Remembering as performance: A model of gendered processes in autobiographical memory

Decades of research report robust gender differences in autobiographical memory: women's memories are described as longer, more emotional, vivid, relational, and coherent than men's. Such findings are typically interpreted as evidence of two stable kinds of mnemonic minds. This theoretical review argues for a reframing. Drawing on feminist and sociocultural theory, it recasts autobiographical remembering as a form of gendered narrative performance enacted for an audience rather than a fixed property of the rememberer. Four dominant explanatory frameworks (biological, social-cultural developmental, affect-intensity, and cognitive-style accounts) are evaluated against criteria of explanatory scope, contextual sensitivity, parsimony, and compatibility with evidence on gender identity and cultural variation. Across developmental, adult, and neuroimaging literatures, the same empirical patterns arere-read as culturally available narrative positions that shift with elicitation format, audience, cue, and self-construal. The review further argues that methodology is not a neutral instrument but is itself implicated in producing gender effects: frequency differences largely disappear when audience and instructional cues are removed, coding schemes function as culturally trained gender detectors, samples are overwhelmingly WEIRD, and psychological gender identity predicts memory variance more robustly than binary sex. A production account is advanced in which feminine- and masculine-typed remembering are accomplished, not merely reflected, in each act of narration. Implications for theory and a production-oriented research agenda, including identity measurement and gender-diverse, non-WEIRD sampling are outlined.