Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Grant Watson

Thesis: Old Girls

July 2025

Abstract

It is with every retelling that the story grows. Fingerprints of the teller are left all over the tale, like the claws of the potter glued on the clay. The 'I' never becomes invisible, even if it 1 hides in the stories of others. This writing is as much my struggle to fit into gender or national boxes as it is a study of heritage from Hiiumaa, Setomaa and Avinurme, regions now all fall under the state of Estonia. I have tried to keep myself from flattering the heritage into distinctly Estonian. Instead, I ask what has built up the national identity? How has the Soviet time merged into what is considered ours? In what ways have the Baltic Germans influenced the idea that freedom emerges from nation states? I try to figure out who has been forgotten on this journey. How to use fiction and storytelling to reimagine the lives those who lived an otherwise, did not fit into the archives? It is not an attempt to return back to some sort of a romantic image of gender or nationhood, or tradition. It is rather a desire to make binaries messy, forget about the linearity of time. It takes shape as stories that narrate the lives of a fisher, a singer, and a weaver, who resist their prescribed identities. Not demonstratively, but through their mere existence. The writing itself is not demonstrative either, but reads like a story. It is a story. All of the non-confirming women subvert the idea that simple life ways or easy language cannot contain a layered understanding of the world. I have needed help from queer theory and decolonial through to apprehend the rich practise-based knowledges that I encountered since the summer of 2022 while doing fieldwork and archival research as preparation for Old Girls.

Author: Mia Tamme