‘Dream(e)scapes’: a Poetic Experiment in Writing a Self Susanne Gannon University of Western Sydney, Australia Feminist poststructuralist approaches to research can authorize different ways of working with different types of texts in search of insight into the discursive constitution of subjects, including the (sexed) self. Such texts draw attention to their own construction and analysis of them tends to multiply the ‘meanings’ that might be on offer. In this paper I perform a risky in(ter)vention into autobiographical writing in order to trouble realist conventions of self-writing, particularly in feminist autobiographical textual practice. An autobiographical self is constructed and put under erasure, in the form of a poem. The data that I represent here in poetic form were collected from recorded fragments of dreams. Privileging dream data leads me to explore how feminist poststructural theory, informed particularly by the work of He ´le `ne Cixous, engages differently with psychoanalytic and discursive approaches to writing the self and about writing itself. INTRODUCTION This paper engages in transgressive ways with usual approaches to auto=biographical writing in academia. My work is underpinned by a poststructural hypervigilance to the politics and practices of lan- guage, particularly to language that purports to represent the self, and to the possibilities that feminist poststructuralist theories bring to research and writing practices (e.g., Davies and Gannon, in press; St Pierre and Pillow, 2000). This paper is intended as an oblique and messy entry in the field on several levels. It messes with the conven- tions of much feminist work in autobiography by turning the analy- tical I=eye onto the production of my ‘own’ textual self, rather than on some other woman’s autobiographical or personal narrative. It dislodges sociology as the pre-eminent frame for understanding Address for correspondence: Susanne Gannon, School of Education, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith South, NSW 1797, Australia; Email: S.Gannon@uws.edu.au Q 2004 Arnold 10.1191=0967550704ab008oa Auto/Biography 2004; 12: 107À125