Under the Sign of Hope : Feminist Methodology and Narrative Interpretation [1 ed.] 9780791496909, 9780791439173

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Under the Sign of Hope Page ii SUNY Series, Identities in the Classroom Deborah P. Britzman and Janet L. Miller, editors

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Under the Sign of Hope Feminist Methodology and Narrative Interpretation Leslie Rebecca Bloom State University of New York Press Page iv Cover Art: Cakewalk by Jeanette May. May is a feminist artist whose work explores women's sexuality and the construction of femininity. Her images include apparently mundane domestic images, which become subversive when depicting strong, sexual women. Production by Ruth Fisher Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 1998 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address the State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y. 12246 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bloom, Leslie Rebecca. Under the sign of hope: feminist methodology and narrative interpretation / Leslie Rebecca Bloom. p. cm. — (SUNY series, Identities in the classroom) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-3917-8 (hc: alk. paper). — ISBN 0-7914-3918-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Women's studies—Biographical methods. 2. Women—Research Methodology. 3. Autobiography—Women authors. 4. Feminism— Fieldwork—Social sciences. I. Title. II. Series. HQ1185.B56 1998 305.4'07—dc21

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For my parents Page vi Feminist politics is not just a tolerable companion of feminist research but a necessary condition for generating less partial and perverse descriptions and explanations. —Sandra Harding, Feminism and Methodology Politically, the interpretive project allows its practitioners to criticize the current situation in light of future possibilities and to ground their recommended actions in their claims to knowledge. —Kathy E. Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in

Feminist Theory However problematic its strategies, autobiographical writing has played and continues to play a role in emancipatory politics. Autobiographical practices become occasions for restaging subjectivity, and autobiographical strategies become occasions for the staging of resistance. —Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body Page vii

CONTENTS Foreword by Deborah P. Britzman Acknowledgments 1. Introduction

ix xiii 1

Part One: Feminist Methodology 2. Two Feminists in Search of an Interview Practice

15

3. "Locked in Uneasy Sisterhood"

43

Part Two: Narrative Interpretation 4. Nonunitary Subjectivity and Self-Representation

61

5. Nonunitary Subjectivity and Gender

97

6. Conclusion: The Signs of Hope

137

Notes

155

Bibliography

167

Index

181 Page ix

FOREWORD To unravel and then retie, again, the knot of intersubjectivity in the afterthought of research is the topic of this book. In feminist research such work becomes more difficult, for there, as Leslie Rebecca Bloom suggests, the values of representing stories of research begin with the hope of friendship, good conversation, and, perhaps, with a wish for an unencumbered space where the method might comfortably reside. But the call for conversation, as readers will see, has conflicting addresses. This is because neither the researcher nor those who participate are as stable as a method promises. More often than not, the stories exchanged fray the fragile tie of subjectivity. Even as feminist research methods urge the researcher to move beyond such values as the rational, the logical, and the regulative, there is still the question of how the researcher herself can prepare for encountering, or crafting, this "beyond." For Bloom, the surprise of constructing this "beyond" comes under the sign of hope. What is it, then, to accept the conflicts, ambivalences, and slipperiness of the stories told? What is it to bother research with its own unfulfilled promise? If one of the divisions in the world, as feminists suggest, is the division of gender, how does research explain the division that is gender? If there are differences between methodologies, how does one live with the difference within one methodology? And, if there are conflicts between the biography told and the one that is lived, how can one think the conflict that is biography? These are questions that orient the strange geography we call research. Bloom adds another question: What is it for feminist research to study itself as it engages with others? Readers will be introduced not just to the conditions of research, although these conditions are filled with intrigue: a researcher and participant travel in the same circle of friends, participants tell the same story in different ways, theories cannot resolve the curious qualities of practice, and sentences are left unsaid. But just as

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crucially, readers are asked to consider what it is that conditions research: the desire to be the beloved object of the research report, the anxiety made from missing the point, an awkward stereotype that ruins the story, the times when intersubjectivity forgets its own grounds of possibility. That all parties entered the research story with a happy hope that reflecting upon one's stories could serve as the royal road to consciousness and that part of the journey would then work against this wish that research would only make more difficult the obstacles within feminism (sisterly desire, proper intentions, common interests) means that everyone must stumble in their reflections. In this book, the time of research must be mixed up, beginning not with insight but with hindsight, beginning not with cure but with obstacles. What then is it for feminist research to promise empathy, power sharing, sincerity, and representation when these values must pass through inequality, disappointment, and misunderstanding? What does it mean to begin to listen well when the stories offered are awkward, incomplete, and even filled with disregard for the listener? What if the stories unhinge the capacity to make an intersubjective space? These questions, as Bloom offers, are also under the sign of hope if hope can be thought of as the afterwards of vulnerability, as something different than idealization, and as capable of considering the stumbling of research as the inside of research. We meet then, the manners of research: how the rules bend, turn against the method, and even crumble in application. This is not the problem of the proper technique, for as Bloom suggests, our techniques can be thought of as something that troubles the story of research. And if the rules of research cannot settle the trouble, they can, as Bloom analyzes, get us in trouble if such rules sit outside the very conflicts they are meant to dispel: the indirection of stories, the unconscious wishes the stories disguise, the competition between the teller and the listener, the interminability and recursive structure of interpretation. Bloom poses these dilemmas as the heart of research and the heart can break. We have then a story of research that admits its curious geography and resides in the fault lines of subjectivity. We have here stories of research that respect the limits of research. And while feminist research methodology must begin with an awareness for women's vulnerability in the world, Bloom admits a more intimate tension, namely the vulnerability within each woman as she attempts to converse. Their stories occupy them even as they attempt to occupy their stories. Sisterhood, in this study, is uneasy. The conventional hug that punctuates the meeting cannot repair the thoughtless reply, the

Page xi painful story, the rigid body, the unacknowledged difference, the hollow response. The repair must be belated. But to admit these experiences as the condition of research, is not, as Bloom insists throughout, to admit a story of research gone wrong. Indeed, research must go wrong for the repair to become possible. Research is made from the hesitations of experience, common mistakes, misguided desires, lost opportunities. Again, the making of insight proceeds in fits and starts, in the inconsolable breech between the public and the private, in the awkward sentence, in the breaking of the rule. The story of research then becomes the story of the researcher's questions. This, too, as Bloom poses, is the beginning sign of hope. So what then is it to study the disappointments of research in a way that the appointment of research can be kept? This question becomes central as readers encounter the cast of characters: research participants, feminist theorists, characters from novels, theorists of discourse. Their views offer different versions of the same event, but not in order to leave the reader with a useless pluralism. If the story of truth is the story of a truth, and if the truth can only point to the truth of desire (as opposed to the veracity of an event), then research cannot be an exercise in pinpointing the actual. If the dream of research first appears as omitting its own "perhaps" then what this text offers is a return of the "perhaps" of research. Bloom offers an interpretation of the dream of feminist methods, an interpretation that can bear the weight of its own implications, its own conflictive desires, indeed, its own wish to dream. The drama of the research and its "passionate fictions" returns, but now as a story of the researcher's education. Readers are asked to consider the power of the afterthought, the fragility of the intersubjective, indeed, the conflict of listening well. The sign of hope, after all

is a hopeful sign and to interpret its message means that the dream of research must be read as more than dreamy research. In this book, there is an ethical wakeup.

DEBORAH P. BRITZMAN TORONTO Page xiii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As I write these acknowledgments to mark the completion of this book, I am reminded of Frank O'Hara's (1974) poem, ''Why I am not a Painter." In this poem, O'Hara reveals the circuitous process of creativity. The poem recounts O'Hara's visit to a painter friend of his who is working on a canvas with the image of sardines on it. A few days later, O'Hara visits the painter again and the sardines are gone. In the next stanza, O'Hara then recalls a day he was thinking about the color orange. The color orange becomes a catalyst for numerous poetic words and pages. Days later, when he has finished, O'Hara discovers that he has not one, but twelve poems, none of which even mentions orange. He calls the series "Oranges." He then tells us about his visit to an art gallery where he sees his friend's painting exhibited. It is called "Sardines." With wonderful wit and perspicacity O'Hara's poem gets at the heart of what happens throughout the creative process—that what inspires us and excites our imaginations may be deeply embedded in our final creations although they may not be overtly present or mentioned specifically. Indeed, what inspires us may even be quite ambiguous. So it is with this book. The many people who influenced my thinking, who inspired ideas, and who supported me and my work in untold ways may not be in the book overtly—that is, referenced in the bibliography or thanked by name here—but like the "oranges" and "sardines" told about in O'Hara's poem, their contributions are no less meaningful to me. I did, however, receive support and encouragement from many, many people whom I am able to thank overtly. My first debt of gratitude is to Olivia and Sandy, whose committed participation in this project and generosity in allowing me to use their narratives made it all possible. Next, I would like to thank Jesse Goodman, Barbara Jackson, Nancy Lesko, Jane E. Schultz, and Thomas A. Schwandt, who, as members of my dissertation committee, intellectually strengthened this project from its inception. Each of them

Page xiv provided me with strong critical feedback, rich discussions about my work, and models of mentoring that I value deeply. I am also very grateful for all the help I received from editing and thoughtful textual criticism on various drafts from Brenda Daly, Barbara Duffelmeyer, Lynne Hamer, Lee-Ann Kastman, Kenneth Pimple, and Rachelle Saltzman. My sister-in-law and friend Debra Bloom deserves extra thanks for her meticulous transcriptions of interview tapes. Since I have known them, Petra Munro and Patricia Sawin have provided me with rich discussions about ideas, insightful critiques of my work, and unfailing enthusiasm for it. My conversations with them, whether about things personal or political, always reinvigorate me and my work, and to them I am deeply grateful. Similarly, Amy Brown, Myra Freedman, Irene Jenks, Doris Martin, Theresa McCormick, David Owen, Lucinda Peach, Alan Tom, and Linda

Voychehovski are friends and/or colleagues whose support cannot go without thanks. Several feminist scholars have had a powerful impact on my thinking and writing and I owe them each a great debt. They are: Elizabeth Ellsworth, Barbara T. Gates, Sandra Harding, Patti Lather, Nancy Lesko, Janet Miller, Anna OchoaBecker, Jo Ann Pagano, and Delese Wear. It is a great honor to know them and a continued source of pleasure to have their encouragement. Being able to work closely with Deborah Britzman has been one of the greatest joys while writing this book. From the start, Deborah provided me with creative, perceptive, and pertinent challenges for revisions. With her staunch support, attentive interest, and invaluable recommendations, I was able to untangle many of the complex knots that arose in my thinking about theory and methodology. I feel very fortunate to have had her mentorship. I was also very fortunate to work with the State University of New York Press from the start of this project. Jane Bunker has been a wonderful help to me and I enjoyed her thoughtful attention to my concerns. I especially want to thank Lois Patton whose advice, support, encouragement, and humor have meant so much to me since we first met. No acknowledgment would be complete without thanking my parents and all my wonderful family who always remind me what and who is important in life and whose voices on the telephone, during my long absences, always nourish me. Finally, I wish to thank my partner Jeff Kuzmic. As an intellectual colleague he has patiently listened to me, has given me encouragement, and has shown unwavering support for my work. It is such a wonderful

Page xv privilege to have a partner who is both a best friend and a fellow educator. A condensed version of chapter 3, "'Locked in Uneasy Sisterhood,'" appeared in The Anthropology and Education Quarterly 28(1): pp. 111–122, in 1997. A portion of chapter 4, "Nonunitary Subjectivity and Self-Representation," appeared in Qualitative Inquiry 2(2): pp. 176–197, in 1996.

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1 Introduction In Paule Marshall's novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People , an anthropologist goes to the fictitious Bournehills Island in the Caribbean where he meets Merle, the island's most impressive inhabitant and the anthropologist's most astute critic. Over drinks one night, Merle confronts him:

"You're always working," she said. "Always collecting data. You think I don't know that. And you could get a stone to tell you its life history. I don't know how you do it." She thought about this for a moment; then her eyes narrowing suspiciously, "Unless maybe you're something of a Juju man yourself. Yes," she cried, laughing, her forefinger impaling him.… "I've watched you work your magic.… Questions and more questions.… You never run short. And yet scarcely a word from you

about yourself. The poor informant must tell you his life story from A to Zed, everything—whether he actually owns the little cane piece he works on the side, if the woman he's living with is his lawful wife, what he thinks about government, when was the first time he had sex, everything while you stay mum, your business to yourself. You know what," she cried, the finger fixed him again, ''somebody needs to interview you for a change." (Marshall 1969, 319–320) Unlike traditional qualitative methodology as characterized by Merle, feminist methodology promises a more interpersonal and reciprocal relationship between researchers and those whose lives are the focus of the research.1 Feminist methodology seeks to break down barriers that exist among women as well as the barriers that exist between the researcher and the researched. For the researcher, the responsibility of engaging in a more personal relationship with

Page 2 those researched while collecting ethnographic and narrative data and writing the interpretive research text may be as difficult as it is joyful. We are often confounded. We grapple with concerns about ethics, reflexivity, emotions, positionality, polyvocality, collaboration, identification with participants, intersubjectivity, and our own authority as interpreters. Postmodernist thinking increasingly makes the interpretive task tricky as the old theories and master narratives of unified individuality collapse and are slowly displaced by theories of the speaking subject whose "individuality and self-awareness" or subjectivity is multiple, conflicted, complex, fragmented, and in constant flux (Henriques et al. 1984). These new articulations of feminist research practices and human subjectivity suggest that we need to look toward research methodologies and interpretive theories that will help researchers be more thoughtful and critical about our intersubjective research relationships and the ways that we analyze the personal narratives of others. With these concerns in mind, I have written this book to focus on two central issues. First, I examine the promises, possibilities, and limitations of feminist methodology, particularly focusing on researcher-participant intersubjective relationships. Second, I explore how feminist narrative interpretations, as the result or product of the fieldwork relationships, may create a context in which nonunitary subjectivity can be engaged as the grounding for the study of women's lives. Perhaps this is the place to admit that this study was not always about methodology and interpretation. Initially, as a graduate student embarking on my dissertation, I conceived of it as a more conventional ethnographic and life history study of feminist teachers and administrators. That is, the methodology I proposed was a fairly traditional qualitative framework, while the study of feminist educators' lives was the more "ideological" or political means through which I would engage in feminist scholarship. At that time, I was unaware that methodological questions could also be an avenue of feminist scholarship. However, when I began reading about feminist methodology, starting with the essays in Theories of Women's Studies (Bowles and Klein 1983) and Feminism & Methodology (Harding 1987) and Patti Lather's (1986) article, "Research as Praxis," I realized that the methodological questions about fieldwork and interpretation raised by feminist theory were a call to me to engaged in this conversation. Similarly, as I began thinking more about the feminist interpretive process, I became tremendously excited about feminist and postmodern theories emerging from such disciplines as anthropology,

Page 3 sociology, education, and English and began to see ways that I could contribute to this interdisciplinary scholarship through my study. What I read about subjectivity in feminist theory particularly impressed me and deeply influenced my work. As this "confessional tale" (Van Maanen 1988) indicates, my ideas about methodology and interpretation changed greatly throughout the reading, data collection, and writing process. Thus, while the book is both a critical

analysis of feminist methodology in practice and an investigation into interpretive methods for examining nonunitary subjectivity in women's personal narratives, it also has a subtext which is the story of my intellectual and personal journey, or subjectivity, as I came to learn about feminist methodology and interpretation through my research.

Nonunitary Subjectivity The examination of nonunitary subjectivity is one of the main focuses of this book and one of the main interests of much recent feminist scholarship. As Chris Weedon explains, redefining subjectivity as nonunitary refutes the humanist assumption that humans have "an essence at the heart of the individual which is unique, fixed and coherent and which makes her what she is " (1987, 32; see also Braidotti 1991; Cixous [1975] 1976; Henriques et al. 1984; Irigaray [1974] 1985; Kristeva [1979] 1986; Rosenau 1992). Similarly, Sidonie Smith explains that such redefinitions are "a means to counter the centrifugal power of the old unitary self of western rationalism" (1993, 155). Toril Moi, drawing from French feminism, maintains that the very concept of the "seamlessly unified self" posited in the Western humanist tradition is part of the phallic logic which likes to see itself as "gloriously autonomous, … banish[ing] from itself all conflict, contradiction and ambiguity" (1985, 8). Claiming the existence of an individual essence in Western humanist ideology denies the possibilities of changes in subjectivity over time; masks the critical roles that language, social interactions, and pivotal experiences play in the production of subjectivity; and ignores the multiple subject positions people occupy, which influence the formation of subjectivity. Because of these limits in humanist concepts of subjectivity, postmodern feminists embrace the idea that an understanding of nonunitary subjectivity in women's lives is critical to feminist research and epistemology. Valerie Walkerdine (1990) in particular suggests that empirical research

Page 4 on subjectivity is an important contribution to feminist research. She hopes that feminists will give their attention to understanding how the process of subjectivity "actually works in the regulative practices of daily life" (1990, 193), because such research may contribute to transforming women's lives. Bronwyn Davies, too, argues that analyzing nonunitary subjectivity is a deeply political strategy for feminist researchers because it has the potential to give researchers and research participants a "clearer comprehension of their own fractured and fragmented subjectivity and [it] allows them to explore ways that patriarchal discourse is inscribed in their bodies and emotions" (1992, 55–56). If subjectivity is not the "essence" of an individual as is asserted in Western humanist thought, then what is it and what does it mean in feminist research? Weedon explains that "'[s]ubjectivity' is used to refer to the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her relation to the world" (1987, 32). Exploring subjectivity in the lives of student teachers, Deborah Britzman defines subjectivity as "both our conceptual orderings of things and the deep investments summoned by such orderings. It organizes an individual's ideas about what it means to recognize oneself as a person, a student, a teacher, and so forth, and arranges strategies for the realization of these multiple identities" (1991, 57). In feminist poststructural theory, subjectivity is also thought to be nonunitary or active and continually in the process of production within historical, social, and cultural boundaries. As Sally Robinson explains, nonunitary subjectivity is "an ongoing process of engagement in social and discursive practices … a continuous process of production and transformation [and] … a 'doing' rather than a being" (1991, 11; see also Kristeva [1974] 1980). For Teresa de Lauretis, subjectivity is "an ongoing construction, not a fixed point of departure or arrival from which one then interacts with the world"; therefore, each person's experiences in the world with "practices, discourses, and institutions that lend significance (value, meaning and affect) to the events of the world" produce subjectivity (1987, 159). Metaphors of motion are often used to characterize subjectivity as a process that takes place within the world.

