Introduction to the Special Issue: Gendered Life Stories and the Politics of Imagination

This introduction frames the special issue Gendered Life Stories and the Politics of Imagination within a broader crisis of narration, where storytelling is both culturally ubiquitous and increasingly unstable. Drawing on feminist theory and narrative studies, it explores how gendered life stories function as narrative technologies—forms through which marginalised subjects navigate risk, challenge dominant frameworks, and reimagine what kinds of stories can be told, heard, and believed. The introduction situates the contributions that follow as interventions into contested terrains of public storytelling, where voice, recognition, and power remain unevenly distributed.