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Sociology undergraduates are generally routinely trained not to use the first person nor to incorporate personal experience in their academic writing. In this article, I question this, arguing instead for the value of autobiographical writing as part of undergraduate sociology, and pointing to some of the sociological traditions that would support such an approach. Drawing on the experience of inviting sociology students to undertake autobiographical writing for a course on `Gender Inequalities', I examine some aspects of how we may regard such work in sociological terms, in particular, how to regard the truth-claims of autobiographical writing. I suggest that, rather than seeing a dichotomous choice between treating such writing as facts or fictions, we need instead to consider how our subjectivity is itself socially constructed. Society thus can be seen to occur `inside' ourselves. To use ourselves as sources for sociological analysis is a challenging project requiring students to learn to regard their autobiographies in terms of how sociological audiences will receive them.

In response to the recent articles in Sociology on the concept of `strategy', this paper aims to make a contribution to the debate by drawing attention to some of its gendered aspects. We seek to raise some further questions without necessarily providing clear-cut answers. We argue that the concept is rooted within masculine spheres of activity, and yet has been widely applied to women's lives, particularly in considering some of the contextual constraints of domestic activities. We consider the reasons for the attractiveness of the concept, as well as the dangers in applying it to women's domestic lives, using illustrations from our own empirical work. While we have found an alternative language difficult to find, we are concerned that the sociological conceptualisation of women's lives in the private sphere needs to work outward from the domestic rather than inward from the public. Furthermore, such conceptual reconsideration may also assist our understandings of female and male lives in public settings.