Ferguson, for example, describes "mobile" subjectivities that move "across and along axes of power (which are themselves in motion) without fully residing in them" (1993, 154). Carole Boyce Davies articulates a theory of "migratory subjectivity," which she explains is a way of promoting the assumption of the "subject's agency," and most particularly the agency of the black woman to refuse being subjugated. She

Page 5 explains that "Black female subjectivity asserts agency as it crosses the borders, journeys, migrates and so re-claims as it re-asserts" (Davies 1994, 36–37). Theorizing subjectivity as situated in the world of experience, Amina Mama further reminds us that subjectivity is produced both collectively and relationally (1995, 98). Kathy Ferguson, too, talks about subjectivities as "relational, produced through shifting yet enduring encounters and connections, never fully captured by them" (1993, 154). These assertions of subjectivity as being produced relationally are critical, for they suggest that feminist coalitions may be positive sites for the production of subjectivity. Subjectivity is also thought to be produced through contradictions and conflict, which cause subjectivity to fragment. Because of women's long history of material marginalization, patriarchal oppression, colonization, physical abuse, and the psychological damage of being demeaned by the pervasive hierarchical structuring of the sexual differences of male/female, women have internalized many negative and conflicted ideas of what it means to be a woman. Both negative feelings and experiences and diverse conflicting interactions and experiences—affirming or negating—result in subjectivity's fragmentation. For this reason, we often speak of subjectiviti es rather than subjectivity, for the fragmentary and nonunitary qualities of subjectivity really do defy the singular noun. It is no wonder, then, that Ferguson says that subjectivities are "ambiguous: messy and multiple, unstable but persevering" (1993, 154), and that Carol Boyce Davies says that they are "conceived … in terms of slipperiness, elsewhereness" (1994, 36). Language and discourse also play important roles in the production of subjectivity. Weedon believes that subjectivity is "constantly being reconstituted in discourse each time we think or speak" (1987, 33). Language is also critical to Cixous's ([1975] 1976) understanding of women's subjectivity as a source of rebellion against oppression. She believes that the diminishing of women through the binary language of "the discourse of man" may be regarded as a source of strength for women. This strength is shown when women challenge, fight back, "explode," "turn around," and ''seize" (not to mention laugh at) male discourse of naming their own experiences and writing their multiple subjectivities in a language of their own. One way that feminists in particular have taken up Cixous's call for a new language is in the redefinition of subjectivity as nonunitary. Through the analysis and celebration of the strength that nonunitary subjectivity can have for women, women can become the authors of their own lives in ways that do "explode" male discourse. It is

Page 6 important, then, to the interpretive project that examines women's lives, to recognize that although subjectivity "is not entirely accessible because of the subterfuges of the unconscious" (Henriques et al. 1984, 225), that "discourses carry the content of subjectivity" (Mama 1995, 98). As a process, fragmentation, and discursive and lived practice, nonunitary subjectivity must be considered a meaningful category of feminist analysis, for it encourages women to understand how we can be open to new ways to understand the world, to think about experiences, or to reflect on one's self. In a project that seeks to understand how women talk about themselves and their experiences in their narratives, the strategic benefit of mobilizing a theory of nonunitary subjectivity is that it resists essentializing individuals by naming a particular immobile identity. As Ferguson claims, subjectivities are "politically difficult in their refusal to stick consistently to one stable identity claim; yet they are politically advantageous because they are less pressed to police their own boundaries, more able to negotiate

respectfully with contentious others" (1993, 154). Humanist and masculinist notions about what it means to be human would lead us to believe that all this fragmentation, conflict, ambiguity, messiness, mobility, border-crossings, and changes in subjectivity means that a person is mentally unstable or weak, lacking an enviable, unified (masculine) self. Rejecting this notion of the unified self, postmodern feminism asserts that an understanding of subjectivity as nonunitary is a move toward a more positive acceptance of the complexities of human identity, especially female identity. To accept that subjectivity is nonunitary and fragmented, however, is not to "promote endless fragmentation and a reified multiplicity," for, as Sidonie Smith argues, this would be "counterproductive" to the narrative project "since the autobiographical subject would have to split itself beyond usefulness to be truly nonexclusionary. And it is difficult," Smith continues, ''to coalesce a call to political action founded upon some kind of communal identity around a constantly deferred point of departure" (1993, 156). Smith's caution is well noted, for claiming nonunitary subjectivity and its fragmentation should not signify a loss of self.2 Rather, it should signify an alternative view of the self located historically in language, produced in everyday gendered, racialized, and cultural/social experiences, expressed in writing and speaking, and employed as a political feminist strategy. As we shall see in the following chapters, nonunitary subjectivity is indeed a meaningful theoretical framework through which to

Page 7 examine both researcher-participants relationships and the life history narratives of the research participants, Sandy and Olivia.3

Interpretation and Genealogy In the above description of nonunitary subjectivity, I refer unproblematically to the importance of "interpreting" both research relationships and personal narratives. But the act of interpreting is never unproblematic. In my work, I use a dual interpretive framework that consists of both feminist hermeneutical practices and genealogical or feminist postmodern interpretive practices. The differences between the two and how they converge in this work is important. As Kathy Ferguson (1993) explains, feminist interpretation is concerned with articulating and analyzing women's experiences and voices while genealogy is the analytic deconstruction of the very category of women. Feminist interpretation "entails immersion in a world divided between male and female experience in order to critique the power of the former and valorize the alternative residing in the latter" (Ferguson 1993, 3). Postmodernists would argue against this interpretive stance, maintaining that it upholds problematic binary structures and essentializes women through this binary structure. In contrast, postmodern genealogy or "the deconstruction of gender entails stepping back from the opposition of male and female in order to loosen the hold of gender on life and meaning" (1993, 4). Feminist interpretivists would argue against this stance because it undermines the feminist work of constituting women historically as empowered and having voice or being subjects of knowledge. Therefore, to practice interpretation and genealogy simultaneously, as I propose to do through the interpretation of women's narratives and genealogy of subjectivity, would seem to be a matter of working with opposing world views. However, this is not the case. Rather, practicing interpretation and genealogy must be seen as a balancing and a positive engagement of the tensions and contradictions of these two practices. What makes this engagement manageable is that both interpretation and genealogy have complementary political feminist goals. That is, interpretation, and genealogy are both practices that seek to disrupt power hierarchies, albeit in different ways: "[I]nterpretation subverts the status quo in the service of a different order, while genealogy aims to shake up the orderedness of things" (Ferguson 1993, 23). Additionally, Ferguson explains, genealogy, like interpretation, can accept that

Page 8 there is a "subject" who has agency—an important concept in feminist narrative (modern and postmodern) theorizing. Calling upon Foucault's (1977) understanding of genealogy, Ferguson continues:

Genealogy does not abandon the subject, but examines it as a function of discourse, asking "under what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the subject appear in the order of discourse; what position does it occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type of discourse?" Genealogy takes the modern subject as data to be accounted for, rather than as a source of privileged accounts of the world. (Ferguson 1993, 15) Finally, and perhaps most important, interpretation is the anchor for genealogy, for without interpretation, genealogists would have nothing to deconstruct! Interpretation too needs genealogy "in order to push aside the hegemonic claims to dominant interpretations" (Ferguson 1993, 28); genealogy in this sense exerts a pressure on interpretation, challenging it to be self-critical and aware of itself and its own potential hegemonic practices. Ferguson's articulation of a practice that engages in both interpretation and genealogy is compelling. This dual practice affirms the importance of deep interpretations of personal narratives through which we may gain a greater understanding of women's lived experiences and the concrete realities of daily life, while simultaneously deconstructing those foundations on which daily life is constructed and experienced. I therefore take up Ferguson's following suggestion in this book, to not "think of the tensions between the interpretive and genealogical impulses as contradictions that we must resolve," but rather to "approach them as riddles that we must engage, in which affirmations are always tied to ambiguity and resolutions to endless deferral" (35). Such a stance, Ferguson suggests, can give us the ironic sensibility and "appropriate humility" through which alternative epistemologies and politics may emerge.

Outline of the Study As the above discussion indicates, this study entails an investigation into a variety of interrelated theoretical, ideological, and methodological issues. The means by which I carry out this investigation has taken me into a variety of discourses and disciplines, each of which contributes to not only the interpretation of research relationships

Page 9 and the narratives, but also my overall understanding of feminist methodology, nonunitary subjectivity, and the uses of personal narratives for understanding women's gendered experiences and self-representations. Part One of the book focuses on the practices of feminist methodology and issues in researcher-participant relationships. In chapters 2 and 3, I tell the stories of my work with each of the two participants in my study, Sandy and Olivia.4 In chapter 2, I focus on interviewing as the critical site where Olivia and I negotiated what it meant to do feminist methodology given our different biographies, subject positions, and understandings of feminist methodology. In chapter 3, I reflect on a problematic situation that arose between Sandy and myself during fieldwork and attempt to analyze how my and Sandy's different subject positions and conceptions of the research process mediated and contributed to the situation. Part Two of this book focuses on interpreting nonunitary subjectivity and the use of various interpretive theories in feminist research.5 In chapters 4 and 5, I use the concept of nonunitary subjectivity to interpret Olivia's and Sandy's narratives. My desire to explore how nonunitary subjectivity is represented in personal narratives led me to experiment with several possible interpretive theories. While I do not attempt to provide a complete array of available interpretive

orientations, what I do hope to provide in chapters 4 and 5 are examples of how these interpretive theories, derived from diverse disciplines, work when applied to the analysis of women's personal narratives. In other words, Part Two of the book demonstrates working illustrations of how particular interpretive theories are used in the actual practice of interpreting nonunitary subjectivity in personal narratives. Toward this end, I first acquaint the reader with the interpretive theories used, writing from an explicate rather than a critical stance. I then offer analyses of segments of the personal narratives based on the interpretive theory, and I give critical commentary on the interpretations and interpretive theories.6 The conclusion of the book reviews relevant literature on feminist methodology, discusses the possibilities and limitations of feminist methodology, and attempts to bring together the different issues raised in the methodological and interpretive chapters of the book. I use extensive interview data throughout the book. The interview data includes both life history narratives and excerpts from discussions the respondents and I had about methodology and about my interpretations of their life history narratives. In some instances

Page 10 I have also included Olivia's and Sandy's reinterpretations of their narratives that they offered after reading their transcripts or my interpretations. While polyvocal strategies may help to diminish this project's association with traditional qualitative writing, the interweaving of Olivia's and Sandy's and my voices in no way diminishes my responsibility or the privileging of my voice. But to have this privilege and responsibility means that I must speak, not "for" the respondents as if they cannot speak for themselves, but "with" and "about" them in a shared struggle that acknowledges different social locations (Ellsworth 1994, 105). I am in accord with Margery Wolf, who reminds us that "no matter what format the anthropologist/reporter/writer uses, she eventually takes the responsibility for putting down the words, for converting their possibly fleeting opinions into a text. I see no way to avoid this exercise of power and at least some of the stylistic requirements used to legitimate that text if the practice of ethnography is to continue" (1992, 11).

"Under the Sign of Hope" I hope that this book raises as many, if not more, questions than it answers. That is, I hope it promotes thinking about what feminist methodology and interpretation are and what possibilities and limitations exist for them; what conditions make it possible for one to participate in them; and what commitments must be addressed when deciding on a theory (or theories) of interpretation for understanding women's personal narratives. I also hope this book helps us grapple with such questions as: What happens to the research process when the nonunitary subjectivities of both the researcher and researcher meet? What happens to representation in life history interpretation if the self is nonunitary? How is gender understood in the nonunitary self? What meanings do life history narratives have for the participant who has a stake in representing herself as a unitary self when the researcher is committed to analyzing the self as nonunitary? How does understanding nonunitary subjectivity contribute to feminist emancipatory goals? While I do not provide definitive answers to these questions, nor, in truth, would I want to, I do demonstrate how I have grappled with and reflected on these problems and issues in my own research. In writing this book, I take up Sidonie Smith's call in her autobiographical manifesto to write "under the sign of hope" (1993, 163). Smith explains that autobiographical writings have been

Page 11 variously theorized as being written "under the sign of death" (the male need for immortality), "under the sign of

desire" (a male longing to recapture what is lost), and under the sign of anxiety (a female fear of future loss). Smith's autobiographical manifesto offers an alternative sign under which to write: the sign of hope. It is a sign that "speaks to the future" by asserting that women, as subjects, can be free from essentializing, naturalizing, constraining, and oppressive identifications. By writing "under the sign of hope" Smith suggests that our feminist work with narratives and autobiographies can present a ''generative and prospective" vision of "the subject [of] the future" (162–163), a subject who is nonunitary, and as such, is a symbol of hope for a better future for all women. The sign of hope is a profoundly political sign in that it ask us to deliberately construct our autobiographical strategies to consciously work toward attaining political empowerment through alternative narrative and interpretive strategies. While some would argue that such hope reflects an obstinate denial that the funeral procession has already passed for the author, the subject, and feminism, with Smith, I believe that they/we are alive and well. I believe that feminist scholarship will benefit from our efforts to take more time to explore what and how feminist methodology and interpretation can contribute to women's lives and to the transformation of our society. This is the sign of hope under which I write.

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PART ONE FEMINIST METHODOLOGY Page 15

2 Two Feminists in Search of an Interview Practice Are interviews a sort of neutered social encountered, divorced from issues relevant to other social situations, so that you accept behavior in interviews that you might expect to challenge elsewhere? —Ribbens 1989, 579

Introduction The first time I met Olivia was a chilly autumn night in 1990 when we were both attending a lecture given by Evelyn Fox Keller. A year later, when I began to seek participants for my study, she expressed an interest in being a respondent.1 Olivia was a second year professor at the university, and she identified herself as a feminist teacher. At first I was worried about including her in the study because we knew so many of the same people in the university community, and I thought that this would jeopardize her anonymity. When I raised this concern, she told me that she knew that some people who read my work and knew her might figure out that she was the participant, but that this was something she could cope with. She also said that she really wanted to have both this opportunity for reflection on her

life and the experience of being a reseach/participant. Her desire to participate seemed to outweigh the risk of being identified. A second concern I raised was about my own discomfort with having a participant who was a professor, one who knew so many of the people I knew; I worried that this would make me feel very self-conscious. However, after some additional discussion about this concern and how we might deal with it, we agreed to work together. In the fall of 1991, Olivia (she chose the name because

Page 16 one of her favorite actresses is Olivia de Havilland!) and I began to work together. In this chapter, I specifically focus on the interviewing process as central to research relationships in feminist methodology, particularly when the focus is on collecting personal narratives. Further, I examine the complexities of and then problematize the nature of power in research relationships. Toward these ends, I examine Olivia's and my discussions about and reflections on researcher and respondent roles in the interviews. My goals are to make sense of how feminist methodology was employed in practice and to reconceptualize it from the vantage point of hindsight.2

Beginning Interviews Olivia's and my first interview took place in her house. I entered the house with the usual anxieties of a first meeting and fears of a novice researcher. These anxieties and fears made voices screech in my mind: What am I going to say? What kind of respondent will she be? Because Olivia was a professor who was familiar with feminist methodology, I also had fears of being found incompetent in her eyes. The living room we sat in was light, airy, and lovely, and I delighted in the hot-pink carnations in the vase of the coffee table. Like Olivia, I too enjoy keeping flowers in my house, and she told me about a great florist in town where I could, and subsequently did, buy flowers. Her cats joined us on the couch, and I admitted to her that cats make my eyes itchy and that they are my least favorite animals, in hopes that she would get them away from me! As she later joked, "My cats were very fond of you so I knew that you were okay. They are very good judges of character!" After we talked for a while about her house, gardening, flowers, and the merits of cats versus dogs, we began to discuss where our work together would lead. Initially, Olivia and I talked about what I would do in terms of observing her teaching and what kinds of disclosures about my presence we would make to her graduate students. We discussed how we would keep the interviews unstructured, particularly that I would not be preparing interview questions for her. I also talked about how I was interested in using Olivia's narratives as a grounding from which theoretical decisions could be made. Indeed, we spent quite a lot of time talking through issues—how theory may be a priori or truly emerge from the "raw data" of narratives. We

Page 17 also talked about how I would be using feminist theory consistently and overtly as a lens through which to understand her life stories, while the other theoretical orientations that I would use would come later, depending on Olivia's narratives. Our conversation was animated. We were both enthusiastic about being able to talk about books, theories, and methodological issues together, and we were eager to come to some mutual understanding about these in the context of feminism. I certainly felt more comfortable talking with her about methodology as this conversation progressed. Olivia then told me that one of the reasons she wanted to be in the study was out of a "sisterly desire to assist a feminist doctoral student," so it was no surprise that we were both excited about the prospect of exploring feminism and

feminist methodology together. Olivia too recalls the first part of this meeting as being enjoyable:

I remember the first meeting. After our initial small talk, you took out the tape recorder and we began to talk about the project. This felt comfortable and it helped me to learn a little more about you; I had a chance to listen to you talk and learn a little about how you think. Perhaps more importantly, I was able to see how you interacted with me in a casual conversation. We spoke of our views on life history research and our thinking seemed quite compatible. I remember you said, "I don't know where this is going," in speaking about the project, which helped me to see that you really didn't have a plan all laid out. And I liked that. Yet I did have a plan in my mind, albeit somewhat nebulous. What I did not have were interview questions! Although we did not discuss this plan at the first interview, Olivia and I had agreed that we shared the goal of embarking on a feminist methodological expedition. My plan might be described as an attempt to put into practice the following propositions that I had culled from various readings in feminist methodology and qualitative methodology more generally in preparing to do this research:3

1.

Feminist methodology should break down the one-way hierarchical framework of traditional interviewing techniques. Feminist interviews should be engaged, interactive, and open-ended. Feminist interviews should strive for intimacy from which long-lasting relationships may develop. Feminist interviews

Page 18

are dialogic in that both the researcher and respondent reveal themselves and reflect on these disclosures. 2.

Feminist researchers give focused attention to and non-judgmental validation of respondents' personal narratives.

3.

Feminist researchers assume that what the respondents tell is true and that their participation is grounded in a sincere desire to explore their experiences.

4.

In feminist methodology, the traditional "stranger-friend" continuum may be lengthened to be a "strangerfriend-surrogate family" continuum, which can allow the connection between women to be a source of both intellectual and personal knowledge.

5.

Identification with respondents enhances researchers' interpretive abilities, rather than jeopardizes validity.

6.

Through working closely with another woman, particularly a feminist, a sense of identification with her may emerge that can be a powerful source of insight.

7.

Feminist researchers strive for egalitarian relationships with their respondents by making space for them to narrate their stories as they desire; by focusing on issues that are important to respondents; by returning transcripts to the respondents so they can participate in interpretation; and by respecting the editorial wishes of the respondents regarding the final product or text.

Further, I was beginning the interviews with Olivia with a strong interest in phenomenology. During that fall semester when I began interviewing Olivia, I was taking a course on the "Anthropology of the Body" with Professor Michael Jackson and reading his book, Paths to a Clearing: Radial Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (1989). I was intrigued by the concept of radical empiricism and very interested in phenomenologically exploring the body (Bloom 1992). As Hammond, Howarth, and Keat explain, in phenomenology the focus is on the experiences of the individual and how an individual views herself as a subject-in-the-world (Hammond, Howarth, and Keat 1991). Therefore, in order to achieve this focus, feminist phenomenological interviewing "requires interviewer skills of restraint and listening as well as interviewees who are verbal and reflective. [An interviewer] asks almost no prepared questions" (Reinharz 1992, 21). Rather, questions emerge from the narratives of the interviewees. The major characteristic of feminist phenomenological interviews is that they are interviewee guided rather than researcher guided. Interviews tend to begin with one general

Page 19 question such as, "tell me about X" (Reinharz 1992, 21). While phenomenology is not inconsistent with feminist methodology, at that time I did not recognize the important contradiction between feminist methodology's call for conversational interviewing as a grounds for friendship building (Oakley 1981) and feminist phenomenology's call for researcher restraint. To start the interview with Olivia, I suggested that she tell me about her early childhood, the situations or circumstances she remembered that, as I phrased the question, "might shed some light on who you are today as an embodied person." From my question emerged a number of stories about Olivia's childhood and family as she was growing up. Her first stody, which focused on herself as a physically active and daring child (discussed in chapter 4), particularly reflects her concern with answering my question about embodiment. While Olivia's narratives of childhood seemed to me a smooth movement from discussing methodology to beginning the narration of her life history, for her the experience was quite different. She later recalled that

when we stopped talking methodology and began the "formal" discussion about my life, our interaction seemed to change. Early in this discussion I sensed your reluctance to continue in a conversational mode. I felt like our conversation went from a comfortable dialogue to an unnatural monologue with the spotlight on me. You began asking some questions. And I told stories in response to those questions. I think we fell into a pattern of being the good listener and the good respondent. Was I a "good listener"? What, for that matter, constitutes a "good listener" or ''good researcher" in this situation? I recall that when I listened to the tapes later that day after this first interview, I criticized myself for talking too much. I would not have characterized myself as a "good listener"! And yet now, as I listen again to the tapes and read the transcripts of this first interview, I see that I did do quite a lot of listening that day, particularly during the earlier part of Olivia's narration. Most of my contributions in the early part of the interview were questions to Olivia. In her narratives, Olivia talked about playing sports as a child and the seriousness in the 1950s with which girls were socialized to femininity. My questions to her included: "Do you remember [your mother] telling you that you should act more 'lady-like'?"; "Did your father encourage you in your sports?"; "Do you remember

Page 20 a point where you started being more of what people would have thought of as feminine?"; "Do you remember how you felt about that?"; and "Do you find that this has carried over in your [adult] life?" These were the questions that I asked to encourage Olivia to talk more extensively about how she interpreted her experiences. Additional questions I asked were quite straightforward, and were used simply to clarify or elicit additional information. For example, I asked if her brother, about whom she was speaking, was older than she was. Early in the interview, I did not respond spontaneously to her stories with parallel stories, as one might with a friend in a "normal" conversation. However, toward the latter part of the interview, Olivia mentioned the apparent stereotypes of her parents' roles and relationship, and I joked, ''Not in my family." My spontaneous response, perhaps particularly because it was spoken in a bantering tone, seemed to open the door for Olivia to ask me a direct question about my family, and for a short time we did talk more conversationally as I described my family in a parallel fashion to her descriptions. This part of the tape (noted in the transcripts) has a lot of laughter in it, which perhaps helped strengthen the connection between Olivia and me. Minister suggests, for example, that joking and laughter "reinforce communal bonds" (Minister 1991, 33). Given my description of these interactions, would I be considered a "good listener" or "good researcher" in the context of feminist methodology? Feminist methodology, we recall, encourages interviews to be more like conversations between friends, and it encourages the researcher to give both focused attention to the respondents and non-judgmental validation of their experiences. Feminist phenomenological methodology asks researchers to be restrained and to listen carefully, constructing questions from what the respondents narrate. By describing me as a "good listener" Olivia acknowledged that I provided her with the focused attention and validation; however I did not provide her with good conversation. Being a "good listener" did not necessarily make me a "good researcher" for Olivia. To her, my responses seemed like "silences" in contrast to her longer narratives and more in-depth storytelling. This made her uncomfortable and selfconscious, as she later revealed:

I do recall that whenever I ended a story you just remained silent, so I thought, well what else can I say? I was talking all of the time and all I could think about was how much Page 21 I hated people who talked all the time. I also remember feeling compelled to reveal parts of my life that I had not shared with many of my closest friends. Why is that? Good girl syndrome? Like the good respondent, I felt obligated to keep talking, to say important things, and to do a mind and heart dump so that you would get the information you needed. Being a "good respondent" is as problematic a role as being a "good listener." To be a good respondent, it is necessary to be able to talk, to narrate experiences and feelings, and to reflect on these. From my perspective, Olivia was a "good respondent." She did respond to my obvious desire to ''get the information" and to hear her narrate and then reflect on her life stories. Further, her initial narrative responded to the topic I had posed. And while my goal of eliciting her storytelling was not in conflict with her own desires to experience being a respondent, what Olivia felt in that first interview was that she had an obligation to "do a mind and heart dump" for me . From her perspective, being a "good respondent" was not a pleasurable experience. When I left Olivia's houst that day, I sensed her discomfort. She was agreeable about setting up another interview date, but there was a tension in the air. I wondered if I had offended her, particularly when I suggested to her that the hour was up. I was trying to keep to the time out of respect for her, but I worried that she felt that I had ended our time together abruptly, as if I had not been interested in what she had been telling me. I felt anxious and felt that I had

disappointed her in some way. When Olivia and I met again the following week, I began the session with the following question: "Would it be more natural or more comfortable if I talked more?" I hadn't planned to ask that; it just came to mind when we first saw down! Olivia responded that she too had wanted to talk about her feelings and reactions to the session, and she was curious about how I felt about it. What resulted was a rich conversation about our research goals and expectations. One of the first things we talked through was whether or not it was useful to us to have me pose questions to her as a way to frame the interviews and amplify her stories. Olivia responded that my questions were helpful because they "keep the conversation going", but she also wanted me to "reflect on things or respond to things" more from my own experiences, because "it makes me think a little more about it. And it makes me feel less egocentric." She further

Page 22 revealed that what was most uncomfortable about the mostly one-sided storytelling was that it felt "more like a therapy kind of situation than it does an interchange or conversation. For me it's not that I can't do this, it's just that it probably isn't what I would picture as a true participatory exchange." A few months later, reflecting again on the first interview, Olivia further revealed what the source of her discomfort had been:

I have always been a private person. I have shared my life with a few special friends only. That first session felt intrusive. You knew so much about me and I knew nothing about you. My shell was broken open and the vulnerable meat of the clam was splayed to the sun, to the world. Yours remained tight and impenetrable. From Olivia's description of me, I could visualize myself as the anthropologist in Paule Marshall's novel, cited at the opening of this book: For her, I was the "Juju" woman, the one who "could get a stone to tell you its life history … while you stay mum, your business to yourself." It was rather horrifying to hear her tell me that to her I seemed like the embodiment of the type of researcher I strove to challenge! During the second interview I told her that I was uncomfortable with talking too much and felt that I was supposed to ask her questions and focus on her. I admitted to her that I was not comfortable self-disclosing too much during the interviews. Additionally, I told her that I worried about "speaking too much [because it] seems to me like I was taking control." I told her that I didn't want to take control because it wouldn't give her enough freedom to talk or to narrate her stories in an uninterrupted, open way. For Olivia, the freedom that I wanted to create for her through my restraint diminished the "naturalness" of the interaction:

I think that questioning is a natural thing to do with each other. But what I found was happening was I kept cutting myself off from asking you questions that, if I were having a conversation with you, I would naturally ask. And so you have all these odd cuts in the conversation so that it ceases to be fluid and interactive. Articulating what we each felt we were supposed to do and not supposed to do as respondent and researcher was central to our conversation. Olivia's sense that she was supposed to tell me lots

Page 23 of stories and not supposed to ask me questions about my life experiences, even though she wanted to, governed her

interactions. Olivia was also governed by her concern that "we were going to get the things that you need to know." I was governed by a sense of responsibility to be an attentive listener who did not talk very much, especially about myself. My ability to be an attentive listener and Olivia's ability to be a good storyteller were mutually nourishing; however, we agreed that we were not nourishing a relationship that either of us felt comfortable with. This conversation was extremely powerful for us, and it helped us to plan ways that we could better achieve feminist methodology. As Olivia later described it,

This was probably one of the most powerful sessions we had together. It wasn't easy telling you that I wasn't comfortable because I didn't know how you would feel about that. I didn't want you to think I was being critical of you, but rather reflective about the process. I did not feel criticized by Olivia when she revealed her thoughts to me, and I too found this session exciting in terms of our shared efforts to find a way that we could both feel comfortable with the research relationship.

