Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies

Mona Livholts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136580239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary challenges for seeking new knowledge in feminist studies are intimately intertwined with methodological renewal that promotes justice and equality in changing global contexts. Written by some of the leading scholars in their fields, this edited collection focuses on the emergence of writing methodologies in feminist studies and their implications for the study of power and change.

The book explores some of the central politics, ideas, and dimensions of power that shape and condition knowledge, at the same time as it elaborates critical, embodied, reflective and situated writing practices. By bringing together a variety of multi/transdisciplinary contributions in a single collection, the anthology offers a timely and intellectually stimulating contribution that deals with how new forms of writing research can contribute to promote fruitful analysis of inequality and power relations related to gender, racialisation, ethnicity, class and heteronormativity and their intersections. It also includes the complex relationship between author, text and audiences.

The intended audience is postgraduates, researchers and academics within feminist and intersectionality studies across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The book is excellent as literature in feminist studies courses and helpful guidance for teaching writing sessions and workshops.

Part I

Politics, Ideas, Thinkers

1 Leaks and Leftovers

Reflections on the Practice and
Politics of Style in Feminist
Academic Writing

Annelie Bränström Öhman

BEGIN THE BEGUINE: THE UTILITARIAN TURN

I begin writing this essay in the best and worst of times. I survived postmodernism without wounds. I even managed to get by undiscovered with nightly poetic raids on academia for twenty odd years. Loosely disguised in the secrets of the wee small hours; clad in a language where use of metaphor is neither more nor less threatening than freedom of speech. My discipline being literary studies, these iterated outbursts of poetry or pure fiction in the middle or margins of academic texts seemed for a long time to be considered a somewhat odd but not directly degrading habit. Thus, having successfully become associate professor (without being busted for the un-academic contraband enfolded in my CV) I just might have convinced myself it was all OK. That I could just go on and ‘not awaken a bear that sleeps’, as the Swedish saying goes. In other words: play it safe. Make no fuss about it, but just go on doing it, avoiding the disturbance of conflicts and open confrontations with the guardians of conventional style, wherever they might lurk—on editorial boards, in publishing houses or in the office of your next-door academic neighbor.

Embarking on this train of thought, however, I realize that times and circumstances have changed rapidly, way beyond my control. My case, as well as the topic for this essay, is at high risk of being closed before it has begun to open. The chorus is starting before I've found the key to the tune. That's me in the corner, that's me in the spotlight … not losing my religion but definitely on the verge of losing my language, my sense of style, my own will to write for change. Because, hand on heart, where are you going to draw the line: when does your intellectual and stylistic getaway strategy turn out to be an ambush for your career?

The answer is by no means obvious and the neoliberal thought pattern it evokes is potentially toxic on contact, touching the old conflict between individual choice and collective good. Avoiding it is no guarantee of not being contaminated by its profits and pitfalls. But one thing I know for sure:

whatever the answer, it has to involve a serious consideration of both the style and politics of writing, in academic as well as other text genres. On a more profound level, I want to argue that this is what is at stake whenever you enter the connecting topics of the forms and style of academic writing and the intersections between theory and feminist politics.

Yet, the silence in the debate is more striking than the murmuring voices of eager discussions. One part of the explanation might be that everybody, in the aftermath of postmodernism, has grown a bit tired of describing change in terms of one ‘turn’ after the other (most notably ‘the linguistic turn’), supposedly changing not only the dominant theoretical frameworks but also the very way of writing theory, of posing questions, of prioritizing among relevant research topics. Another explanation is that the silence is part of the problem itself—a problem that in its turn can indeed be described as a new ‘turn’ within academia. Tentatively, in this context, I want to call it a ‘utilitarian turn’, a turn which is part of the frequently observed development within Western universities referred to as a neoliberal shift—or with an often used euphemism: a shift towards a culture of ‘excellence’, focused on competition and results. The focus on results has already caused severe cuts in branches of education and research that cannot be proven to be ‘useful’ or competitive according to the measurements of ‘excellence’ and international competitiveness. Reports on the downsizing or even loss of resources and closing down of whole university departments, especially within the humanities, have spread almost as rapidly as swine flu all over the world in the last couple of years. The subsequent rearrangements of curricula have further deepened the crisis and, moreover, the optical illusion of the non-profitable and non-competitive humanities.

More roughly put, this ‘utilitarian turn’ might also be described as a shift from content to counting. The competitive value of both universities and individual researchers is, for instance, stated by counting credits, based on ‘international’ (North American or, occasionally, British) standards, prescribing what research funds, journals and publishing houses are to be regarded as foremost, the state of excellence within each discipline and each research area.

