Using fairy tale to make sense of our lived experience of motherhood and academia: A duoethnography through the woods

In this chapter, we explore how our autoethnographic method of storying the self (Marr & Moriarty, 2023) supports us, as women academics and mothers, to navigate expectations in the colonised, patriarchal environment of Higher Education. Using Little Red Riding Hood as a focus, we narrate our experiences of motherhood in academia from the perspective of the girl’s mother and grandmother, exploring and subverting the many interpretations of this tale as tools to explore the concept of mother in our roles.

We choose fairy tales because for many of us, they are a part of our cultural history, informing early beliefs and values around identity, marriage, gender roles, our families, and relationships. Warner writes that fairy tales reflect “lived experience, with a slant towards the tribulations of women.” (2014, p,xix). We agree with Celia Hunt (2000) who states that fictionalizing autobiographical experiences can provide spaces where a creative writer can expand the possibilities for self, and that by storying the self, we are able to express ourselves in a way that offers us permission to be different to who we are, or/and how people have chosen to perceive us.

As one researcher from creative writing and another from art, we acknowledge that bringing different disciplines together in dialogue opens up new ways of thinking and being that can nourish our research-led practice and sense of self. We embrace an inherently interdisciplinary methodology, which, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains: “being able to braid together ideas and emotions from disparate domains is one way writers express their creativity” (p.263). In our collaborative autoethnographic approach (Chang et al., 2018), we adopt a playful and imaginative stance that enables us to challenge problematic stereotypes in fairy stories and reimagine ourselves from a position that gives us a more objective place from which to examine and reflect on our lived experiences mothers (Marr & Moriarty, 2021).