Negotiating Research Relationships At the end of this pivotal second conversation, Olivia and I talked about ways to shift the relationship to be more comfortable for each of us. We agreed that we would explore issues Olivia wanted to explore about her life and discussed whether these issues would be useful for my work. We made plans to get together in non-interview situations so that we could get to know each other on social and presumably more equal ground. And most importantly, we agreed to shift the agenda from interviewing about Olivia's life, to interweaving conversations about our life histories with conversations about methodology and the process that we were going through. In Olivia's words, this was a time of "feeling kindredship and mutual struggle, neither of us knowing what the balance of conversation should be or exactly how to achieve it, but knowing that we wanted to explore the possibilities together." One of the ways that Olivia and I tried to reframe or normalize our relationship was by meeting in a restaurant for lunch. I have

Page 24 always treasured lunchtime as a time to meet with women friends. Lunch with friends is an oasis in a busy day filled with dry meetings, paper grading, and superficial conversations with acquaintances unavoidable in the halls. I don't remember what we talked about that day, but what we talked about didn't matter to me as much as the fact that we did talk, and that we could meet over food rather than over a tape recorder. During this phase of trying to get to know each other better, I went to one of her classes and participated in the activities she had planned. It was good for me to see her as a professor interacting with her students. On another day, instead of leaving the house before her husband came home as I usually did, I accepted the offered glass of wine and took the time to chat with them both. We also went to a Bonnie Raitt concert together, and had a wonderful time. All of these things helped me to get to know more about Olivia, "the meaningful actions that [she] engages in, the processes and activities that compose [her] life" (Reinharz 1983, 179). These shared activities gradually led to my gaining an understanding of Olivia as someone with whom I was able to talk more comfortably. For Olivia, the first time she came to my house during the winter was special in terms of her getting to know me:

I particularly remember the day you invited me to your home for one of our sessions. All traditional methods texts say that the interview should be held in a place where respondents are comfortable, like their homes. But ironically, seeing your home actually made me more comfortable with you. I felt I

knew you better. You had beautiful spring flowers that you had "forced" from bulbs on the table, pictures of people you loved on book cases and the refrigerator—with a special place on your computer for a framed picture of your new nephew Zachary. You became a real person to me. Also, it was in your home where you were the most forthcoming about your own life. You told me about your family, your friend Patricia, and your confusions about relationships. We often don't think about the importance of the inquirer being comfortable if she is to engage in a truly interactive process. For the first time I began thinking of you as a friend and not simply as the person with whom I was working. This time of trying to work things out to be more in accord with feminist methodology was good for both of us, and we both felt that

Page 25 we had achieved more rapport and a higher level of comfort. But had we found the feminist methodology we were searching for?

The Heteroglossia of Research Interviewing Toward the end of our work together Olivia and I reflected on the time we had spent together, from our initial interview, through interpretations of her narratives, to the final writing of the research. While the focus of the interviews remained primarily on Olivia's life, she did come to feel that "we did a good job at [working toward establishing trust and intimacy] and it got easier and easier as we went further along in the process. And my discomfort with you which I had earlier completely went away later in the process." We agreed that although we had come a long way with creating a feminist framework for the research and had achieved a strong level of comfort with each other, we had not achieved the kind of conversational patterns that Oakley (1981) recommends. Nor, we agreed, did we form a friendship out of the research relationship. Olivia suggested that one reason we did not find new ways "to be" in the research relationship was that we were being pulled back to "old behaviors":

I have all these expectations or notions built into my head about what my role is and what your role is and I think you do too. Even though we say we're going to do something different, I think it's hard to break out of that and we don't realize what some of the things are that are pulling us back to those old behaviors. Olivia's analysis of the limitations on our attempts to create a feminist methodological context for our work together raises questions about how individuals do find ways to resist, subvert, and challenge normative roles and ways of thinking and believing and what prevents them from doing so. Bakhtin ([1935] 1981) also asks these questions about human agency in his theory of heteroglot discourses or heteroglossia. His theory is an enabling heuristic for making sense of successes and failures at "breaking out" of "old behaviors." Bakhtin ([1935] 1981) explains that all individuals speak in heteroglot discourses that are governed by and emerge from the social, historical, and cultural contexts in which they are uttered. These socially situated heteroglot discourses are made up of a

Page 26 combination of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses that influence our thinking and behaviors. Internally

persuasive discourses may be thought of as ways of thinking and being in the world in ways that engage us from within. They appeal to our hearts and minds. Internally persuasive discourses challenge the status quo, the authoritative discourses, and therefore, they function as interpretive lenses that allow us to see ourselves and the world in new and enabling ways. Bakhtin suggests that individuals who experience internally persuasive discourses discover awakened consciousness. In contrast, authoritative discourses impose themselves from without. According to Bakhtin, an authoritative discourse has great power to "determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behavior," because an authoritative discourse is

located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. Its authority was already acknowledged in the past. It is a prior discourse. It is therefore not a question of choosing it from among other possible discourses that are its equal. It is given (it sounds) in lofty spheres, not those of familiar contact. Its language is a special (as it were, hieratic) language. It can be profaned. It is akin to taboo, i.e., a name that must not be taken in vain. (original emphasis, Bakhtin [1935] 1981, 342) Further, because "we encounter it with its authority already fused to it," an authoritative discourse "binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally" and profoundly influences our behaviors, relationships, and ways of thinking (Bakhtin [1935] 1981, 342). Analyzing how qualitative research methodologies in general and feminist methodology in particular are constructed through these various authoritative and internally persuasive discourses, may shed light on why it was so difficult for Olivia and myself to locate ourselves comfortably within or achieve feminist methodology. Therefore, in the following section of this chapter, I would like to use Bakhtin's discourse framework for locating multiple, conflicting authoritative discourses and internally persuasive discourses. Further, I examine how these discourses functioned in the interviews specifically and the research relationship more generally. My hope is that this form of discourse analysis will help me begin to unravel

Page 27 some of the complexities of the interview process and research relationship. The three central discourses I will examine are the discourses of feminist methodology, the discourses of communication, and the discourses of the roles of power.

Discourses of Feminist Methodology One indicator of friendship is having someone to confide in and knowing that person will listen sympathetically to what you have to say. Another indication is reciprocity, in that confiding and listening are usually shared activities between close friends…. [But] close friends do not usually arrive with a tape-recorder, listen carefully and sympathetically to what you have to say and then disappear. —Cotterill 1992, 599 One of the difficulties that Olivia and I experienced in our work together was coming to terms with what we each expected of ourselves and of each other as two women engaged in this feminist research project. The terrain for working out these expectations was the interview session, that specialized location where our roles were revealed, negotiated, and reframed. What I want to explore here are ways that Olivia and I were negotiating between competing

internally persuasive discourses of models of feminist methodology, each with its own concept of the roles of "good researcher" and "good respondent" in the interview sessions. Looking back at Olivia's articulations of her desires for the interview process, I see her use of words such as participatory, interactive, and conversational. As she explained at the end of the project, "I do like the more conversational approach where we would just talk and the stories would just come out … even though it is a very inefficient way to do things." Thus, her conception of feminist methodology appears to be in accord with the model that Oakley (1981) and her followers describe. This model suggests that the interview becomes a site where women converse, reciprocate self-disclosure, and develop a relationship more akin to or resembling friendship or sisterhood than the conventional middle ground between stranger and friend. For Olivia, therefore, we might say that Oakley's model of feminist methodology was internally persuasive and that she used this framework to evaluate herself and me. In this discourse, being a "good respondent" meant that she would have an interest in me as

Page 28 a person, encouraging me to talk about myself while I also encouraged her to talk about herself. Our success in doing this would be apparent in the equal amount of self-disclosure between us. Further, this discourse of feminist methodology attempts to diminish role differentiation, and her stress on the importance of conversation may also indicate an attempt to break down the differential roles of researcher and respondent. Her willingness to meet with me outside of the interview sessions, despite her busy schedule, also indicated that she was attempting to put into practice Oakley's suggestion that research respondents need to be committed and involved in the process. This conception of the research relationship seemed to be stable as an internally persuasive discourse to Olivia throughout the process and may offer one explanation of why being a "good respondent" (in the sense of her doing the majority of talking) was not achieving feminist methodology for Olivia. But what was internally persuasive for me? What model was in my mind for being a "good researcher"? Going into the research, I recall being internally persuaded by Oakley's methodology as well as other descriptions of the empowering relationships between women articulated by feminist biographers and anthropologists. I believed that conversations between women would be a powerful alternative to the conventional interviewing and would therefore constitute a subversion of conventional qualitative methodology. I was intrigued by the idea that role differentiation could be diminished or eliminated. However, I was also equally taken with the idea of interviews as respondent-guided—the kind of interviews where the respondents felt that they were given the opportunity for expressing themselves as they wished. This phenomenological model of feminist methodology, when put into practice, competes with the Oakley model. Engaged intellectually by two competing internally persuasive discourses, I see now that my practices leaned more toward the second model based on feminist phenomenology. Therefore, when striving to be a "good researcher," especially after Olivia articulated her discomfort with the first interview, I attempted to find a balance between the two models, not only to respond to Olivia's need not to be spotlighted, but also to fulfill my own interest in trying to "be" a feminist interviewer. Upon reflection, I can see that what made this balancing difficult was that, in practice, the feminist phenomenological model was more internally persuasive (as my interview style attests) and more productive. In theory, however, the Oakley model was more internally persuasive because of its overt feminist challenge to conventional

Page 29 methods of interviewing and its privileging of the relational. Working with two discourses of feminist methodology

simultaneously caused a tension for me, one that was not resolved during the research process.

Discourses of Communication, Or, Emily Post Does Discourse Olivia: I never did know what you were interested in or how much you wanted me to go into things. And that's because you were a good listener. You just took it in like you were willing to take what I gave you. You didn't want to probe or make me feel that I had to say something. I think that you were concerned with stepping in too far…. And I was concerned with telling you far more than you wanted to know or with boring you. In his book on research interviewing, Charles Briggs (1986) suggests that in an interview situation, the rules of social science interviewing "preempt" the rules of normal, polite, social communication. He explains that "playing by the rules" of interviewing

prompts the subordination of other components of the interaction to the mutual goal of the conscious transmission of interesting, accurate, and abundant information. When the system is working properly, the participants accept the roles assigned to them by the structure of the interview. Interviewers provide clear and interesting questions that enable respondents to exhibit their knowledge. These roles preempt the criteria that normally define these individuals' roles in society. (Briggs 1986, 56) But what happens if interview rules and roles compete with , rather than preempt the normal rules and roles of polite social communication, particularly between women? I want to suggest that in Olivia's and my interview sessions, we each struggled with multiple authoritative discourses and internally persuasive discourses of what constituted appropriate communication in our interview sessions. The two operative and influential authoritative discourses of communication were the discourses of polite social communication and feminine communication . Further, we were each working within a different model of interviewing depending on our

Page 30 internally persuasive feminist methodology. Finally, we each had a "normal" communication pattern that came into play in the interview sessions. When we look at communication with each of these concepts in mind, the palette from which we draw our understanding of communicative roles gets very messy in an intersubjective relationship. Polite social communication, which I am framing as an authoritative discourse, might be characterized as turn-taking, listening and responding to the other, "making a long story short," and only asking questions appropriate to the relationship. Feminine modes of communication are similar to polite social communication. While feminine models may also be thought of as an authoritative discourse for women (even though they may also be personally internally persuasive), they emphasize emphathetic listening and creating a relationship through personal disclosures (as opposed to only talking about things and events). As a communication event, the Oakleyan model of interviewing, which I am arguing Olivia was drawn to, is based on the feminine mode of communication as is typical of conversations found in friendships. The phenomenological model of interviewing that I was practicing, although it draws from the "feminine" skills of listening, might be thought of as a specialized speech event with specific roles for the participants that are not the same roles as those in "normal" polite social communication. With this set of interrelated ideas about communication in mind, how might we better understand the ways in which the discourses of methodology and communication influenced how Olivia and I communicated with each other? Thinking about the relationship between my ways of communicating and my ways of interviewing has revealed to me, among other things, the powerful effects of my socialization as a child. When I was growing up, I was taught these

rules of polite social communication, especially the rule about never asking people personal questions. I think that my mother thought it especially important that my brother and I be able to converse politely and properly with anyone in any social situation and we had a lot of practice doing so because we were always included at dinner parties when my parents had guests at the house. My parents quite frequently entertained their friends and graduate students from the university where my father worked. One event from when I was eleven or twelve stands out vividly for me. My parents had invited a couple to dinner: he was an Egyptian graduate student and she was from Boston and worked in Senator Ted Kennedy's office. I was fascinated with them and wanted to ask them lots of

Page 31 questions—him about Egypt and her about Senator Kennedy. I don't recall what I asked, but I clearly recall being told by my mother that it was not polite to ask whatever it was that I did ask. I remember feeling ashamed and embarrassed—demoted from dinner participant to child. With this kind of disciplined socialization, it is no wonder that I felt both complimented and relieved when Olivia said that I was ''very respectful not to probe beyond that I want to talk about": this is the good feeling that comes from fulfilling the demands of an authoritative discourse. Kathryn Anderson, reflecting on her interview style, also found herself adhering to the conventions of social communication, which made it difficult for her to ask probing questions:

[M]y interview strategies were bound to some extent by the conventions of social discourse. The unwritten rules by conversation about appropriate questions and topics—especially the one that says "don't pry!"—kept me from encouraging women to make explicit the range of emotions surrounding events and experiences they related. (Anderson and Jack 1991, 13) The authoritative discourse of polite social communication, especially as associated with women and feminine modes of communication, further mediated the kinds of responses I felt able to articulate when I was with Olivia. I felt that I was "forbidden" from voicing reactions to her narratives that might have been interpreted by her as confrontational. While there were times I may have thought to myself that "this can't be the whole story" or "that sounds like a romanticized memory," I never articulated these types of responses (even if more tactfully phrased) to her in the event that she would be offended by my doubt or disbelief. If we think of feminist methodology as an internally persuasive discourse, however, we might have called it into practice to challenge these authoritative discourse/feminine requirements of politeness. But this only works if we think of feminist methodology as offering recommendations for interviews as different communication events than normal conversation. For example, feminist and feminist phenomenological methodologies encourage us or give us permission to ask probing questions as a means to help women explore their lives beyond the superficial. Further, feminist methodology may require us to voice disbelief and doubt, for as Reinharz explains, while feminist researchers may "begin a research project

Page 32 intending to believe the interviewee [they] should question the interviewee if she begins not to believe her" (emphasis added, Reinharz 1992, 29). A feminist phenomenological interview particularly may be seen to challenge polite social communication in that the respondent does not "make a long story short," but rather tells the long story in order to put her experiences into the words that she and the researcher can interpret. I have also come to understand, with the help of my friend Patricia Sawin,4 that what might have been internally persuasive to me about feminist phenomenological interviewing is that it fit my customary communication style. In a discussion about this chapter, Patricia told me that after knowing me for two years, she felt that I had told her only a

fraction about myself compared to what she had told me about herself. She also said that I have a discourse pattern that encourages the other person to talk more and that I typically do not share confidence for confidence. Therefore, when Olivia suggested that my "silences" about myself stemmed from how I was communicating as a researcher, she is right because, with hindsight, we can say that phenomenological interviewing was internally persuasive to me because of the type of person I am; but this is only part of the picture. It is equally true to say that this is how I communicate in a close friendship. But Olivia could not possibly have known this, because she and I were in an interview, not a friendship relationship. Given the information she had about me, Olivia rightly concluded that the predominant way I communicated with her was not conducive to achieving her regulative ideal of feminist interviewing as a conversation. However, if Oakley's model allows for women to converse in "natural" ways, then my behavior might be judged equally successful, because I was doing what was natural for me in a friendship conversation. The problem, then, is having a rigid ideal of what a feminist, feminine, or woman-to-woman conversation should be as an internally persuasive discourse. Feminist methodology may also be seen as supportive of and supported by the authoritative discourse of polite social communication and an equally authoritative discourse of feminine modes of communication. When the emphasis of feminist methodology is on conversation, turn-taking, and empathetic listening, women are asked to be polite not only in a conventional sense, but also in the feminine sense as well. Thus, internally persuasive and authoritative discourses work together to mediate the type of interactions that are possible and desirable. For Olivia, this may have been the case particularly in light of her articulations of feeling natural and

Page 33 unnatural. Being the focus of the interview made her feel that she was engaged in an "unnatural monologue" and that withholding questions from me was unnatural because "questioning is a natural thing to do" in social communication. It was not natural to tell a long story, and both feminist methodology and polite social communication contributed to her self-consciousness when she did so:

One of the things I found in the interviews was that this autobiographical method of research was very inconsistent with how I typically talk about my life. I usually talk about my life through and with other people. If Jan [her best friend] and I were to sit and talk about my life, she would explore things, she would ask questions, and she would say, "well I remember a time" and then she would talk about herself. It would be a much more back and forth process. If we return to the idea discussed above—that Olivia and I were working with competing internally persuasive discourses of feminist methodology—my will toward practicing feminist phenomenology created a conflict for her. That is, my interview style asked her to be a "good respondent" in the model that was internally persuasive to me, not her. Briggs describes this imposition of the researcher's communication style on the respondent as "communicative hegemony" (1986, 90). However, if the respondent is uncomfortable with the role, or if, as Briggs explains, respondents "are not accustomed to playing this [interview] game … they are unlikely to accept this suppression of normal social criteria and ... may frame the 'interview' as another type of communicative event" (57). In a sense, making the communicative event into a conversation between women, rather than an interview, is what Olivia attempted when she "broke the frame'' of phenomenological interviewing by asking me questions about myself.

Discourses of the Roles of Power The final disclosure that I want to explicate is the multiple roles of power in feminist methodology. I specifically want to examine how Olivia's multiple subject positions of respondent, professor, and feminist and my multiple subject positions of researcher, student, and feminist constituted a complex web of conflicting authoritative discourses and

internally persuasive discourses about power in our research relationship.

Page 34 In order to examine conflicting discourses of power in the research relationship, I want to mobilize one of the central claims of feminist theory—that individual, multiple subject positions are central to human relationships and that these multiple subject positions take on different meanings and levels of importance depending on particular situations and interpersonal relations. In the research relationship, the way that power functions depends greatly on the interrelationship between the multiple subject positions of the people involved in the research and the different discourses about those subject positions. What is crucial to unravel is the ways that conflicting discourses about the role of power in research emerge in research relationship as a result of the hierarchical structuring of particular subject positions. My hope is that by examining the conflicting discourses about the multiple subject positions in Olivia's and my research relationship, I may be able to discuss the complexities of the roles of power in feminist methodology and destabilize stagnant, authoritative discourses about how power functions in qualitative methodology more generally.