The term ‘excellence’, however, is practically useless as an analytical tool or even a guiding principle at the level of everyday academic life. A shift or a ‘turn’, may it be paradigmatic, ideological and/or just a temporal change of tide, is never recognized before it is assimilated into the personal accounts of everyday academic life—in all its variety from seminars and coffee-table conversations to conscious or unconscious choices of writing styles and publication strategies for your next article or book. By using the label ‘utilitarian’, I want to draw attention to the personal as well as structural effects of this ongoing change. It is a change of attitude with direct consequences for both research policies and the individual researcher's attitude towards the what, how and why of writing as a form for academic knowledge production. When writing is reduced to merely an instrumental skill, it is just a matter of time before any discussion of writing as epistemological experience will be regarded as superfluous. Within the field of feminist theory and gender studies, this is surely a change promoting a challenge that yet remains to be taken into consideration. ‘What's in it for us?’ is the beginner's question seldom articulated—and it yet remains to be answered.

In her recent book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Martha C. Nussbaum summarizes the consequences of this development as a ‘silent crisis’, not only within academia but also as a cultural crisis with global range and significance. The urgency of the topic is further underlined by Nussbaum's choice to label the book ‘a manifesto, not an empirical study’ (Nussbaum 2010, 121). She argues that what are endangered are the fundamental democratic values implicitly embedded in education in most of the disciplines in the humanities. These are values that must not be seen as measurable results but rather as abilities—as ‘faculties of thought and imagination’. Seen in relation to a political agenda ‘bent on maximizing economic growth’ it is obvious that this is a crisis that will prevail in silence, unless it becomes recognized in scholarly and intellectual debate. Nussbaum writes: ‘The ability to think and argue for oneself looks to many people like something dispensable if what we want are marketable outputs of a quantifiable nature’ (Nussbaum 2010, 1–11, 48).

Nussbaum's sights are mainly set on the task of uncovering how this ‘economization’ is rapidly narrowing and undermining the quality of education. But the same pattern can be observed, possibly with even more devastating and long-term effects, within the field of academic research and writing. Even if this is not a change, or a ‘turn’, that has arrived in complete silence, it is still fair to say that it has been tiptoeing in—disguised in seemingly harmless small talk and followed by an odd entourage of new words. But changes in vocabulary are seldom innocent. Something is surely bound to happen to scholarly self-esteem, on both an individual and a collective level, when the choice between writing a monograph or an article is described as a choice of ‘publication strategy’—or the envisioning of future research fields is summarized as a means of securing quality-based resources.

Likewise, if the revision or elaboration of text is seen just as an instrumental aim for fitting into the model, meeting the demands of journals, its stylistic as well epistemological originality is at risk of going to waste. On the other hand: if we want, in Nussbaum's words, to settle for ‘marketable outputs of a quantifiable nature’, there are obvious advantages in regarding writing as an instrumental skill, ‘excellent’ by measure, utilitarian in approach. To make a drastic comparison: this is an approach to the writing of academic texts that bears distinct (and disturbing) similarities to the writing of formula stories, such as the well known versions in the romance and mystery genres of Mills & Boon and Harlequin Enterprises. And it is guided by the same delusion, the ever-deceptive promise of one size fits all—the claim that this is a formula, a choice of model for writing, that fulfils everybody's expectations, it works transnationally, it is translatable into any language or culture with slight modifications (Cawelti 1976; Hemmungs Wirtén 1998).¹

On the subject of romance, there is of course always a risk of evoking a hidden gender agenda, dividing the ‘bad’ and ‘good’ of writing under the same old gendered labels. Romance for the girlie ones and Real Literature for Real Men …Without underestimating that risk, I want to draw the metaphorical comparison just a little bit further, since I think it may give us a notion of the complexity involved in every major shift in thought patterns, dominating ideas and theories within academia. However, one must not jump to conclusions here. The idea of ‘formula stories’ may still have negative connotations for researchers in the human sciences, most feminist scholars included—but not for all. Within the human sciences, foremost the humanities, originality of thought and expression have traditionally been highly esteemed qualities in the writing as well as in the evaluation of academic texts. But it is equally true that this is not necessarily a quality promoted among the list of skills for undergraduate or even postgraduate students in their research training in Swedish universities. Of course there are exceptions but, generally speaking, most of the training in writing skills is scheduled during the undergraduate years. At the advanced and postgraduate levels, most of the training is absorbed (or dissolved) into individual tutorials with supervisors or occasionally into seminar discussions. This rather rough learning-by-doing attitude leaves the young researcher with a confusing double standard. On the one hand—nobody will hang you for not developing a personal style as long as your research questions are relevant. On the other hand—when the publishing of the text is drawing closer neither editors nor supervisors will settle for a manuscript that is sloppily written.

