maori women in those ways that i have come to think voc what's going on here what's this really all about how can i explain being attacked because i just wanted to stand up and have my say how can i interpret that personal attack which in fact was really just a response to the fact that a young maori woman <&>13:00 academic wanted to have her say what's that all about when that is seen as such a threat inhales it was brought <&>pronounced bought home to me um tut a long time ago when i happened to be in a situation <.>where voc i was going to be married in a very unorthodox situation and the person who was going to perform the ceremony <,> would only do it if we went to the premarriage classes sigh <,> so i went and one of the things that happened at those classes was that we shared a whole lot of ideas about what is marriage what is the nature of the whanau the family what is creating a home all about with about seven or eight other couples who were not at all like my <&>14:00 partner at the time and i inhales and basically what happened during those sessions was that i bit my <.>to laughs i came out after seven weeks with NO tongue cos i think i'd bitten it off but i bit my tongue to not say what i really wanted to say because i just KNEW that the reaction would be so hostile and i thought there is no point we want to get married in a student hall this man will only do that if we come to these classes so just bite your tongue but at one point towards the end of those sessions and at this point i was a lecturer in education at massey university and some of the people unbeknown to me were students on the campus who were in our group inhales towards the end we were asked about what the real tasks of keeping a home together were and whose responsibility they were well i waited patiently until everyone else had had <&>15:00 their say and then i offered my position which is really just a very simple position and that is that they're shared tasks and that whoever the partners in a relationship in a home are they do half each and that didn't seem to me to be very radical at all it just seemed to be a very common sense way to allocate the tasks and not to tie them to any particular <,> ways of seeing sexuality or gender or any of those things well when we reported back and <.>it the groups were split boys on one side and girls on the other so when the groups reported back and the spokesperson from our group shared the ideas of the group mine of course were not reported at all and so i took leave to put my hand up and say well there was one other laughs contrary position in the group <,> albeit stated right at the end and in a nonthreatening way and so i put my ideas to the <&>16:00 group to which one of the young chaps from the boys' section responded oh yeah well you just got that stuff out of women's studies books I'VE seen you at the university NOSE in all those books those ideas don't work they're not real you know some radical feminist has written them on a dark night and published them in the book and you think <,> that you can change the world <,,> and in fact at that time i was VERY new to being a teacher in the university system and very new to feminism in the way that i would articulate it now <,> and i was able to just say to him without a word of a lie not to denigrate the writing of feminist theory or to <&>17:00 denigrate women's studies but to be able to reaffirm the women's studies in my family to be able to say look i <.>actually i'm an education student i don't do women's <.>stu i'm a teacher i actually have never studied women's studies this is just what my mother did and her mother and her sisters now he never believed that but that's okay i knew it was true and my partner knew it was true and whether the other women in that room wanted to believe it was true or not they had an idea being put in front of them that would've questioned some of their ideas about women's role about the way in which a house is created and made into a home <&>17:47