The Role of Power in Researcher-Respondent Subject Positions Little attention has been given to power relationships between women other than to assume that the researcher, by virtue of her education and status, is always more powerful than her respondents. —Cotterill 1992, 599 In qualitative methodology, it is a commonly accepted belief that the researcher has "The Power" in research relationships. As Laura Nader asserts, historically researchers have consciously placed themselves in positions of power because "the entirety of field work … depend[ed] upon a certain power relationship in favor of the anthropologist" (Nader 1969, 289). Recent critiques of how researchers' power is a form of colonization have raised awareness about the need to be reflective about how they exercise power over respondents. Similarly, Judith Stacey (1988) warned feminists about the ways that we may also participate in exploitative power relationships with our respondents. The common thread in this genre of writing is that the respondent is envisioned in a social position "below" the researcher who, to use an often used (but rather offensive) term, "studies down" from a position of power over respondents. Researchers are understood

Page 35 to have power for many reasons. One central reason is that they often have economic and educational advantages over respondents, and in many cases, they also have white or male privilege. In feminist methodology, researchers are also said to be imbued with power because they are more free to leave the relationship than are the participants, which is a "significant power difference which remains constant" (Armstead 1995, 628; see also Stacey 1988). Even when feminist researchers themselves locate ways in which power is "shifting and, at times contradictory," they may still "accept that power ultimately lies with the researcher rather than the researched" because researchers, while they listen to what women want to say during interviews, "retain the power of redirection'' and walk away with the interview data they wanted (Reay 1995, 211-213; see also Ribbens 1989). However, as Margaret LeCompte asserts, when researchers engaged in critical or emancipatory research define the respondents uniformly as "disempowered or oppressed, regardless of how the informants define themselves … the research is deeply constrained (Le Compte 1993, 13). These totalizing conceptions of power consolidated in the researcher, while initially based on an understanding of the exploitative and colonizing practices of anthropology, have now become reified into an authoritative discourse. This discourse has constrained our research and therefore does not help us to understand power as complex, contextual,

fluctuating, and, above all, relational (Friedman 1995). That is, while the awareness of researchers has been raised by the important critiques of colonization and exploitation, the discourses about the role of power are oversimplified. Further, the idea that the researcher has "The Power" over the participant is an authoritative, binary discourse that may function to disguise the ways that "the flow of power in multiple systems of domination is not always unidirectional" (Friedman 1995, 18). Power is situated and contextualized within particular intersubjective relationships. In accordance with Cotterill, I want to make a case that "issues of power and control which are fundamental to the research process shift and change, and within the interview situation the researcher as well as the researched is vulnerable. To deny that is to deny the subjective experience of the researcher as a woman" (1992, 605). One effect of having power reified into an authoritative discourse is that we talk as if researchers inherently have more power in the research relationship. This problematic way of talking about the role of power stems from the dangerous and erroneous conflation of researcher power with researcher responsibility. This mode of discourse is further compounded by conflating researcher responsibility with

Page 36 researcher exploitation; it suggests that having the authority to collect data, interpret it, and produce a text is inherently an act of exploitation or even violence done by the researcher to the almost victimized respondent. As a researcher, I began the process under the spell of this authoritative discourse of the role of power. I felt a great deal of anxiety about researcher power; consequently, I felt that putting into practice certain internally persuasive aspects of feminist methodology (such as those discussed above) would diminish my "power," and Olivia and I could have a more egalitarian relationship. Such is the lure of Oakley's model of feminist methodology! Therefore, I was particularly careful about giving the transcripts and tapes of the interviews to Olivia so that we would have shared ownership of them. We also used her transcripts to decide together on the path our subsequent interviews would take so that the research would answer questions she had about her own life (Harding 1987). I negotiated with Olivia the amount of input she wanted in the interpretation of her narratives; discussed with her the theoretical ways I would interpret her narratives; and worked with her on the final text so that she was comfortable having it go public. In accord with feminist methodology, I gave up what would conventionally be thought of as the researcher's interpretive or authorial "rights" in favor of shared rights, authorial responsibility, and diminished researcher power. Implementing these strategies into our research relationship did not mean that I was "giving up power" if power is taken to mean that I used her interviews for my work and my academic gains; however, implementing these strategies did mean that I was trying to be responsible to my work and my commitment to Olivia. Further, because I gave Olivia the transcripts of the interviews and she was and is using t hem as the grounding for her own academic publishing, the stagnant notion that power is only situated in the researcher was challenged. Similarly, the idea that only the researcher gains from the research, making the research inherently exploitative, is also challenged. This example of how the unidirectional notion of power can be disrupted in practice emerges specifically from this type of relationship within an academic community; furthermore, it is connected with the context of "researching up" that is discussed next.

The Role of Power in Professor-Student Subject Positions If power is contextual, complex, and unidirectional, this picture of the role of power in our research relationship is incomplete, for it

Page 37 negates the importance of Olivia's and my different subject positions as professor and student. This second hierarchical

arrangement may be described as "researching up." Researching up is defined as conducting research in an elite setting with respondents who have more power and status than the researcher (Nader 1969). As Leslie Roman notes, researching up needs to be a feminist goal so that we can better understand "the cultural practices, social relations, and material conditions that structure the daily experiences and expectations of powerful groups" (1993, 307). What seems curious to me now, is how conscious I was during the research process of diminishing conventional ways that researchers manifest power, while not consciously dealing with the ways that, as a student interviewing a professor, I was disempowered in this relationship. The unequal distribution of power that stemmed from "researching up" was probably more critical to our relationship than I understood at that time, and the authoritative discourse of the role of power in the professor-student relationship may well have functioned as a hidden episteme in the research relationship. This discourse becomes more apparent if we look at what was not said during the research process about power and if we reexamine the interviewing process in light of this discourse. Like being a researcher, being a professor comes with an authoritative discourse of structural superiority in place. While feminist pedagogy offers a competing discourse, the structural realities of university life have managed to maintain the higher position of the professor in relation to the student. Therefore, while Olivia was not in a position to grade me—she was not "my" professor—her role as professor was no less powerful in my mind. Because we were in the same academic community, I felt worried about being judged by Olivia and feared offending her much of the time. I do not mean to suggest that I experienced incapacitating worries and fears; rather, it was an unspoken undercurrent that made me extra careful of how I interacted with her or interpreted her narratives. It was a vulnerability I experienced. While a desire to not hurt, offend, or exploit each and every one of our respondents makes us hyperconscious of what we do and say, "researching up" adds an extra dimension to this concern: one that may contribute to the authoritative discourse of polite social communication—being the good, polite, researcher and the "good listener." Because she was the professor—that is, she was someone located structurally as my superior in an institutional setting we shared—she was positioned in such a way as to question my competence and knowledge based on her more advanced status in the academic community. For this reason, it may be understandable why I felt

Page 38 that I had failed in feminist methodology even though she did not say to me that I had: I knew I was not fulfilling her model of and desire for feminist methodology. This structural inequity may also, in part, account for Olivia's feelings of vulnerability as a respondent: it is not part of the usual professor-student relationship for the professor to disclose so much to a student.

The Role of Power in Feminist and Other Subject Positions Olivia and I embarked on this project with the explicit naming of ourselves as feminists. Being feminists was not something either of us treated as insignificant: it was a consciously motivated component of our lives and subjectivity as well as a major commitment in our academic research and teaching. Feminism was a powerful, internally persuasive discourse to each of us. Reflecting on this shared commitment, I am left wondering how much this sense of identification with each other as being in a "sisterhood" contributed to the silence around issues of unequal power—as if our feminism had the magic to render impotent not only the power inequities discussed above, but a few additional ones as well. Although Olivia and I intersected in some ways in terms of our subject positions and accesses to "power," we were more different than we ever discussed, our power was quite ambiguous and fluctuating in terms of our biographies. One similarity that gave us equal privilege was that we are both heterosexual. This made it easy for us to talk about gender differences and concerns about our heterosexual relationships as feminists. Our feminism also helped us to understand

why we both highly valued our close friendships with our women friends. We did not, however, talk about our religious (ethnic) differences. While we often discussed racism in the public schools and our efforts in anti-racist pedagogy as white educators, my being Jewish complicates the notion of a shared whiteness, since whiteness is a modern social construction that not all Jews, including myself, share (Sacks 1994). Fluctuating axes of social class were also a grounding of our relationship. As a former corporate .P. and then university professor, Olivia was middle-class when we worked together; however, she had been raised working-class and, as she told me, still felt a deeper connection with and concern for working-class women than middle-class women.5 Olivia's affiliations and history locate her simultaneously as working and middle-class. I had been raised middle-class, although this positioning is not as simple as it sounds. At the time we were working together, I was

Page 39 not financially stable. I had just returned with very little from the Peace Corps and was living off student loans and graduate assistantships. As a result, I did not have a lot of financial security at that time, particularly given that graduate students often had to wait until just before the new academic year to find out if we were even being funded. Another disjuncture was that although Olivia and I were almost the same age, because we had grown up in such different regions of the country to such different families, we had less in common in terms of cultural experiences than we would have if we had been raised within the same class or if we had both grown up in the same type of geographic setting. I highlight these differences, not because I think that they need to be interpreted exhaustively, but to provide some insight into the multiple grounding from which our fragile intersubjective research relationship emerged. Caught up in the research process and in our emerging relationship, I did not recall Mies's (1991) warning that identification, such as our identification as feminists, can cause blindness to differences, especially differences in power that exist among women.

Rethinking Feminist Methodology The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology. —Haraway 1991, 191 As a mode of examining women's lives, feminist methodology was and remains internally persuasive to me. I recognize the need to be able to talk about feminist methodology without resorting to either complete relativism or rule making (Reinharz 1992). Perhaps the only way to do this is to make sure that our discussions leave in the ambiguity and complexity of what it means to do feminist inquiry without denying that we can and sometimes do achieve feminist methodology; however, we still must acknowledge that each instance of feminist methodology differs because field relations are contextual and contingent, and intersubjective relationships are always in flux. What I hope to add to the growing literature on feminist methodology through this chapter is my understanding of how important it is for us to have a more complex view of the concept of power and intersubjectivity in feminist methodology, one that

Page 40 emerges from an understanding of a complex relationship that is not permanently fixing the researcher in a position of

power. Rather, we need to be more open and sensitive to how multiple desires and subject positions become enacted in various ways in our power dynamics. We need to reject conceptions of power in feminist methodology that do not attend to power's ambiguous ways of becoming manifest in interviews (see Newton and Stacey 1995). Power may fluctuate and vary depending not only on who is in the relationship, but on what is going on in both the researchers' and participants' lives and in the research process. Allowing for a more complex analysis of power dynamics through an understanding of intersubjectivity will help us to see how in some research relationships, power may alight on respondents and researchers with differing degrees of weight at different times and with different meanings in specific contexts. We cannot eliminate power in research relationships, as much early feminist methodological literature hoped was possible. Nor, as Petra Munro maintains, is power "something feminist … have to be against," for power is not the same as domination (1995a, 110). Rather, the goal for feminists is to understand power's complexities and its influences on how we interact with each other. We must learn to notice power, analyze it, and name it when it manifests itself as it undoubtedly will. I hope that my reflections on Olivia's and my research relationship contributes to the discussion about what a feminist interview can or might be as we rethink power and subjectively in research. Questioning the idea that interviews are "unnatural" and that conversations are "natural" and therefore more desirable for feminist methodology is helpful for this discussion. If we understand both interviews and conversations as "natural" speech events, then striving for conversations in place of interviews may be less important in feminist relationships. What is more important is not whether one does an interview or a conversation, but that there is a resonance between the context of the relationship and the type of speech event that people have. If the relationship is a research relationship, perhaps it is less "natural'' to have a conversation than to have an interview. What is at stake is the type of interview. Bakhtin's ([1952–3] 1986) later writings about "speech genres" are helpful here. Bakhtin suggests that the form our utterances or speech acts take depends upon the genre in which we speak. He explains that "the genre in turn is determined by the subject matter, goal, and situation of the utterance" ([1952–3] 1986, 152–3). If the goal of the

Page 41 speech act is to collect narratives, then the genre is an interview: therefore, as Patricia Sawin argues, "perhaps it is a bit daft to say 'let's have a conversation' when what we want are narratives to interpret" (personal communication, 1997). Further, if the situation of the utterance or the goal of the speech act is friendship, then is it equally contradictory to say that we can conduct an interview? While I am not fully prepared to say that more conversational interviewing is not desirable, for I still think it is, I have come to understand that interviewing women is not a contradiction in terms. Rather, interviewing women in exploitative ways or in a dominating relationship is unethical and antithetical to feminist methodology. The participants of each relationship, then, will need to find a way of communicating in the project and will need to communicate about how they communicate. While this may mean that there is no way to say what feminist methodology is or is not in terms of methods in the field (and I think this is the point that Reinharz makes in her book, Feminist Methods in Social Research , that I had to experience to understand), it nonetheless must always have the political agenda of finding ways to better understand women's lives—our own, those of our participants, and the relationship between the two.

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3

"Locked in Uneasy Sisterhood" Beginnings When I was searching for feminist educators as possible respondents for my dissertation research, Sandy's name repeatedly came up among both teachers and administrators in the county. I was told that she would be an "ideal respondent" because she both defines herself as a feminist and works toward creating gender equity in schools through her faculty and staff development workshops. In her late forties during the time we worked together, Sandy was one of the few women administrators in the Sussex County school system Strong-willed, intelligent, extremely energetic, intense, and forthright, she received the recognition of her peers and colleagues by being appointed the first staff development director for the county school system. When I first called Sandy in June 1990 to ask her to participate in this study, she hesitated. I explained to her that I was studying the life histories of feminist teachers to understand how they became feminists and that I was interested in applying feminist methodological theories in practice. After we talked for a while about my research interests, Sandy said that although it sounded really interesting to her, she wasn't sure that she had the time. We agreed to talk again in late August when she returned from summer vacation, at which time she would tell me if she wanted to participate. I put down the telephone, flipped ahead in the pages of my calendar, and wrote in the August 20th block, "call Sandy." Writing it, I almost hoped that she would decide not to participate, not only because of her initial hesitation, but because her abrupt manner on the phone made me feel ill at ease. Despite cautions to myself not to judge the future of a relationship on the basis of

Page 44 one brief phone call, I couldn't stop myself from speculating on whether this brusqueness was typical of her. If it was, would I be able to feel comfortable enough with her for us to forge the trusting and open relationship that I understood as the necessary grounding for feminist methodology? On August 20th, I called Sandy as planned, and she told me that she had given it a lot of thought and had decided that she would like to be a respondent in my research. She felt that the examination of events in her life—past and present—would allow her a kind of disciplined reflection that she felt was "an imperative" at that time. She explained that she had recently been diagnosed with melanoma (skin cancer) and that the prognosis was not particularly optimistic. She continued to explain that she had already undergone dialysis and then a kidney transplant some years earlier and so she had expected a failed kidney to "get" her, not cancer (Bloom 1992). Sandy also told me that she was experiencing a great deal of stress in her marriage and this too made her feel a pressing need to reflect on her life. Serious and candid, Sandy also sounded very enthusiastic and ready to get started on the project, and all my doubts were dispelled in my excitement to begin my research; thus began our research relationship that lasted from August 1990 until the summer of 1993.

Relationship/Ruptured Relationship The county school administration building was dark when I approached it for our first meeting. Sandy and I had decided that we would meet in her office around 7 P.M. when everyone else had gone home. Knocking on her office door, I discovered Sandy in a black muscle shirt and gym shorts, so incongruous with the conservative environment of the school administration building that it caught me by surprise. Sandy explained that she had just finished working out

at the YMCA, and had not had time to change before our appointment. As I plugged in the tape recorder and got myself situated at the small round conference table in her office, I felt intimidated both by the enormity of the task that lay ahead and by the return of Sandy's somewhat brusque manner, which reminded me of our first phone conversation. I thought it would make a good beginning to our work together to discuss what each of us expected to get out of the project. I suggested to Sandy that she talk about her expectations first. She rather curtly reminded me that "we talked about that before" on

Page 45 the telephone, and she seemed almost accusatory when she continued: "but you don't think we talked about that enough." I replied that "we talked about some of it. But also, I wanted to get some of it on tape too." I suspect that she was disappointed by my repetition of this question because it disrupted what her expectations were for the first interview. She was ready—mentally and emotionally—to tell me "chapter one" of her life story and had not anticipated (or desired) a discussion of research methodology. I explained to her that it was really important to me to include as part of the first interview why she wanted to participate as a respondent and told her that her response was "a real important part of our work together." As I spoke, she listened intently, her dark brown eyes looking unwaveringly at me. When I finished my brief explanation, she started right in and clearly articulated why she was participating and what she wanted to get out of the process. I was amazed at her clarity, and I was not a little surprised at some of the things she told me she wanted to explore in the life history interviews, such as her history of illnesses, her current thoughts about personal relationships, and questions about sexuality. She said that she wanted to use our interview time as a way to focus her thinking on these issues of her life, and she repeated what she had told me on the phone: that because she had been diagnosed with melanoma, she felt an immediacy to do so. Although I had selected Sandy because she had been active in gender equity programs in the county school system, she did not mention teaching or professional activities in her list; what stood out for her was the focus on her life history more generally. In the end, this turned out well for me since my initial interests in feminist teaching had receded as I increasingly became more invested in theorizing methodology, subjectivity, narrative, and interpretation. When Sandy finished talking about her reasons for wanting to be a respondent, I told her that it seemed as if her desire to tell her life story to me was going to work out well for my research. I also explained to her that I didn't expect our interviews to be very structured and that I hoped that she would feel free to disclose what she wanted to me. I then asked her if she would like me to also share stories of my life with her so that she could get to know me too. I indicated that such reciprocity might generate a more open relationship between us. She emphatically replied: "If I were reluctant to talk about myself I wouldn't have said that you could come and do this." She said that she would be happy to answer direct questions that I might want to ask, especially based on my

Page 46 ongoing analysis of interviews, but that the "reciprocal kind of thing" was not necessary. Upon reflection, I realize that the dynamics of this first conversation between us about reciprocity was quite significant for establishing the grounds for the relationship that was to follow; however, at that time I was unable to analyze or recognize its significance. I felt as though I had put out my hand in greeting and it had not been grasped in return. My reaction was silent disappointment at her rejection of reciprocity and I worried that if she did not share a desire for reciprocity as a grounding for a feminist research relationship, I would not be able to theorize feminist methodology. Petra Munro (1995b) discloses a similar experience. In her first feminist life-history project she asked her participants

to keep a personal journal of their reactions to their work together. They responded by saying that they did not wish to write independently, but they would respond to Petra's questions; thus, they rejected her offer "for establishing a collaborative relationship." Munro continues:

I sensed that my request was perceived as a demand which did not conform to my participants' conceptualization of the research process. My heightened sensitivity to avoiding an exploitative research relationship had not taken into account the fact that my participants had their own reasons and agendas for participating in the study. In essence, my assumption of the need for a collaborative relationship underscored by perception of them as disempowered, thereby disregarding their power to determine the nature of the relationship. (Munro 1995b, 143) Like Munro's participants, Sandy also rejected a participatory model, in this case, "the reciprocal kind of thing." This reciprocity was of course not necessary for Sandy, because her reason for being in the study was that it provided her with the opportunity to examine her life by responding to my interviewing. She was not in the study to theorize feminist methodology with me. In retrospect, I see this moment as the first rift in our working relationship, for we most definitely were beginning from points of crossed purposes and contradictory expectations; however, the importance of this was not at all clear to me at the time. As we began, I was also not recognizing, as Munro says, Sandy's "power to determine the nature of the relationship." As Sandy began narrating her life history that first night after our methodological discussion, I realized that she had stories that

Page 47 she wanted to tell about herself, and that there was little I needed to say or do to elicit them. From the moment Sandy began telling the stories for her life until the time that we had scheduled to part, it was as if nothing else existed for me. Like a good storyteller, she drew me in. Her animated and somewhat raspy voice, the vibrancy of her eyes, and the stories of her life rarely failed to capture my attention. Sandy and I never became friends and we never interacted outside of the life-history interviews or ethnographic observations. Although we usually met in each other's homes, which lent a kind of informality to the interviews, I did not come to see her in multiple contexts that approximate the lived experience, as Shulamit Reinharz (1983) suggests is critical to feminist work. That is, we did not meet for lunch, we did not arrange to do things socially together, and I did not meet her friends and family, with the exception of her first and second husbands (although that was only toward the end of our work.) I felt that we were developing a relationship that, although narrowly circumscribed, was both intense and involved. As I got to know Sandy, I increasingly became aware that we did not have a lot in common in terms of our differences in our family histories, past experiences, and daily work lives; I suspect that our differences made Sandy all the more interesting to me! However, we did have many shared interests (novels, art, piano music, feminism) that we discovered through conversations during our first minutes before each interview. These similarities and my increasing fascination with her life experiences contributed to a relationship in which our differences receded into the background of our current work and immediate relationship. However, late in the first year of fieldwork, the relationship we had developed was ruptured and one of our differences became harshly illuminated. It was the night during the Gulf War when Scud missiles were being launched at Israel. When Sandy came to my house for an interview with the first night that missiles were fired at Israel, she found me distraught and teary. We had never talked much about religion, only to note that she had been brought up Protestant in a midwestern rural town while I had been brought up Jewish in a northeastern suburb. She asked me if I was upset

because I had relatives in Israel. I told her no, but I was surprised at her question: I had assumed the obviousness of most U.S. Jews caring about Israel although not necessarily supporting all its policies.1 Her next comment stunned me. She said that Israel deserved the bombing for their treatment of the