… Whatever is ‘sloppily-written’ supposed to mean? I apologize for my choice of vocabulary. What happens when you're writing in another language than your mother tongue is that you see the words one by one, as when you are on vacation in a foreign country and you're walking the shoreline of an equally foreign sea, in search of the most beautiful shells, stones and occasionally even sea glass. You see them one by one, pick them up, hold them in your hand and make a decision about whether to keep them or throw them back. But you cannot at the same time take the whole multitude of the sea into your mind. You know it's there, but you cannot grasp it. This is what I am doing now, while writing this essay. It is a quite different kind of writing experience. While writing in English my relation to language turns out to be at once more direct and indirect, compared to when I am writing in Swedish. I see and sense the words just as much as I think with and in them. I make mistakes and I constantly mix up sounds and nuances of colors. These visual and sensual qualities are crucial for my motivation to make the effort, to take the risk of getting lost in translation. In an earlier Swedish version of the line of thought I am trying to develop in this essay I could, to recall the image of the shell seeker, also make use of my knowledge of the sea. I even dared to undertake, figuratively speaking, a free ride under a pirate flag—and take my dog for a walk while doing it (Bränström Öhman 2010).

Such a daring stylistic movement is not an option here. Instead I'll try to make use of the short-sightedness and the cracked-up character of my English writing capacity. Because I do believe that, just as the Swedish sociologist Johan Asplund has pointed out, there comes a thought style with every language style. (Asplund 2002)² When I write in Swedish I regard myself as skilled enough writer to elaborate my language style in the same direction as my thought style. When I write in English my expression will never be equally eloquent, equally sensitive. I have to stick with my limitations and just say it in broken English. Keep on following the shoreline; cracks, stones and sticks making my feet stumble, but oh, look! what a pretty shell.

A DIARY OF EXCELLENCE: PART I

November 21, 2009

Will this dreary rain ever stop? The landscape outside my office window at the university has been turned gray by clouds, darkened and drenched by weeks of rain and no snow, a dystopian sight that sets every possible climate alert on the move. It is an inverted, blank kind of beauty, which reminds me of a song by Kate Bush where the perspective is set on a fetus in its mother's womb. Unseen but embodied, the fetus is helplessly sensing and breathing the fallout of radioactivity after a nuclear disaster along with the nicotine of the mother's morning cigarette and the consoling rhythm of her heartbeat: ‘Breathing/breathing the fall-out in, /Out in, out in, out in, out in’.³

I don't know why I came to think of this song and this feeling right now. Is it the fear of entrapment that the weather provokes? As if the darkness is closing in with accelerating speed, sneaking indoors and into the veins and brains of every living being. I'm yearning for snow, for cold mornings and puffy white clouds of breath streaming, blooming around the nostrils.

Today I decided to start writing a work diary. I said to myself: this writing is an act of mere survival, just to keep track of what's going on. No ‘Ms Secret Agent’ but the right to claim the benefit of a doubt. I realize I might sound paranoid (or worse) if I start bringing this up in public. This is because if you look upon things from the everyday point of view, nothing important has changed. Just a few people have lost their jobs, but they were only temps or soon to be retired, weren't they? Nobody talks about it and everybody, willingly or unwillingly, takes part in it. It's all painlessly wrapped in the dry whispering of paper, in an endless extension of lists of merits, ranks and publication strategies, and even more lists of the newly-established transfer system for recounting publications into figures and points. Just like the Eurovision Song Contest, minus the sequins. Allemagne dix points—Germany ten points, Royaume Unie douze points— Great Britain twelve points …

I say everybody, and include myself. Nobody is allowed to rat out from the system nowadays. The results of the whole department are dependent on you—and you—and you …

It's as though everybody has become happy-go-lucky about some surrealistic version of Bourdieu's field theory, newly introduced to the stock market. They have secretly started to count their savings in all adequate currencies. Cultural capital—not so hot. Social capital—lukewar...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Advances
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Contemporary Untimely Post/Academic Writings—Transforming the Shape of Knowledge in Feminist Studies
• PART I Politics,Ideas, Thinkers
• PART II Privilege,Power and Subjugated Knowledge
• PART III Imaginative and Poetic Spaces, Readers, and Audiences
• Contributors
• Index