Page 48 Palestinians. I don't remember my response to her. Maybe I made some weak retort about the fact that Israel was not part of the Gulf War and therefore the bombing was unjust; maybe I said something about the (pre-1994 accord) Palestinian position on Israel. I don't remamber. I only remember feeling that same numbness that, ever since I was a child, has overcome me when I encounter what I feel as antisemitism. At that point, Sandy and I agreed that we would cancell the interview that night: I was too upset and involved in watching the news, and she wanted to go home and watch the news with her husband, Dan. We hugged good-bye as we had become accustomed to doing and agreed to meet the following week. I thought—perhaps obsessed—about Sandy's comments all that next week. I didn't think that I would ever feel the same way about her again. Although we had not established a friendship, we nonetheless had developed a caring relationship. All this had changed for me in the course of a few minutes. I kept asking myself: Could I continue to maintain interest in and look in the eyes of someone who I perceived to be prejudiced against my religion? I thought with some bitter amusement about the two meanings of the word gulf—both body of water and abyss—and how the Gulf War had precipitated a gulf between us. I knew that the project had to continue and that Sandy and I had to find a way to come to terms with what had occurred between us that night. The need to maintain this relationship despite the tensions that had arisen made me feel that we were, to borrow a phrase from Gloria Hull (1984), "locked in uneasy sisterhood." Sandy and I met for several interviews after that night, but it was a few months before we talked about what had happened. As we sat in Sandy's kitchen sipping lemon zinger tea during my first visit to her and Dan's house, we talked about recent events having to do with the breakup of her marriage with Dan and stressful events in her work. I was acutely aware of two differences during this discussion. First, the interview felt different: I had atypically brought along a list of questions and topics for us to discuss. In retrospect, I can see that the list of questions was symbolic of my need to state to Sandy that I was the researcher and the context of our meeting was limited to the research project. "Let there be no mistake," my list of questions affirmed, "I am the researcher here to get information from you the respondent! We are not having any relationship but that of researcher and respondent." I think too that preparing a list of questions served as a buffer of formality that allowed me to distance myself from my negative feelings toward Sandy. Second, I felt different both physically and emotionally:

Page 49 I was conscious that I was sitting with my back held straighter and tighter; I felt as if I was looking at her without really seeing her; and although I listened attentively, I felt emotionally detached from her and somewhat uninterested in what she had to say. And yet, playing the tape of the conversation later, I heard myself asking occasional interested questions, making affirming "uh-huh" sounds, and responding pleasantly to Sandy's questions. My voice, at least to my ears, did not betray my sense of alienation from Sandy, although this feeling was acute. Toward the end of the interview, I asked Sandy to reflect on the last months of the research process and fieldwork—I wanted to know how she felt about the process of telling her life story to me up to that time. However, what emerged was a discussion of what had happened that night. I still find it interesting that the discussion emerged not out of an attempt by either of us to openly address what had happened that night but as part of a discussion of the research process. In some ways, perhaps this was the right and only possible context for this discussion. To my question Sandy responded:

I don't get close to very many people. It's one thing to be able to talk and say things that are revealing—I chose the word carefully—are revealing , and I can do that fairly easily. I think that when I started out with you I looked at it as an assignment, something that I thought would be interesting from an intellectual point of view. But I have enough friends. You know, I had to clarify that in my own mind. What was our relationship going to be? And it was going to be pretty much a business relationship. I think that I can express myself, I think that I have an interesting story to tell, and the other thing is that I had an obligation because I am the only female administrator in the county schools at that level. So I had an obligation to say yes for professional reasons, for the feminist cause in its own sense. Sandy's explanation of her comfort with talking about "revealing" aspects of her life without friendship and her admission that she had framed our work together as an "assignment," a "business relationship," and a professional "obligation" clarified for me why she neither desired to know me better nor desired the reciprocity of feminist methodology I had posed in our first interview. However, Sandy continued her reflection on our work explaining how the incident that night broke down for her some of the barriers she (finally) admitted to having constructed in the beginning.

Page 50 But there was a turning point that made you really real for me. That was of course when I came over and they were bombing [Israel]. That was really quite um, quite, (pause) it really really affected me very deeply. Those things took me past Leslie the researcher and the student … [and] make you really unique to me. I asked her why that incident, in particular, made me "real" to her. She replied:

Well, because, if you really must know, it's because I'm really very anti-Zionist. I'm not anti-Jewish, but anti-Zionist. I think that Israel stole that land. And I don't have a good feeling about Israel anyway. But here's a Jewish person that doesn't fit any Jewish stereotypes. You know, you're really passive, you are not Zionist, obviously, and yet what I ended up doing there was comforting someone who is upset over Israel when it's just not the role that I would have ever played for anybody, ever, period. And um, the other part is that it wasn't that you knew anyone. What you said to me was that "you can't be raised in a Jewish family and not have these feelings." And so those are all the things—it gives me shivers to think about—those are all things that I had to come home, and I really had to think about. You know, it was a real growth experience for me, a real strong feeling. Sandy's description of what constituted for her a turning point in our relationship, in general heightened my awareness of the unforeseen complexities of intersubjective relationships in research and specifically attested to the great differences between Sandy's and my reactions to what had occurred between us. Her remark that, until that night I was not "really real" for her was deeply troubling. But it also helped me to realize that I had responded to her statement that "the reciprocal kind of thing" was not necessary by crafting myself in her presence as a silent listener. In effect, I conceded my desire for working toward reciprocity as a critical component of feminist research to Sandy's (previously unstated) desire for a business relationship, and then interpreted my concession as a feminist practice because I had responded to the needs and desires of my respondent, perhaps making inevitable an uncomfortable intersubjective relationship. As Patricia Sawin rightly admonishes, adherence to such practices in the name of feminist

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scholarship forces women back into ''that atavistic 'feminine' role from which feminism is intended to free us" (1993, 3). I might further argue that my taking the "feminine" role placed me in a position of subordination to Sandy, problem of power that I shall return to shortly. Further, Sandy's reflection that she was "really very anti-Zionist [but] not anti-Jewish" left me emotionally unsettled, as did her characterization of me as not a stereotypical Jew because she regards me as "really passive." What troubled me about her statement that she is anti-Zionist but not anti-Jewish is that I understand anti-Zionism as the desire for the dissolution of Israel; for most Jews, regardless of how negatively many of us feel about Israeli domestic policies and colonizing tendencies, the desire for the elimination of Israel—a Jewish nation—is (rightly or wrongly) equated with antisemitism. Letty Cottin Pogrebin sums up this widely held belief:

I have no tolerance for anti-Zionists even if they are feminists…. I have come to consider anti-Zionism tantamount to anti-Semitism because the political reality is that its bottom line is the end to all Jews. (Pogrebin, cited in Bourne 1987, 8) Finally, her statement that I am not a "stereotypical Jew" because she regards me as "really passive" insulted me for its implications of what kind of stereotypes I would need to manifest to be intelligible in the dominant culture as a "typical Jew." Yet my responses to her that night revealed none of the anger and hurt I felt. On the tape of this conversation, I hear Sandy say with great kindness in her voice that "I have come to see different facets of you and to appreciate those things very much. Um. (pause) I guess just to really care." This statement is followed by a rather long silence on the tape. And then I finally respond in what can only be described as a tense voice: "Thank you. (pause, nervous laugh) It's interesting how (pause) in books, um, they talk about researcher relationships being distant and separate. (pause, change subject) So, at this point do you think that you've gotten to talk about the things that you wanted to express?" Listening to my evasive and hollow response makes it clear to me, although I do not know if Sandy realized it, that I was unable and unwilling to tell her that the conflict had the opposite effect on me than her. For Sandy, the incident was a catalyst for her to think about me in more thoughtful ways and it made her feel closer to

Page 52 me as an individual. She enjoyed feeling that she had given me comfort. I shared none of her feelings and had not felt comforted by her in the least. Why then didn't I ask her why she had not previously told me she had decided we were going to have a "business relationship" when she knew perfectly well that this was in opposition to my goals? Why didn't I question her about her feelings that Israel "stole that land" and that it was okay to bomb Israel and open a conversation about how I understood her anti-Zionist stance? Why didn't I tell her that she had insulted me by her implied stereotyping of Jews? "Locked in uneasy sisterhood." Gloria Hull's phrase echoes in my mind. It accuses me of an unnecessary compromise to bury myself and be silent in order to maintain what I increasingly thought of as the vulnerable bonds of a feminist relationship. But were the bonds, in reality, so vulnerable that they could not bear the strain of my anger and hurt? Or were my interpretations of feminist methodology and notions of ''sisterhood" too idealistic to remain intact in the face of the reality of our differences? Over the next nine or ten months, as I completed writing the dissertation and we had less frequent interviews, these questions haunted me.

Reflections on Feminist Methodology What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot

see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny? —Lorde 1984, 132 Feminist methodology is both complex and exciting. That I tell this story in the context of a self-critical reflection on one of my experiences is meant neither to denigrate feminist methodology not to suggest that it be abandoned. On the contrary, by engaging in critique from/of my own experiences, I seek to illustrate that feminist methodology does support the possibility of a radically different and transformational research methodology if we do not idealize or unproblematically accept it or our practices of it. Good critiques of feminist methodology and practice do exist (e.g., Gluck and Patai 1991; Probyn 1993; Visweswaran 1994); however, I would suggest that feminist ethnographers have been mostly (and understandably) silent on this thorny issue of prejudice

Page 53 or misunderstandings within research relationships in deference to the research participants. The methodology literature has also elided this issue by focusing instead on how even feminist researchers have the power to exploit respondents (Stacey 1988) and on how ethnic, class, and gender heterogeneity can be stimulating (Benmayor 1991). Further, methodological literature typically centers on the normal or perhaps normalized alienation a researcher feels as an outsider to a site or culture or on the importance of recognizing and managing negative or ambivalent emotions the researcher may feel about the respondents (Kleinman and Copp (1993). While all of these accounts are insightful and helpful, experiences such as the one explored here typically go unremarked (see however, Borland 1991, Hale 1991). This allows the researcher-respondent relationship a protected status that I believe must be relinquished if feminist methodology is going to: 1) further our understanding of women's lives and experiences; 2) challenge dominant modes of participatory research; and 3) actively contribute to social change. I have come to believe that feminist methodology's challenge to researchers to put themselves on the same critical plane as their research respondents is one of the most important practices of feminist methodology and certainly the most difficult to achieve. Placing oneself on the same critical plane must, of course, go beyond, "a gesture that is enforced by politically correct convention" (Marcus 1994, 572) and be truly and openly self-critical and responsible (Harding 1991). It is, as Michelle Fine notes, a matter of "working the hyphens" in which "researchers probe how we are in relation with the contexts we study and with our informants, understanding that we are all multiple in those relations" (1994, 72). Working the hyphens now helps me to see that like many American Jews, I do not acknowledge that Israel, a Jewish nation state deeply committed to and protective of its own survival, expelled and condemned to poverty thousands of Arabs and Palestinians and has continued to be a source of oppression for many Palestinians (Bourne 1987; Bulkin 1984). The protection of Israel as a Jewish homeland and the assertions of its rights to exist have a prominence in both diaspora Jewish and Israeli discourses that allows institutional racism against Arabs to flourish. Further, it pushes out of consciousness the harsh material and political realities of the Palestinian people and especially Palestinian women, with whom Jewish feminists must stand in solidarity against all forms of oppression. Thus, as Jenny Bourne (1987) explains, being a feminist U.S. Jew

Page 54 places one in the difficult, contradictory position of simultaneously deploring Israel's colonizing and oppressive roles in the Middle East and wanting to have Jewish identity and support Jewish survival. Had I been more thoughtful about the

ways that my understandings of Israel had been shaped by the dominant Jewish-American discourses and more willing to put myself on the same critical plane as I was placing Sandy following that night's discussion, I might have been able to respond with more understanding to her reactions against Israel. SElf-scrutiny on my part during the research process might have been the catalyst for a constructive discussion between us that did not result in my profound feelings of hurt and emotional distance from Sandy. Placing myself on the same critical plane may also hace encouraged me to interrogate both Sandy's and my understandings of our identities: How they shifted and changed and influenced the intersubjective research relationship and how our different social positions meant a fluctuating power relationship. That I was the researcher may have given me a certain amoung of power, as the research literature attests; however, that Sandy was a well-respected professional administrator and I but a student meant that she saw herself as having more status, as her description above indicates. Articulating our understandings of power might have been a discussion we could have had. Further, when Sandy's and my religious and political differences (in my perspective) ruptured our relationship, I see now that it was an opportunity for us to talk about what meanings religious, class, and geographic identities had for us and how they mediated what we believed about ourselves and others. Although we did discuss how Sandy's experiences growing up in a predominantly rural, fundamentalist Christian environment influenced her ideas about many things, we never did discuss how it shaped her ideas about me with my different background. By overtly taking about our identities we would have been able to do more than simply pay lip service to feminist methodology's call for naming and reflecting on our subject positions. Instead, we could have used these as sources of understanding how identities and power work in the shifting nature of research relationships. To paraphrase Harding (1991), it was a time for each of us, together, to take responsibility for our identities and social locations. This experience with Sandy has also affirmed for me that mutual trust and reciprocity are critical to the feminist project, for it is only in a context of mutual trust and openness that negotiations of difference can take place. A "business relationship" may result in the collection of excellent data and the generation of meaningful

Page 55 research, but it will probably not foster a relationship that can withstand conflict and recuperate from a deep rupture. Negotiations of differences, when they arise, should be considered part of feminist methodology. These negotiations are a step toward contributing more conscientiously to the feminist goal of transformational politics in which feminists work for more multicultural understanding and activism (Anzaldúa 1990; Caraway 1991; hooks 1989; Molina 1990) or "goodwill," which Lugones and Spelman explain is a reciprocal caring for the well-being of each other as whole beings (1982, 581). In this situation with Sandy, had we developed more trust through a more reciprocal relationship, I might have been able to contribute more toward feminist transformational politics by helping Sandy to understand the antisemitism encoded in her characterization of me as passive, and therefore, atypical. Because I knew that Sandy was the kind of person whom Uma Narayan (1988) calls a "sympathetic outsider," a person who has good will toward those who experience oppression or prejudice from the "inside," a context of trust may have made an open conversation more possible. Although the good will of sympathetic outsiders is not enough "to guarantee that their perceptions and comments are inoffensive to insiders,"2 their good will may be demonstrated in "their willingness to actively educate themselves about it" (Narayan 1988, 46, 37). Thus, this incident might have resulted in a transformational action for me as a feminist educator and transformational knowledge for Sandy as a feminist educator.3 Finally, I have learned how important it is that feminists engaged in the very intersubjective nature of qualitative research recognize the complexity of the concept of "sisterhood." While we may feel some connections with fellowfeminist respondents, particularly as the relationship grows and evolves, it is critical that we not, as Mies (1991) advises, bury the differences of our social relations under an idealistic facade. After two years of fieldwork and ample time for reflection, I wholeheartedly support Reinharz's (1992) assertions that a realistic attitude toward research

relationships is necessary and that we should regard "sisterhood" as a "fortunate outcome of some projects rather than a precondition of all research relationships" (1992, 267). We must recall that feminist relations are mediated by power as much as any other relationships and that power (and the power to exploit) is not naturally and uniformly located in the researcher, as methodological literature would have us believe. Thus, while feminists may wish to retain the notion of "sisterhood" as a political strategy that keeps active the idea

Page 56 that misogyny and its effects are yet to be eliminated, it must neither be idealized as nor equated with a state of cohesiveness or universal sameness of women that elides profound personal and ideological differences as well as differences in how power functions in specific relationships. Feminist methodology can help researchers and respondents to generate a unique context in which not only are women's lives studies, but through the research process they may unlearn silences, prejudices, and fears of conflict. As I hope my story demonstrates, this possibility is enhanced when women's differences are accepted as the foundation of feminist research, rather than a disturbing problem of it; when researchers and respondents are placed on the same critical plane; when power is understood to exist on multiple levels within the relationship; and when reciprocal, negotiated, honest, and realistic intersubjective relationships are fostered. While we may never eliminate the sense of being "locked in uneasy sisterhood" when profound differences threaten to rupture the feminist research relationship, these powerful practices of feminist methodology may result in our using the discomfort as a catalyst and source of energy for feminist transformational praxis.

"So I Guess That's It" In the fall of 1992 Sandy and I rarely saw each other, as I was intent upon completing the dissertation and was no longer conducting interviews. In the spring of 1993, when I had completed drafts of the chapters derived from our work together, I called Sandy and asked her if she would read them and offer her final critiques of them. A week later, after she had read them, we met at her new house, and I had the opportunity to meet Robert, her new husband. During this meeting, we again talked about the process that we had gone through together, and she talked about how being a respondent had affected her life. For Sandy, the experience of being a respondent was extremely positive. She said that the interviews and especially reading the interpretations "gave me a perspective in retrospect…. I think that these discussions that we had clarified my abilities, experience, and knowledge. They made me a lot more aware of what a role mode I am for women." She also explained to me that her recent marriage with Robert had "softened" her and that the research process, in combination with her marriage to Robert, "has helped me to look at people as people [as I began to] look more at myself as a person and

Page 57 that has been a great freedom. And thank you." In thanking me, she expressed her gratitude for having been provided with both a context in which and a written text through which she could look at herself "as a person." She commented that doing so "clarifies where you've been, where you are in the present, and helps to form a foundation for where you are going to go in the future." Despite the fact that I would describe Sandy as an ideal respondent in the sense that she was a strong and interesting storyteller and was always almost burning to talk about something when we met for interviews, she said that it was often difficult and even painful for her to do this.

Even though I might not have wanted to go [to the interview] sometimes, you go; it's kind of like how you feel when you are going to a therapist. What you are talking about is your life and that very conversation and sharing puts it right out there for not just myself to take a look at, but for you to take a look at too. The process was so painful—when you hear yourself talk and put things into words. And I've never been through such a tumultuous two years in my life … and the fact is that you were a witness to that or a part of it. Part of the pain she felt as a respondent, Sandy explained, was being vulnerable and knowing that she somehow had to be as truthful as possible about herself.

I have felt vulnerable to varying degrees, but when you open yourself up, especially when it's at the very core of who you are, vulnerability is always an issue. And so truths always have to be there at the forefront of your mind so that you are not misrepresenting, at least I feel, not unwittingly saying something, softening something, or harshening something or whatever because you are trying to present a better picture to the researcher than might be really the case. Sandy explained that her trust in me helped her to be open despite her vulnerability and consciousness about trying to narrate an authentic self.

So in your role as a researcher you had a view [of me] that you would never have gotten if there hadn't been that confidential relationship. I just don't let that many people Page 58 that close…. And [the vulnerability and self-presentation] have been made easier because you have been a non-judgmental person and accepting. Also, you are inclined to be true to the tale, and try to really portray me. As a good researcher, you listen, record it, go back and do a member check, all of that. I really feel like that whole recursive process, you seemed to have handled that beautifully. Rather, pleased, of course, with Sandy's representation of me as a good researcher, but also being mindful of Judith Stacey's (1988) warnings about how feminist researchers can unwittingly exploit their respondents, I asked her the allimportant, profound, and final question of our research together. "So, you don't feel exploited?" She responded, laughing, "No, not at all. (pause). So I guess that's it!" I did not ride off into the sunset in a blaze of glory after this final interview; rather, I went home to the final gruelling months of creating a polished text for he completion my degree. I would be lying if I said that her overall positive feelings about me and our work together (despite her painful moments and vulnerability when narrating her life story; despite her having read difficult interpretive passages about herself; indeed, despite her having read about my feelings of alienation from her and accusations of antisemitism), didn't give me an almost giddy sense of relief and exhilaration. Yet I did not feel like a great success as a feminist researcher. Instead, I walked out her door burdened and challenged by the knowledge that although I was not a failure, I would have liked to have done things differently. As we each try in our own idiosyncratic ways and within the specificities of our complex intersubjective research relationships, perhaps all we can ask of ourselves is to find understanding for who we are, what we have done, and what we may yet do.

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PART TWO NARRATIVE INTERPRETATION Page 61

4 Nonunitary Subjectivity and Self-Representation I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive. The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story. —Le Guin 1985, 317

Introduction In the opening paragraphs of Ursula Le Guin's (1985) science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness , the narrator asserts that the distinction between factual reporting and storytelling can be erased because "Truth is a matter of the imagination." Like fiction, the narrator suggests, facts are constructed when we interpret the world; they are not discovered in a preexisting reality separate from the observer. The narrator also tells us that the distinction between factual reporting and storytelling is found in the style of storytelling and that stories are sensitive to the way in which the storyteller crafts them. Such realizations lead the narrator to acknowledge that no story is constructed by one person alone, and that a story, as a social construction, can appear to change as if

Page 62 transformed into a different story when the narrator's voice alters. Such altering may occur as the narrator's subjectivity shifts, fragments, and becomes refigured. Like the stories Le Guin's narrator promises to tell, the narratives considered in this chapter—those told by Olivia about her life—will also shift and change as Olivia reflects on her experiences. In this chapter, I explore nonunitary subjectivity by examining diverse modes of self-representation in the genre of personal narratives. Using Sartre's ([1960] 1963) progressive-regressive method for examining biographical stories and feminist literary criticism—specifically feminist narratology—to explicate the personal narratives, I examine ways in which Olivia uses her personal narratives to create and recreate representations of herself.

The Personal Narrative Genre and Self-Representation Before I turn to the descriptions of Sartre's ([1960] 1963) progressive-regressive method and feminist narratology, I want to foreground some tensions inherent in the examination of women's autobiographical narratives. Teresa de Lauretis (1987) warns that women must be suspicious both of narrative forms and our "irresistible attraction" to the narrative genre as a means of personal expression. The reason for suspicion, she explains, is that when women create narratives, they often unconsciously reproduce patriarchal ideologies because these ideologies work like "master scripts" on the individual subject regardless of sex. She asks if women's attraction to and use of so androcentric a genre is "simply, again, a case of masochism, of victimism, a gender-specific pathological condition, or is there something else, or something more, at stake?" (1987, 108). Her fear is that women's use of the narrative genre may reproduce structures of domination rather than liberate women from cultural silence. Sidonie Smith (1987) is also suspicious of narrative genres, particularly autobiographical ones. Taking up an argument similar to that of de Lauretis, she explains that women's relationships to autobiographical narratives have always been troublesome because the genre is constructed according to ideologies of male selfhood that posit women as the "incomplete man" or the essentialized other. Smith's misgiving about autobiographical narratives is based in part on the belief that "since traditional autobiography has functioned as one of those forms and languages that sustain sexual

Page 63 difference, the woman who writes autobiography is doubly estranged when she enters the autobiographical contract'' (1987, 49). While on the one hand, writing autobiographically signals a critical and positive noncompliance with cultural silence, on the other hand, a woman's "double estrangement" in her use of the genre often means that she responds to "cultural expectations about appropriate female speech and behavior" by reproducing fictions, myths, and stereotypes of female selfhood (54). That is, she may be compelled by the genre to represent herself as "an ideal woman who embodies the characteristics and enacts the roles assigned to her in the fictions of patriarchal culture" (54). Therefore, when personal expression takes the form of autobiographical or personal narratives, it may not yield the positive results of giving voice to women's experiences that the genre promises. Smith (1987) also argues that the reason women find themselves reproducing patriarchal fictions is that women are unrepresentable in language, or "the discourse of man" as Cixous ([1975] 1976) calls it. As Smith points out, acknowledging this unrepresentability has recently led women to experiment with "alternative languages of self and storytelling" (59). Part of this autobiographical experiment is for women to conscientiously describe experiences they have had that would not be considered interesting or appropriate autobiographical material by traditional male standards; this includes the recognition that women can construct a "woman-centered and woman-defined discourse" (58). While feminist constructionists may chide these attempts for being essentialist because they posit that there is a differentiated woman's voice, these experiments with a women-centered discourse nonetheless suggest that such discourses are politically and strategically necessary at this point in time so that women's experiences and feelings are represented in their narratives. Like Smith, I believe that these new forms of autobiographical writing have the potential to untie women's "relationship to the conventions of the autobiographical contract from the idea of an atomized, individualistic, central self" (1987, 59). And in doing so, they may allow for the positive representation of women's subjectivity as nonunitary, fragmented, conflicted, fluid, and in flux.

"The Profundity of the Lived": Sartre's Progressive-Regressive Method

Finally, the questions an oppressed group wants answered are rarely requests for so-called pure truth. Instead, they are queries Page 64 about how to change its conditions; how its world is shaped by forces beyond it; how to win over, defeat, or neutralize those forces arrayed against its emancipation, growth, or development. —Harding 1987, 8 One of the purposes of examining subjectivity in women's personal narratives is to redefine what it means for women to write, tell, discuss, and analyze their life experiences against the backdrop of the prevailing discourses that seek to silence them. To change the master script is to change reality; to change reality is to participate in making a history different from the one the status quo would produce. The belief that this sort of change is possible is grounded in the assumption that individuals have the capacity to overcome the limitations imposed upon them by social, economic, racial, and historical factors. For women, this means also overcoming limitations placed on them due to their socialization within the patriarchal gender system. As Sartre explains, "man [sic ] is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation, and by what he succeeds in making of what he has been made" ([1960] 1963, 91). To go beyond given situations, individuals reject and act against the limitations or prohibitions that are hegemonically and objectively constructed, but felt subjectively. I use Jean-Paul Sartre's ([1960] 1963) "progressive-regressive method," which he describes in Search for a Method , to both explore the power of subjectivity and to enhance my understanding of how Olivia has surpassed limitations or the "givens" in her life, allowing her to reject prohibitions against her as a woman. Sartre's method is used to understand how individuals go beyond their given situations even when life is determined "in relation to the … factors which condition it and in relation to a certain object, still to come, which it is trying to bring into being" ([1960] 1963, 91). In this regard, Sartre always sees the present as the future in the making. Sartre's modified Marxist-existentialist philosophy, influenced by psychoanalytic theory, affirms that material circumstances condition people. Sartre departs from strict Marxism in his conviction that it is individual subjectivity and not collective movements that moves history toward new configurations. Sartre's biographical project is political: he wants to know how individuals simultaneously participate in maintaining existing social structures because of their conditioning, and he wants to question and change these conditions according to their subjective needs. The method that Sartre recommends for this biographical project, the progressive-regressive method, is a heuristic that Sartre claims

Page 65 can be used to chart the history of events in an individual's life. Kathleen Barry (1990), Norman Denzin (1989), Michael Jackson (1989), and William Pinar (1974) suggest that Sartre's method is particularly useful for exploration of personal narratives and ethnographic research. Barry (1990) further supports the use of Sartre's method in feminist research, as does Maxine Greene who reminds us that Sartre's "notion that freedom can be achieved only in a resistant world was played out in many female lives" (1988, 67). The progressive-regressive method is an analytic process for moving forward and backward through a personal narrative (biography, in Sartre's and Barry's terminology) to chart significant events that recur in a person's life in different forms over time. An individual life, Sartre explains, "develops in spirals; it passes again and again by the same points but at different levels of integration and complexity" ([1960] 1963, 106). Sartre proposed that by closely examining these "same points" of intersection in the spiral, it will be possible to locate examples of how the individual

surpasses her or his conditioning, thereby manifesting what he calls "positive praxis." The progressive-regressive method is the process of examining these "same points" by considering and reconsidering life experiences in light of the analysis of previous experiences. In the progressive or forward movement, the interpretation emphasizes the individual's experiences as a journey of becoming . The regressive or backward movement is reflective; it "takes one back on a journey of exploration among the objects, people, places, and events which make up the grounds of one's being" (Jackson 1989, 162).1 The backward and forward movement encourages the researcher to reconsider her original interpretations and the respondent to reflect upon her own life history. Thus, as Barry explains, "original interpretations will be deepened or altered (corrected) by moving backward through them with the knowledge of later events and the subject's reflections upon the earlier ones" (1990, 87). The analysis then concentrates on how past givens are surpassed in present or subsequent events, and how the individual came to be who she is as an accumulation of past events and choices among possibilities. Sartre's method is interesting to me because its focus on how an individual surpasses the "givens" of her life is well suited to exploring nonunitary subjectivity, especially how nonunitary subjectivity is formed and reformed through women's resistance to and subversion of the limitations imposed on them as women . Further, as Jackson (1989) demonstrates in his use of the progressive-regressive method, this method of interpretation encourages the researcher to

Page 66 examine how his or her own biography creates particular interpretations of another's experiences, thus encouraging the kind of intersubjective examination of a life that is in keeping with the feminist goals of this book.

Feminist Narratology I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statute of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. —Hurston 1942, 34 As Teresa de Lauretis (1987) and Sidonie Smith (1987) suggest, women need to be suspicious when they participate in creating their stories in a narrative form that is derived from masculinist models and norms. The danger in doing so is that women may recreate "master scripts" unconsciously (de Lauretis 1987) or become positioned inequitably if they choose female representations of selfhood (Smith 1987). However, as de Lauretis makes clear, women are compelled to tell their lives in narrative form and actively seek alternative ways to represent themselves. Therefore, the first task for contemporary feminist narratologists is to expose both the workings of the master script in women's narratives and women's subversions of it so that we can better learn how nonunitary subjectivity can be represented. The second task is to validate the non-masculinist ways women voice their experiences and write about them. The outcome of such accomplishments would be a narrative genre that could be called feminist. Rachel DuPlessis (1985) asserts that one way to subvert and rewrite master narratives so that women can be represented is to change the conventional patterns of narrative closure. DuPlessis calls this "writing beyond the ending" (1985, 4). A narrative that writes beyond the ending rejects the "happily ever after" endings of fairy tales, Victorian novels, and Harlequin Romances. It refuses to exclude what the author feels, desires, or experiences (e.g., rebellion, selfishness, worldly action, disinterest in marriage and family, or identification with other women) that are in conflict with the master script (e.g., marriage, family, selflessness, heterosexuality, or 'femininity"). Because of the way women are socialized, these elements of the master script are "culturally mandated, internally policed and hegemonically poised" (de Lauretis 1987, 5); they are therefore difficult to reject.

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When conventional closures are reproduced in women's narratives, the conflicts women face living under patriarchy become masked in their texts. Masking conflicted experiences and feelings in women's narratives leads to narrative closures that maintain patriarchal control because they offer readers an alternative to neither unitary subjectivity nor the status quo of women's lives. In order to subvert their seduction toward patriarchal closures, DuPlessis (1985) proposes that women make the conflicts that emerge from their marginalized status and their rebellions against marginalization central to their stories. They can deliberately use the endings of their narratives to assert feminist values and ideologies. The outcome of the narrative thus becomes, according to DuPlessis, a site where "subtexts" and repressed discourses can throw up one last flare of meaning" (3). One of my favorite examples of this tension between the master script and women's reality is Jo's situation in Louisa May Alcott's 1871 book, Little Women (rpt. 1963). Jo has a driving need for adventure and to succeed as a writer, but she is thwarted at every turn. Most painful is the experience of her rich Aunt March refusing to take her to Europe because of her "blunt manners and too independent spirit" (1963, 316). She instead takes the younger, more ladylike and docile Amy. Jo's conflict is presumably resolved in the novel with the appearance of the scholarly and kind Mr. Bhaer who, although he enjoys her writing, in effect deprives her of it through marriage and childrearing. However, this sense of deprivation is suppressed under the master script which asserts Jo's uncontested "happiness" at marriage, motherhood, and domesticity. Like the many twentieth-century women novelists cited by DuPlessis who made a project of examining "how social practices surrounding gender have entered narrative" (1985, 4), and who offered readers alternative narrative closures or non-closures, scholars studying women's personal narratives need to make a project of helping their respondents verbalize and examine the contradictions of their lives so that they too may "write beyond the ending." Women who narrate their life stories must be encouraged and given space to tell and retell their stories, attempting each time to articulate the complexities, confusions, and indeterminancies of lived reality, thus thwarting the inclination to end with "happily ever after." DuPlessis suggests that because twentieth-century writers, unlike their Victorian foremothers, can reject reproducing the master script in their endings, they have the obligation to make the subtexts of conflict and rebellion central. DuPlessis's argument is powerful:

Page 68 if the endings of women's stories are ideologically grounded in masculine perceptions of endings, and if feminists do not attempt to subvert the master scripts by bringing to the surface the complexities of women's feelings and experiences (their nonunitary subjectivities), then they participate in perpetuating patriarchal norms. Along similar lines, Carolyn Heilbrun (1988), specifically addressing the gender roles that master scripts make available to women, suggests that in writing or telling their lives, women often describe their feelings, experiences, hopes, and identities to live up to conventional patriarchal notions of being female. They write themselves as "ideal mothers" or "femme fatales ," for example. Barbara Christian (1985a, b) notes that African-American women writers, influenced both by racism and sexism, may further limit the roles of women to "down-trodden victims" or "ideal matrons,'' thus omitting ordinary women's successes and failures from the texts and making marginal their internal life of self-exploration. Both African-American and white women authors also frequently privilege partnership in a heterosexual marriage above writing about women friends, or they write about the joys of domestic life rather than their desire for more education, a more public life, or for community with other women. Conventional female autobiography further limits the emotional roles women are authorized to describe and "tends to find beauty even in pain and to transform rage into spiritual acceptance" (Heilbrun 1988, 12). Masking of anger, pain, or other emotions functions to denarrativize women: it takes away their ability to actively narrate their stories. Further, when women do break convention and write of their real lives and feelings, they are accused of being unwomanly or characterized as manly women (Heilbrun 1988). Further, as Heilbrun argues, when

women are deprived of narrative conventions that allow them complex identity and self-representation, they are deprived of power. This issue of being fully narrativized is also about subjectivity, for when women are deprived of the potential for complex self-representation as a means through which to gain self-knowledge, their complex subjectivities are masked and the power and energy they may derive from such self-knowledge is not allowed to be a source of nourishment and strength. Heilbrun believes that women

in trying honestly to deal in written form with lived past lives, have had to confront power and control. Because this has been declared unwomanly, and because many women Page 69 would prefer (or think they would prefer) a world without evident power or control, women have been deprived of the narratives, or the texts, plots, or examples, by which they might assume power over—take control of—their own lives. (1988, 17) Thus, one important goal of feminist narratology is to make available to women structures for writing about the multiple roles they experience. For oral historians, it is particularly critical to interpret women's narratives in ways that help the narrators to examine their roles, choices, and pains so that they may assume power. Power in this context means "the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter" (Heilbrun 1988, 18). It is the right to have a narrative of one's own. Drawing from theories of cinematography as well as literary theory, Teresa de Lauretis (1987) suggests another approach to creating women's narratives that addresses the problems of narrative point of view, or narrativity. Narrativity is the "effective functioning of narrative on and with the reader/spectator to produce a subject of reading or a subject of vision" (de Lauretis 1987, 108). De Lauretis explains that because conventional narrative strategies are patriarchal, women have learned to read and experience narrative texts through masculine eyes. As a result of this (and, of course, other social factors) women learn only to see themselves through masculine eyes, what is commonly referred to as "the male gaze." It is only when women are given the option, through the lens of feminism, to read as women or as "resisting readers" that the masculine nature of the texts is revealed (Fetterly 1978). When texts are created for women, by women, with women as the subjects of the narrativity, women are made free to read as women and to see themselves through a (potentially) more empowering women's gaze. Therefore, de Lauretis argues, it is the responsibility of feminists to create texts using alternative narrative strategies "to shift the terms of representation, [and] to produce the conditions of representability of another—and gendered—social subject" (1987, 109). DuPlessis's strategy for writing beyond the ending, Heilbrun's strategy for expressing women's complex subjectivity, and de Lauretis's recommendation that women write for the female gaze may all be seen as methods for creating narrative texts that allow for women's gendered perspectives and subjectivities to be represented. A project that implements these strategies would be considered feminist

Page 70 because, as de Lauretis argues, it is only feminism (not femaleness) that is in a position to offer "a rewriting of our culture's 'master narratives'" (1987, 113). Thus, if feminists have an attraction to narrative, it is not the attraction to traditional narrative, but the attraction to the feminist project of rewriting the master script. It is the attraction of assuming the authority of "writing beyond the ending," of telling personal stories that no longer misrepresent and limit women's experiences and identities, and of writing for the female gaze. It is the attraction of creating an explicitly feminist narrative.

Having denounced master narratives and androcentric genres of biography, it might seem odd that I am linking Sartre's biographical method with feminist narratology. It might be said that Sartre's biographical method is itself a master script and that it teaches reproduction of the androcentric biographical genre (as Sartre's own biography of Flaubert's life seems to suggest). I would like to leave this problem unresolved until the end of this chapter and, instead make explicit what the progressive-regressive method and feminist narratology have in common and why the combination will prove mutually enhancing. Heilbrun's (1988) and DuPlessis's (1985) depictions of women's role limitations and masking of their lives describe the manifestations in literature and autobiography of culturally mandated prohibitions against women. While Sartre does not concern himself with sexism as a prohibition in Search for a Method , his belief that individuals can surpass prohibitions resonates with the feminist tenet that women have the ability to resist and subvert prohibitions against them as women. The progressive-regressive method benefits from the feminist perspective because it keeps the issue of how hegemonic structures act on individuals at the forefront. The progressive-regressive method also benefits from feminist narratology because the latter adds a political dimension that the former otherwise lacks. Feminist narratology benefits from the progressive-regressive method because locating points on the spiral makes systematic the difficult task of selecting critical stories from the narratives for interpretation. It also benefits from the progressive-regressive method because it encourages the interpreters or biographers to check, refine, and examine their own interpretations. This is especially helpful for researchers who recognize the instability of their own authority as interpreters. Feminist methodology is also strengthened when Sartre's method is used to analyze narratives of a respondent who participates in the interpretation. Sartre's method facilitates an intersubjective

Page 71 relationship with the respondent that breaks down the knower/known distinction by asserting that the respondent has agency and therefore can offer interpretations of her own self, her intentions, and further details of her life as needed in conversation with the researcher. The necessity for intersubjectivity is even more critical when the respondent's subjectivity is the focus of inquiry, for it is then, as Barry explains, that the researcher "becomes interactively involved with the subject through interpretation of meanings…. [T]his relationship of biographer and subject takes on feminist meaning as a woman-centered approach when the stance of the researcher is critical" (1990, 77–78). In the following analyses of subjectivity in Olivia's narratives, Olivia and I did attempt to work together in the "womancentered" approach described by Barry (1990). The analyses therefore include both Olivia's and my interpretations as well as her critiques of my interpretations. Further, this chapter centers on—indeed, was brought into being through—the rewriting of one of the stories of her life that Olivia had previously narrated to me. As such, the chapter is integrally connected to and is a product of Olivia's and my relationship. However, because I selected the interpretive methods for the chapter, my voice and desires as an interpreter ultimately do get privileged.

"Owning One's Own Life": Self-Representation and Nonunitary Subjectivity in Olivia's Narratives I take as the starting point for the exploration of Olivia's experiences two versions of a story: the first, narrated in October 1991, and the second, written in June 1992. Both versions refer to events that occurred in 1988, when Olivia was in her early thirties. She had recently completed a Ph.D. in Organizational Management, was single after divorcing her first husband, and was in a high-level management position at a Fortune 500 company in Chicago. Here is the first version of Olivia's story:

Not too much earlier I had just gotten rid of one of the biggest sexual perverts who was involved in all kinds of sexual harassment at the organization. He was a senior executive. And I went after him. And I got him fired. And it was very empowering. Just having experiences like that where I was a force to be reckoned with in the city of Page 72 Chicago and people knew me. It felt so good to be able to change the image of women in management, you know? To open doors for other women. I hired three other women in management, and it felt good to be there to present a different point of view than what those men would have heard had I not been there. And feeling empowered myself because of that. Reading this story in the transcripts of her narratives a few months after she narrated it to me, Olivia asked questions similar to those posed by DuPlessis and Heilbrun about women's stories. Olivia wondered why, in the above story especially, she had so many "omissions" and places where she felt that she had attempted to represent herself as what she called "a feminist icon." Although she felt that the story was accurate, she felt uncomfortable that it was not the story that she wanted to be told. This realization was disturbing for her:

I had recalled the good part of several stories and failed to mention the less satisfying sides of these stories. In part this made me feel dishonest. I thought hard about that. I did not remember editing these stories in the telling, and I wondered why these stories emerged and not the less satisfying ones. A few months after Olivia shared this impression of her transcripts with me, we agreed that it would be helpful for her to retell the story, this time filling in the omissions. Olivia decided that she would prefer to write rather than narrate the story. The process of writing, filling in the omissions, and allowing the "less satisfying" events to surface was painful for Olivia; it brought back memories that she had suppressed when she narrated the story. The following is her written version of the story.2

My original story does not reflect how very wearing and disappointing the entire process had been…. This man on several occasions, put poor, single women who worked for him in the position of having to refuse his sexual advances in his office…. If they did not fight his advances, they remained at the main facility working for him; however, if they failed to respond to his advances they were soon transferred to a … remote facility, and not granted overtime or promotions critical to many of these women who were single parents. Page 73 For four days I listened to the stories these women had to tell. I comforted them through the tears and pain that these memories evoked. Why had this happened to them, they asked me? In our conversations they fought both paralyzing fears of losing their jobs, and personal humiliation and embarrassment for making the choices they made to keep them. Their stories drew me in…. What could they do? They felt powerless. Through pained expression, one woman asked me why we, management, had waited so long to do something. Didn't we know what was happening? … I felt ashamed and angered. I felt ashamed because I hadn't acted on my earlier discomfort with this man's treatment of women, and I felt angered because I allowed male colleagues to dissuade me from my concerns about his behavior. "That's just

Joe" they would say, "he's harmless." … But I knew better. I didn't know just how serious this situation had become, but I did know that his behaviors were unacceptable. It took an anonymous letter from a despondent black woman detailing the racism, sexism, and sexual harassment that she had experienced … to wake me and others up to the seriousness of the situation. At the conclusion of the investigation, I wrote the report and in a meeting with the executive management team, I insisted that the man be dismissed…. I was assured by the CEO and the VP that this would happen. I learned later, however, that the VP [who was supposed to fire him] … asked Smith to turn in his resignation and gave him a consulting contract with an affiliate company. I was stunned. When I confronted the VP … he dismissed the entire investigation and stated matter of factly, "these are the things that happen when men and women work together." I was furious…. To this day I am not comfortable knowing that Joe Smith moved on to another company … but there are also times when my thoughts are warmed by memories of those women thanking me for "getting rid of Joe Smith." They knew only that Joe Smith was gone. And that was good enough for them. I want to begin my analysis of these two versions of the story by first looking at the narrative convention of the first version. In it, Olivia reproduces the classical story of the hero's journey (Campbell 1949), a master narrative of male success. She describes the hero

Page 74 (herself) who leaves the world (of female prescriptive roles) for the underworld (male-dominated corporate America), where she encounters evil (the sexual harassment of women) and an evil doer (the "sexual pervert"). She then slays the powerful evil doer (gets the senior executive fired) and emerges victorious (she is a force to be reckoned with in Chicago), bringing with her gifts to society (managerial jobs for women). As de Lauretis (1987) says, women must be suspicious of the master narrative, for as this story demonstrates, it does get reproduced unconsciously! How are master narratives reproduced in Olivia's first version? If, as Cixous ([1975] 1976) and S. Smith (1987) argue, women are unrepresentable in patriarchal discourse, can we interpret Olivia's narrative as a subversion of the master narrative because of the inclusion of a feminist heroine, a figure not found in patriarchal discourse? Does her selfrepresentation as a feminist heroine reject the fictions of femaleness found in conventional narratives? Does this story thus "write beyond the ending" or narrativize Olivia? I would argue that the narrative, although representing a "feminist heroine," leaves the master narrative intact. Sidonie Smith's (1987) explanation of women's uneasy relationship with autobiographical writing helps to illuminate why the master narrative persists in women's stories. Smith explains the paradox:

When a woman chooses to leave behind cultural silence and to pursue autobiography, she chooses to enter the public arena. But she can speak with authority only insofar as she tells a story that her audience will read. Responding to the generic expectations of significance in life stories, she looks towards a narrative that will resonate with privileged cultural fictions of male selfhood. (Smith 1987, 52) According to Smith, it is the genre itself that constrains the representability of women. As long as Olivia casts herself as a hero(ine), she inscribes herself with male selfhood. Although Olivia rebels against the oppression of sexism—a rebellion that DuPlessis (1985) would argue is critical for "writing beyond the ending"—Olivia's story does not "write beyond the ending" by making her internal conflicts central. Nor does Olivia represent a full range of emotions and identities, which Heilbrun (1988) proposes is necessary for women to be narrativized. What we have instead is a one-

dimensional representation: Olivia is an exceptional, brave, and empowered feminist heroine. Her subjectivity, therefore, can only be interpreted as unitary and unconflicted like the masculinist ideal,

Page 75 as evidenced in self-representational phrases such as "I was a force," "it was empowering," and "it felt good to be there." With this understanding of the narrative convention in mind, it would seem that Olivia tells this first version because she is bound by the conventions of the narrative autobiographical contract, which almost forces reproduction of the master narrative. But people are also constrained, as Sartre ([1960] 1963) explains, by their own biographies and their conditioning, which begins in childhood. By looking at a person's biographical past in relation to later events, the ways that Olivia surpasses her conditioning are made evident. Therefore, the backward/forward reading of experiences is helpful to make sense of how she came to tell the first version of the story as she did. I will briefly examine four excerpts of Olivia's narratives to look for biographical influences that may help us to understand why she told the first version of this story, and to explain her desire and capacity to rethink the story, as she does in the second version.3 Olivia's earliest memory is of an event that occurred when she was just two years old, in 1956.

I was always, always, always a very physical child. When I was two years old I walked across the street. My dad was supposed to be watching me. He and some friends were building the garage, and my mom was at work. They were building a new home across the street and there were some children in the neighborhood over there who (they had the basement in, of the house) and there were children who were walking along the side of the cement basement, you know? And so I thought that—I must have thought—that looked a lot of fun and so I walked over there and immediately got up on this cement wall. And you know, I'd like to believe that I made a few rounds. And I fell into the basement. In this story, Olivia recalls herself as a physically strong, determined child, one who feels autonomous enough to walk away from her father and adventurous enough to do what older children were doing, especially since it looked like fun. Olivia believes that her closure to this story, "And you know, I'd like to believe that I made a few rounds," means that she enjoys remembering herself as a physically "skilled, agile child." This representation of herself as an independent child with a will toward autonomy may be thought of as the grounding for other rebellions or acts of determination. The

Page 76 enjoyment she takes in recalling physical agility is consistent not only with her current sense of self, but also with her practice of staying physically active and fit. In other words, to use Sartre's metaphor of the spiral, this memory of herself marks the first occurrence on the spiral of characteristics that she will, throughout her life, explore and test. The second early memory Olivia shared occurred in around 1966, when she was eleven or twelve years old:

I used to get so resentful because my brother always got to work outside and I loved being outside in the summer, mowing the lawn, working in the garden. But that was always my brother's job and doing the dishes and vacuuming and dusting and changing the beds—those were my jobs. And so I remember it was a summer night, a beautiful summer night, and I must have been about twelve, eleven or twelve, and we were getting up after dinner and I said something like, "Well David has to help with the dishes." And my dad said, "No he doesn't. He works outside all the time, he's doing his work. He

doesn't have to help with the dishes." And I said, "Well, that's not fair! I'd like to do that." And dad said, "You just get over there and do the dishes," or something to that effect. And so my brother went outside and we had a turnaround that came in front of our house and we used to ride our bikes around that turnaround. He was riding around—I was drying dishes at the door—and every time he'd go by he'd stick his tongue out at me: "See! See!" I remember I was drying this knife and when he went past I just sliced open the screen. And my reaction was, "Oh, I don't believe I did that!" Olivia's description of being responsible for indoor household chores while her brother was responsible for outdoor chores is a familiar one to many women. Recognizing the unfairness of the situation, Olivia responds in two ways. First, she attempts to right the injustice by insisting that her brother also share in the housework; when her father explains why he doesn't have to, she asserts that she would like to do the same chores he does, making the arrangement completely equitable. However, her reasoned argument falls on deaf ears, and her father asserts his authority, telling her to dry the dishes as she is told.

Page 77 Olivia's father was authoritarian and strong-willed; he was also vulnerable to heart attacks because of a chronic critical heart condition.4 Therefore, he was protected from his own temper and negative emotions by Olivia's mother who taught her two younger children not to upset their father. Olivia explained that she rarely challenged her father, especially because she wanted to avoid the fury that her older sister Kim raised by her rebellions against him. Olivia was always careful to do either what was expected of her or to hide it when she didn't. She not only had the responsibility not to anger him because of his heart condition, but also wanted to avoid the sound of his voice in anger:

It was his voice, this booming, screaming and I never could stand that. To this day, I don't like yelling. So I tried never to do anything wrong. That's what I learned. Or if you do, you hide it—that's something I learned from my mother. Therefore, when she confronted her father about the unfairness of the chores and he responded with the command to "do the dishes," Olivia may have felt the futility of further vocalized disagreement with him. With her voice silenced, Olivia's second response came from her body; her anger was visceral. Knife in hand, she lashed out at her brother and by extension, her father. She was outraged by the limitation placed on her by her father and by the taunting of her brother. Her anger and actions can be characterized as attempts to overcome the limitations placed on her both as an individual and as a female. As Sartre ([1960] 1963) explains, prohibitions are felt individually and subjectively. However, they become "objective" or part of changing the status quo when the individual participates in a "positive praxis" to overcome the prohibitions. Sartre's example and analysis of such praxis is worth considering because it demonstrates how an oppressed individual's actions against prohibitions contribute to moving history to new patterns.

A member of the ground crew at an air base on the outskirts of London took a plane and, with no experience as a pilot, flew it across the Channel. He is colored [sic ]; he is prevented from becoming a member of the flying personnel. This prohibition becomes for him a subjective impoverishment, but he immediately goes beyond the subjective to the objective. This denied future reflects to him the fate of his Page 78

''race" and the racism of the English. The general revolt on the part of colored men against colonialists is expressed in him by his particular refusal of this prohibition. He affirms that a future possible for whites is possible for everyone . This political position, of which he doubtless has no clear awareness, he lives as a personal obsession. (original emphasis, [1960] 1963, 95–96.) If we consider Sartre's emphasis on the internalized subjective that becomes objective, it is possible to go beyond the tempting but limited reading of Olivia's screen slashing as an act of symbolic castration, to a more enabling feminist reading, one that recognizes that collective movements toward a different and better future are expressed in individual acts of rebellion. It also offers a way of reading her screen slashing as not only a physical demonstration of her anger but also a manifestation of her will to be independent of such prohibitions. This becomes apparent if we retell Olivia's story using Sartre's description of the Afro-French man:

An adolescent daughter in a working class family in a small midwestern town took a knife and, with no experience as a feminist activist, slashed a screen in anger at the male members of her family. She is female; she is prevented from becoming a member of the male order or community. This prohibition becomes for her a subjective impoverishment, but she immediately goes beyond the subjective to the objective. This denied future reflects to her the fate ascribed to her by "gender" and the sexism of the society. The general revolt on the part of women against males is expressed in her by her particular refusal of this prohibition. She affirms that a future possible for men is possible for everyone . This political position, of which she doubtless has no clear awareness, she lives as a personal obsession. Recasting Olivia's childhood story this way demonstrates that individual actions do provide insight into the larger contexts of material realities that govern people's lives. Olivia's actions also illustrate that an individual has the ability to resist and rebel against prohibiting material conditions. The finesse with which one enacts rebellions, of course, increases with experience. The screen slashing story may be seen as the grounds for Olivia's first version of the sexual harassment story. Increasingly aware of the limitations placed on women by patriarchal society, especially

Page 79 limitations pertaining to work, Olivia had a great deal invested in representing herself as a feminist in management. As she explained, she may have told this version initially because the memory of her delay to intervene was "intolerable" for her to think about. Considering that Olivia told this story very early in our work together, it is more than understandable that she would not have wanted to share what was intolerable with me. Olivia also suggests that this was the "easy" and ''less messy" story to tell because she left out all the conflicts and did not branch out into the many parts of the story. Further, this version, in which Olivia represents herself as an empowered feminist, may reveal Olivia's continuing desire to assert her own voice in order to dispel the voice of her father (authority) in her life. Olivia interpreted her story of the screen slashing as symbolic of the gender messages that become overt during female adolescence. She recalls this as a time in which she felt more and more that parts of her were being "pruned away" (Hancock 1989); she was being made into someone different from who she felt herself to be. Thus, she interprets her anger not only as anger against her brother and father, but anger against societal prescriptions she was receiving:

It was clearly the time, at ten, eleven, twelve, where the gender messages get so much more overt and stronger. I think Emily Hancock talks about pruning. Feeling like all of who you have been for the first ten years of your life is getting pruned away. You feel yourself getting cut away and you are being made into something different. And I think the anger is the fighting of that pruning.

Olivia's interpretation of the story as evidence of how she was being pruned away is helpful for thinking about the formation of female subjectivity. Such cutting away of her sense of self speaks of one of the many ways that women's subjectivity may be split apart, sometimes leaving women confused about their self-perceptions and their identities and desiring to regain what has been pruned. In the third story that I offer as grounding for Olivia's desire to tell the first story as a feminist heroine tale, Olivia recalls a time in her life of great independence after her divorce from Scott. Olivia married Scott, whom she had known since high school, in 1975, when Olivia was twenty-one years old. During their married life, Olivia became increasingly uncomfortable with the disparity between her career ambitions and desire for more education and

Page 80 Scott's resistance to her acting upon those ambitions. She recalls her marriage as a time when she felt that her identity and independence were being contested by both social and parental expectations, which prescribed that as a married woman, she should do what made her husband happy and her marriage secure. This made her feel constrained. Olivia describes the tensions preceding their divorce:

I had just been appointed as the director of curriculum for the school system. It was the kind of position where I had to go to all the school board meetings and I would be quoted in the paper: it gave me very high visibility. Scott was a personal banker in the community, and was not happy with that job at all and was feeling trapped into work he really didn't want to do. But he wasn't motivated to find any other kind of work or do anything else. I remember one time we were in a store and a man I worked with came up to us and said to Scott, "Well, you know, this woman is dynamite, she's really something." You know, praising my work or whatever. And I just remember watching Scott kind of shrink away from that…. And it seemed like the more I did the more depressed and withdrawn he got. Yet I never had the thought that I shouldn't do these things. After the divorce, Olivia felt a great sense of relief and freedom. She had declared her independence not only from male dominance, but from expectations of her to stay married. Most importantly, she found that she enjoyed living on her own. She could not imagine ever being remarried and giving up the bliss of solitude in her home.

It was a marriage where I walked away and never looked back, and never missed him one day in my life. This scared me because I thought, how could I spend ten years of my life with somebody and live with this man for five years and not miss him? But it was a tremendous relief. I remember after getting the furniture and everything all moved and into the new place, sitting down and saying, "This is all mine." And I loved coming home at night. This sense of, "Oh God, I get to go home and there's nobody there, you know? … There was no way I was going to get married again. I just thought, this is the best thing in the world. I was always very active and had a lot of friends and did a Page 81 lot of things and got involved in my Ph.D. And I never was lonely. As with the previous stories of the toddler of two and the adolescent of twelve, in this memory, Olivia represents herself as someone who values her autonomy. Increasingly she has become aware of and resists men whose presence becomes symbolic of the social practices which restrain women and demand their submissiveness and conformity.

When Olivia re-read the above narrative, she made connections between her feelings of being pruned away as an adolescent and being pruned away further as a young wife. She described her years after their divorce as a "coming back to myself." She expressed that it was a time of reunion, of growing new branches where older ones had been pruned by the marriage:

I think what surprised me the most was that even though my parents were very upset, I knew this was not the way I wanted to live my life and it didn't matter who thought differently about it. I think that there is some kind of a coming together of purpose and some sense of identity about who I was. It was a rejection of being defined within the relationship if it meant that I had to give up all these other parts of me and if you think about the pruning—that kind of makes sense to me. I kept having to be somebody I wasn't, again, in this marriage. Olivia further explained to me that after the divorce she felt as if she could finally define herself. She explained, "I could do what I wanted to do. This was a very empowering time for me." Having given herself freedom from male authority, Olivia was at her best; as a result, she explained that "it was a time in my life when I said that I'd never get married again. I hate that, I hate being married." Despite this assertion about marriage, Olivia did remarry in 1988, nine years after her divorce from Scott. She believed that she had found a man who loved her because she was a strong, independent, and ambitious woman—not in spite of it. The fourth excerpt that I want to examine as part of the backward/forward reading of Olivia's life is a journal reflection on her experiences leaving Chicago with her husband Marc to become a faculty member at the university where he was hired. Marc received an offer to teach at the university. Deciding that they did not want a commuting marriage, Marc and Olivia negotiated for a teaching position for her as

Page 82 well at the same university. Although it initially was not tenure-track, the department told Olivia that she could apply for the first tenure-track position that came open in the department. Coming in as she did where Marc was known and in a tenure-track position, and she was not, was a terribly difficult transition for Olivia. As a result, in her first year in the university community, she felt lonely and missed her corporate life in Chicago. The following is from her journal, written about five months after she and Marc began their lives at the university, and just one year after they were married and Olivia had dealt with the sexual harassment incident. Despite having gained strength and autonomy over the years through divorcing Scott, living on her own, getting a Ph.D, and becoming a corporate executive, Olivia found that she was revisiting issues and feelings similar to those she had known earlier in her life.

About Chicago, an Opportunity and Being a Shadow (Journal Entry, January 10, 1990) I just finished reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath—and that left me needy enough to read a biography of her life and her death. These books reached out to me and drew me in as nothing else has for a very long time. Sylvia Plath spoke of having her 'mind go dead.' I know that feeling. My entire body suffers from deadness. For a long time I thought that my depression was the result of feeling too much, and now I realize that I have been feeling nothing at all. I am numb to the world around me. Since our move here, I have felt so very out of place. Only the breezy flow of our lush, green willow

tree and gazing upon our budding spring bulbs soothes my discontent. But even in the presence of these natural wonders, I long to escape to the familiarity of Chicago—the hustle, the energy, the crowds, the noise, the cement, the people, the buildings, the cars, the horns, the wind, the train, the friends, the restaurants—and the sense of owning one's own life. I have always owned my own life. Why do I feel that I do not own my own life here? Why do I feel that I am a shadow and not a person? A shadow of a woman I used to be. A shadow that people cannot see. 'Are you going to [the conference]' Will asked Marc as we sipped wine at Winstons on a lazy Friday afternoon? We both Page 83 are' Marc said, attempting to include me in the event. But Will could not see me. Will could not see shadows. He could only see Marc. Marc is a person. 'I have to go back' the voice in me screams and jars me from my sleep. 'I have to go back/ I have to be a person again.' I don't want to be a shadow. I'm too young—I've only just begun—and I'm not dead—not yet. 'I cannot accept the Director position you have so generously offered,' my letter to John says—I cannot return to Chicago—it would be too hard on my personal life—but already my personal life is hard—It is hard for a shadow to be personal—it is hard for a shadow to own one's own life. —and I wonder Is it the way I think about my life? Does that make me sad? Or is it the way I am living my life that makes me sad? When I reread this journal entry after reading and analyzing the transcripts of Olivia's life history and studying Sartre's method, I was struck by the veracity of Sartre's idea that life occurs in spirals, for it seemed to me that not only was Olivia revisiting and reliving the issue of autonomy from men, but also that the spiral of her mother's life was intersecting with Olivia's as well. I felt unsure of the veracity of these interpretations of this transitional period in Olivia's life, and so together we attempted to interpret its meaning. I first asked Olivia if her sense of loss-of-self in her marriage to Marc was different from what she experienced with Scott.

Olivia: I wonder if it is different. That's an interesting way to think about it. There's definitely a sense here of pruning away again, if we use that as a theme. Who I was in Chicago was so incredibly different from who I was when I came here. I was doing very well in Chicago and had established myself. People knew and valued me. Coming here was like having all of that taken away. And not only that, but coming here with Marc who was sought to come here it was he who received all the attention. It was like I had joined his world and I had no world of my own. And it's all very complicated in the sense that—I don't like the notion of blaming Marc because that's never the way it

was. He always said, "we won't do this if you don't want to do this." But I had said that one day I wanted to go back into academics and that if we could find a place where I could begin that we would do it. And I think I would Page 84 have experienced this pain no matter where we would have gone. Because clearly I was on a completely different path. But had I not been married, I probably would have stayed in business. Although I always wanted to write, I don't know if I would have [gone into academia] on my own. And it took me away from all my friends and I knew only him. So that made it harder. I then asked her about her mother:

Leslie: I was thinking about the image of the shadow in this [journal entry] and … about how your mother would get you a dress or get the house painted—do things kind of surreptitiously when your father was in the hospital. I thought of that as kind of a shadow moving around doing things undercover, not full force, more of a shadowy figure doing it. And then I thought about the relationship between your mother and father which probably made her feel like a shadow, and you growing up with that. It seemed interesting to me that at this point in your life there was this loss of identity and that you use the term shadow. I don't know, it made me think a lot about your mother and how women become shadows. Olivia: I think that I have a lot of problems with marriage. I do think there is a sense of being back in that same kind of husband-wife relationship, back like my mother is in that married relationship and thinking that I never felt more powerful than when I lived on my own. (pause) But see, that has a lot to do with relationships, too. No matter who you're with things are going to be changed in some ways. You make agreements together to do things, and I don't care if it's a heterosexual or homosexual relationship, there are going to be changes. But this was hard because we had to make a decision that would bear on both of us. He said we could go back to Chicago—but all I kept thinking was how he'd regret that because this job was so important to him. But what I never thought about was whether I would regret it. You know? Somehow it was more important that I wouldn't do something that he would regret rather than if I made a decision and I would regret it. Leslie: So this sense of shadow, I guess, was part of it—not being the sought-after scholar or recognized for your scholarship? Page 85 Olivia: Right. Leslie: But also it was as a wife? Olivia: Oh yes. I was defined much more as a wife because people didn't know me. And I really hated that! (both laugh) No one thought of me as "the wife" in Chicago. Leslie: Did you ever feel with Marc that you became a shadow in that relationship?

Olivia: No, I think he fought it very hard. He always tried and it was very important to him that I like it here and that I was comfortable here. I think that he did a lot to ensure that it would happen, but see, that wasn't good for me because I do those things for myself. I don't need or want someone else to do that for me. But he was really trying to be caring. But I kept thinking this is just something I have to go through. I think I could have done just fine with it as a junior person starting in a university if my desire had been to be an academic, but it was being defined in the relationship the way it was and all of that made it almost intolerable (long pause); you know, it was intolerable. I still can't say that it's the right decision. It is interesting that almost three years after leaving Chicago and having attained respect in the university, Olivia still voiced her uncertainty about this choice. Both her journal excerpt and her responses to my questions demonstrate the effects that these difficult decisions had an Olivia's subjectivity and the way that she represents herself as a result of her subjectivity. What this tells us about subjectivity is that while we become more adept at dealing with the revisited spirals of our life and perhaps learn to make choices with our eyes more open, there are still constraints on the way that women make decisions about their lives. This is made clear when Olivia admits that she thought, "Somehow it was more important that I wouldn't do something that he would regret rather than if I made a decision and I would regret it." What historical and social reasons might further account for Olivia's desire to tell this feminist heroine version of the story? Narrated in a decade when the sexual harassment of women in the work place had finally attracted some public attention, Olivia told a story that many of us wanted, indeed, needed to hear.5 As discourses on sexual harassment began publicly to take shape in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many women shared stories of their

Page 86 experiences. For feminists, the discourse has a special meaning in shaping the perception that something socially, morally, and legally can be done about sexual harassment. Thus, as a feminist, Olivia's story is historically consistent with this strand of feminist discourse that encourages women to envision ourselves as powerful feminist activists. This empowered vision may come at the cost of sharing with others the difficulties confronted in trying to annihilate "sexual perverts" and perversions. In Olivia's first version of the story we can see the varying influences of the autobiographical narrative genre and historical feminist discourses. By reading the life backward and forward, we can see how past experiences influenced the first version, and deepen our understanding of those past experiences by what we know of Olivia's later experiences. But how does my own biography as Olivia's "biographer" influence my interpretation of the story as an archetypal hero's tale? What are the convergences of my life with Olivia's and what meanings might these have for our work together? When I worked in a large architectural firm in Marketing and Public Relations—my first job after completing college—I, too, encountered what Olivia called a "sexual pervert." He was an associate partner in the firm, quickly working his way up to full partner by being actively engaged in marketing. As a result, we often had to work together on job proposals and marketing presentations. Perry had a quirk that was often laughed at, but was certainly not considered harassment or sexism in 1979. I do not recall a public discourse at that time to describe his behavior as sexist. Instead it was considered childish: he snapped bra straps. For me, it was a source of frustration because I felt powerless to take action against him, especially since no one thought that his actions were anything but silly. My boss, a senior partner, expressed that Perry behaved stupidly, but he could not see making a big deal out of it. My only recourse at the time seemed to be either silence or feigned good humor. However, I finally did challenge him. I was walking into a full room for a marketing meeting in which I was one of only two women, the youngest person there, and one of the lowest-ranking employees in the meeting. As I walked past

Perry, he snapped my bra strap. I felt my temper explode and my face get bright red. I turned to Perry and yelled really loudly: "Don't ever do that to me again!" And I took my seat in the meeting. I don't remember what happened after that—I was so shocked at the sound of my own voice yelling, but a few weeks later at a company party, Perry's wife told me that I had really embarrassed him, and that she was

Page 87 glad! But I certainly never felt that I had conquered the problem, because he continued to do it to other women, especially secretaries in the company, and because I felt that I had lost face by losing my temper. When Olivia told me the first version of her story, I enjoyed a vision of her as a woman warrior. Through her story, I was able to imagine myself taking similar action—getting Perry fired. Although I harbored some doubts as to the quickness of the results, I found myself wanting to believe that this story was true because it held possibilities for me to act similarly. It was my own experiences with corporate harassment that influenced the first interpretation, the analogy of the archetypal hero's tale. It gave me pleasure to think of Olivia as a feminist heroine. Reflecting on my vicarious enjoyment of Olivia's story makes all the more true Jackson's observation that "every act of cool analysis is also a creative act initiated within our particular personality and explicable in terms of our biography" (1989, 166). Was I prepared, then, for Olivia's realization that the first version "recalled the good part … and failed to mention the less satisfying side" of the story? Again my own failure to deal successfully with Perry made Olivia's retelling equally compelling for me, and it made me able to explore her narrative with greater empathy. Interpreting Olivia's second version helped me to realize how a life history and an interpretation are both creative processes in which the self of the interpreter is made through the process. How does Olivia represent herself in the second version? Let me begin by reading it through the lens of feminist narratology. Most apparent to me was that Olivia no longer represents herself as having a unitary and unconflicted subjectivity; she is more fully narrativized because she represents an array of emotions and diverse depictions of her interactions with others. She no longer uses phrases like, "I was a force," "it was empowering," and "it felt good to be there." Instead, she uses words like "wearing,'' "disappointing," "ashamed," "angered," "stunned," and "furious." Olivia describes how she was "dissuaded" by male colleagues, acknowledging that although they did not have the authority to demand that she keep silent, they did have the power to influence her. Olivia also explains that she was "drawn in" by women's stories, "gave comfort" to women, and "receive comfort" back from them by their thanks, allowing us to know her as a sympathetic and caring woman. There is a much wider range of emotional representation and a greater personal, albeit conflicted, presence in the second version. No greater a feminist icon, Olivia

Page 88 appears more truly multi-dimensional: she suffers with the rest of us and does her best in a difficult world. The second version also has a larger cast of characters. Olivia did not, in the sense of the first version, get the man fired. It was a team effort, and in the retelling, she acknowledges that it was both the women who "painfully" told their stories, risking their jobs to do so, and the men on her management team who all contributed to the case being made against Joe. And I think that this is a critical component of the retelling, for it shifts the image of Olivia as a solitary "feminist icon" to an image of a woman who is fully engaged in a community, thus reminding us that subjectivity is produced in the process of interaction with others. (It is also a reminder that both men and women must work together to rid the work place of sexual harassment.) Having allowed herself a fuller self-representation, Olivia is also able to make conflicts central to the story. The major conflict that emerges concerns her decision to comply with management and her male colleagues when the sexual

harassments first came to light, and not to take action against Joe. This conflict demonstrated the difficult position Olivia was in as she attempted to balance her alliance with patriarchal management with her alliance with the other women. In both alliances Olivia was positioned as insider and outsider: in management but not "one of the guys"; a woman but not "one of the women" whose job was so vulnerable. Olivia later explained further that dealing with the men meant that she had to call upon especially tactful means of expression so that she could remain an ally to the women:

I do remember feeling like they [the men] were very attentive to what I told them about this. I felt like it was important for them to know what I felt about this. But I also remember feeling that it was important that I not alienate them, that I had to keep them on my side in order to get accomplished what I needed to get accomplished. These conflicted subject positions must have made her decision about how to handle the situation extremely painful. I therefore want to examine them closely because, as Walkerdine (1990) observes, conflicts are the most interesting sites for locating subjectivity and gaining understanding of how subjectivity becomes fragmented. Ellsworth and Miller (1996) suggest that one way to make sense of conflicted subject positions is to examine what they call the

Page 89 "strategic fixing and unfixing of subject positions" based on "situated responsiveness."6 Situated responsiveness refers to the idea that responses to particular situations must not be generic, but specific to the complexities of the situation. It also suggests that individuals may call upon different strategies to respond to given situations. "Strategic fixing and unfixing of subject positions" further suggests that given a particular situation, such as the management decision that Olivia was called upon to make, a person may have multiple ways to respond to that situation. Because there is no one definitive way to respond to a situation, people may feel doubt and alienation about their decisions. However, an Anzaldúa (1987) argues, the alienation that women feel in this patriarchal culture makes it difficult for women to respond, especially for women of color:

[T]he ability to respond is what is meant by responsibility, yet our cultures take away our ability to act…. We do not engage fully. We do not make full use of our faculties. We abnegate. And there in front of us is the crossroads and choice: to feel a victim where someone else is in control and therefore responsible and to blame … or to feel strong, and, for the most part, in control (Anzaldúa 1987, 20) Ellsworth and Miller believe that not only do our multiple subject positions in the world make it difficult to respond, but that the complexities of situations also compel us to "speak from between the boundaries" of these subject positions.7 Speaking from the boundaries means that the defining lines between subject positions often become blurred and ambiguous. With the concepts of fixing and unfixing and situated responsiveness in mind, I want to examine several configurations of Olivia's subject position in the second version in order to understand her responses to the dilemma and the implications that these subject positions had for her subjectivity at that time. The interrelated subject positions that I identify include her place in management, her role as a woman, her social/economic status, and her racial identity as white. As stated above, we see that Olivia was variously positioned in the second version of the story. First, she strategically fixed her position in management by using the expression "we" when referring to management. However, this position became unfixed when she described the "male colleagues" who "dissuaded" her from being concerned about Joe's

behavior. Her position was unfixed because it

Page 90 was no longer "we" but "they" and "she." With this unfixing, she simultaneously became fixed in the margins of management, a place where, as a woman, she may have been (according to some of her male colleagues) all along. Therefore, when she said that she "didn't know just how serious this situation had become," her voice emanated from her subject position in management, a position which may have made these women less visible to her initially, but when she continued with "but [she] did know that his behaviors were unacceptable,'' she was speaking from her subject position as a woman who acknowledged the experiences of these women. Thus, in this sentence ("I don't know just how serious this situation had become but I did know that his behaviors were unacceptable"), we hear her conflicted and alienated voice from "between the boundaries" of multiple subject positions. Anzaldúa describes this phenomenon as the "swampings" of psychological borders where women discover they cannot "hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries" (1987, 79) and such boundaries become enemies. Olivia's subject position as a woman is further fixed and unfixed in relation to the unequal power she had compared to the other women whom she described in the story. At the risk of being repetitious, I need to start again from her strategic fixing of herself as a woman in management. This fixing is more overtly represented in the first version, where she says that it "felt good to change the image of women in management, you know? To open doors for other women." In the second version, rather than fixing her position as a feminist-managerial woman, she fixed herself more as a woman in the recognized role of the listener and comforter. It was Olivia (not her male colleagues) who "listened to the stories these women had to tell." It was she who "comforted them through the tears and pain that these memories evoked." It was she who had to answer their questions of "Why had this happened to them?" While the image of Olivia responding to these women helped to fix the image of her as woman, it simultaneously unfixed the stable representation of her as a woman because she did not share their experiences in that particular situation. She was not one of them. She was management—and according to Olivia, that is how they saw her, which was painful to her. Unlike them, she had not had to "[fight] both paralyzing fears of losing [her] job … and personal humiliation and embarassment for making the choices [she] made to keep [it]." It was not Olivia who felt powerless. "They felt powerless." In relation to some of the men on her management team, she was marginalized and somewhat less empowered; but more

Page 91 critically, in relation to the women whose stories she heard, her management job placed her in a position of power, which made her marginalized from them as well. Again, in the borderland, Olivia's relationship to these women was both precarious and ambiguous. The borderlands, although initially uncomfortable, eventually became a place from where Olivia gained self-knowledge and acceptance of the ambiguity that conflicted subject positions engender. Another aspect of Olivia's subject position involves her unequal social class or economic status in relation to the women whose stories she heard. She described them as "poor, single women" for whom "overtime or promotions [was] critical … [because] many of these women … were single parents." For many people like Olivia who grew up in working-class families, the American dream of upward mobility was central; for women, it was often a dream that was allowed to be deferred or dropped as they took their places in marriages and families and dead-end jobs. If Olivia had not "surpassed the givens" of the material conditions of her childhood and attained a Ph.D., she may well have been one of the women who was afraid to lose her job and who was therefore vulnerable to a man like Joe. Recognizing the distance between herself and these women helped Olivia to acknowledge how fortunate she had been in her life. She was aware that she had attained financial security and a level of self-esteem that could mediate against her being victimized by someone like Joe. Olivia's secretary, "who was in an abusive marriage and used drugs to numb the pain," especially served as a reminder to her of the good quality of her own life, as Olivia noted in her journal in 1988:

Reflections on Katie

Why do some people seem to have clouds of doom that loom over their heads year after year resulting in relentless grief and agony? Each new week I think now the tragedy is over and Katie will get back on track. But each new week brings a new tragedy…. How do I begin to help her? … Each day I begin anew with a sympathetic ear and conviction in her ability to put her life together and move beyond the pain. Why do some people have such pain? I look at my life and can't help but feel over-privileged. Katie deserves better than this. When will life get better for her? I try to help her think that through. But she can't—not now—maybe never. Page 92 White racial identity also plays a role in the strategic fixing and unfixing of Olivia's subject position in the second version. In the second narrative she states that:

It took an anonymous letter from a despondent black woman detailing in racism, sexism, and sexual harassment that she had experienced … to wake me and others up to the seriousness of the situation. Toni Morrison (1992) maintains that the presence of a black population today, like the slave population it is descended from, allows the white population to reflect on its own (privileged) position in the world by offering itself as that which white is not: powerless, enslaved, and poor. Through these distinctions between black/white, enslaved/free, wealthy/poor, etc., whites can know who they are. In other words, it is in the context of the opposite other than whiteness is constructed. In light of Morrison's argument, how might the letter from "a despondent black woman" have contributed to fixing and unfixing Olivia's subject position? One explanation might be that the letter from the black woman fixed Olivia's subject position as white, perhaps reminder her of the privilege afforded to whites in this society. Just as Katie's problems made her feel "over-privileged," this letter may have reminded her of how blacks as "racialized others" are denied certain rights. With her own sense of otherness increasing as her subject positions fragmented her subjectivity, Olivia may have felt particularly sensitive to this woman's marginalized status in the company, her triply oppressed position due to racism, class elitism, and sexism. These sites of fixed and unfixed subject positions destablize subjectivity by making us question and examine who we are. For Olivia, her desire to make changes in the corporation based on her feminist values, her need to be independent, and her ambition to be successful in management all contribute to reconstructing and fragmenting her subjectivity; the specific decisions she made based on these often competing desires leave her feeling conflicted to this day. These conflicts create nonunitary subjectivity and ultimately were what compelled Olivia to retell her story. Such retelling helps to deconstruct the master narrative of "they all lived happily ever after" and gives us a tentative ending that is more in keeping with lived experience. As Heilbrun affirms,

We women have lived too much with closure: "If he notices me, if I marry him, if I get into college, if I get this work Page 93 accepted, if I get that job"—there always seems to loom the possibility of something being over, settled, sweeping clear the way for contentment. This is the delusion of a passive life. When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, adventure for women will begin. Endings … are for romance or for daydreams, but not for life. (Heilbrun 1988, 130)

The retelling also reminds us that to interpret fragmented subjectivity as a weaknesses or flaw would mean being blind to the energy that such fragmenting can engender in an individual like Olivia, who, upon reflection, learns to grow as a result of it. By understanding the potential of nonunitary subjectivity, feminists can read it not as a weakness, but as a strength and as an alternative feminist discourse. It is a strength because giving up the myth of unified subjectivity allows respect for the complexity of subjectivity and the validation of conflict as a source through which women become strong and learn to speak their own experiences. Thus, the cauldron of feelings expressed in the second narrative speaks of Olivia's complex subjectivity. In the first version of the story, Olivia says that she was "a force to be reckoned with." In the second version, although she does not say it, she is much more of a force to be reckoned with because she is more fully narrativized: she has taken her place in a feminist discourse that allows her complex representation and gives her power and "the right to have one's part matter" (Heilbrun 1988, 18). The second story may well mark a departure from the master narrative as patriarchal discourse and an arrival at a feminist discourse.8 Like the many twentieth-century women novelists cited by DuPlessis who made a project of examining "how social practices surrounding gender have entered narrative" and who offered readers alternative narrative closures, women working on personal experience narratives must also make a project of verbalizing and examining the contradictions of women's lives in order to also "write beyond the ending" (DuPlessis 1985, 4). Engaging in feminist interpretation in life history work means that women who narrate their stories must be encouraged and given space to tell and retell their stories as Olivia did, attempting each time to better articulate a closer approximation of their complex subjectivity, thus thwarting the natural inclination to end with "happily ever after." DuPlessis's and Heilbrun's arguments are powerful: if the endings of women's stories are ideologically grounded in masculine perceptions of endings, and if feminists do not attempt to subvert the master scripts

Page 94 by bringing to the surface the complex and diverse realities of women's feelings and experiences, we are participating in perpetuating patriarchal norms. And we as readers will never learn to see ourselves outside of male ideologies and thus will never gain strength from our own complex and often baffling subjectivities.9

"No Making Sense of It All" In the last chapter of Writing Beyond the Ending , DuPlessis remarks that "a novel typically ends by asserting that choice is over and that the growth of character or the capacity for a defining action has ceased" (1985, 178). Novelists fashion their characters' activities, desires, and beliefs. Ethnographers and life historians differ, however, because they portray, as much as possible, the actualities of respondents' activities, desires, and beliefs. Further, while a novelist resolves the loose ends of characters' lives and writes "the end" on the last page, ethnographers and life historians can only (and should only) provide tentative endings to their research, for respondents do grow emotionally and intellectually and continue to make important choices about their lives after the researcher has ceased to "document" these choices and changes. This difference between the freedom of the novelist to create a fictional life and the responsibility of the ethnographer or life historian to portray an actual life is important for the social science researcher to remember when appropriating an interpretive method from literary criticism. Using feminist narratology allowed me to examine the master script in selected narratives. However, it was critical for me to remember that Olivia is neither a fictional nor an archetypal woman such as those found in novels. Therefore, my interpretations of her personal narratives using feminist narratology had to take into account that her stories expressed more than her reproduction, subversion, and rebellion against patriarchy. They expressed many of the nuances and complexities of her being that are a part of her daily lived experiences, rather than some abstracted sense of self. One of

the dangers, then, of adhering strictly to a model of literary criticism would be to miss these nuances. For this reason, I think that Ellsworth and Miller's (1996) method for examining conflicted subject positions was extremely helpful—perhaps even necessary—for interpreting the exigencies of lived experience. Second, in much the same way that novelists can have the freedom to create a character as they want, literary critics who analyze

Page 95 the life of fictional characters have a similar freedom to say what they want. However, social science researchers cannot explore personal narratives in the same way that a literary critic can. Nor can a social science researcher ask a respondent to explore her life as if she were a fixed character in a work of fiction. Therefore, one problem that might ensue from using literary criticism for social science research would result from treating and analyzing a respondent's life as if she were a fictional character whose being was fixed in the text—as if the text itself represented the sum of her being. This would constitute an injustice against the respondent, denying her the complexity of her lived experiences, which may be offensive and perhaps even detrimental to their well-being and sense of self. In the research context, so much depends on the trust between the researcher and respondent, the respondent's readiness for such an examination, the respondent's capacity for dealing with the emotional difficulty of re(telling) stories that make them feel vulnerable, and the researcher's ability to sincerely, thoughtfully, and adeptly analyze stories while being both gentle in tone and sensitive in understanding. In some cases, being sensitive may also mean leaving some stories uninterpreted. When DuPlessis (1985) says that twentieth-century women writers and their critics have available to them alternative narrative and critical strategies, she is completely correct; however, it may not always be possible for twentieth-century researchers and their respondents to avail themselves of all these strategies. "Writing beyond the ending," making conflict central, and becoming narrativized may be more achievable and desirable for feminist novelists than for feminist researchers, particularly when power differences make the researcher vulnerable. Unlike feminist narratology, which emerged out of critiques of novels, Sartre's ([1960] 1963) progressive-regressive method emerged out of his concern with understanding lived experiences of individuals within historical contexts. However, his concern in Search for a Method was not how women surpass the given of limitations placed on them by patriarchal societies. Does Sartre's method, therefore, validate the androcentric biographical genre because it only speaks of a male selfhood? Is it, therefore, also a master script? I think that both of these questions could easily be answered "yes," not because Sartre is a male theorist, but because of his description of "positive praxis," the means by which individuals surpass prohibitions and limitations imposed on them by society, history, and culture. Sartre believes that individuals have the capacity to shift the terms by which they live in the world, but he never states that

Page 96 such "positive praxis" results in an internal change or shift in the individual's subjectivity. Therefore, to have applied Sartre's method of analysis of Olivia's life without situating it within the larger analysis of nonunitary subjectivity may have resulted in not only an androcentric analysis, but perhaps a less complex one as well, one that overly determined Olivia's rebelliousness as an essential part of her fixed being, rather than as a shifting component of her being-inprocess, her nonunitary subjectivity. However, as Olivia explains, her subjectivity and her story will "keep unfolding" long after we put closure on this chapter. Therefore, I would like to conclude this chapter with her words:

I realize that although Leslie and I have come to the close of the project, as we must, I have not been able to come to a close on the interpretations of my life stories. For me, this is not the end of the project—though the project must end. I am still in the middle of the story. I am still enmeshed in interpretations and competing interpretations. And I sense there is no end. No "Final" interpretations.

No making sense of it all. Page 97

5 Nonunitary Subjectivity and Gender Introduction Since the 1970s, feminist theories on sexual difference and the social construction of gender have raised questions about the possibility of describing an individual's gender identity without the binary construct that currently frames our language.1 In addition, feminist and feminist postmodern critiques of psychoanalytic theory have contributed to our understanding of the inherent sexism in most theories of sexual difference and the limitations that binary language places on individuals attempting to express the complex lived reality of being a gendered and sexual being (Brennan 1989; Butler 1990a,b; Cixous and Clement [1975] 1986; Gallop 1982). In this chapter, I explore the concept of nonunitary subjectivity by examining the conflicted ways in which Sandy describes her experiences of being female. I focus on the ways in which binary modes of constructing sexual difference have influenced her self-representations of her gendered roles at home and in her professional career, her understandings of emotions as gendered within her relationships with others, and her sense of self with regard to her sexuality. Set against the background of the postmodern critique of conventional psychoanalytic theories of gender identity formation, I use Wendy Hollway's (1984; 1989) discourse theory to interpret Sandy's narratives. I examine ways in which Sandy expresses what it means to her to be female in light of her female socialization in a society 1) that is patriarchal and heterosexist; 2) that only sees as natural, binary definitions of gender and sex; and 3) that only accepts as normal, heterosexual desire and sexuality. I particularly focus on how Sandy's self-representations utilize conflicting discourses about what it means to be female in relation to others at home, at work, and in intimate relations.

Page 98 Finally, I demonstrate how the analyses of conflicted discourses in Sandy's narratives help us to understand nonunitary subjectivity.

Psychoanalytic Theories of Identity and the Postmodern Critique People's identities as males or females, men or women, are partially based on their understanding of the meanings given to sexuality in their sociocultural context. —Devor 1989, 89 It is impossible to separate what we articulate about ourselves from the sociocultural and historical contexts that influence both our experiences and the ways that we describe and interpret the meanings of experiences, particularly sexual ones. Freud's (1966) theories of infant development2 and more recent reinterpretations of Freud by Jacques Lacan ([1966] 1977) and Nancy Chodorow (1978) ask us to consider ways that sexuality is constituted in both complex social and biological ways.3

Postmodern feminist psychoanalytic theories in particular take up these questions of gender and sexuality. The primary goal of these theories is to challenge traditional psychoanalytic theories such as those posed by Freud and his followers and to provide non-misogynist and non-homophobic understandings of sex and sexuality. Further, they seek to restage the discourse of sexuality and gender by examining the diverse voices of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transvestites, and transsexuals. Enlarging the discourse to include "non-normative" sexuality allows postmodern feminist psychoanalytic theorists to envision and begin to shape a discourse of gender that is not fixed. That is, this discourse recognizes that like subjectivity, both sexual identity, regardless of one's sexual orientation(s), and gender, regardless of one's biological sex, are neither unified nor fixed. Judith Butler, for example, suggests that Freudian, Lacanian, and Chodorovian psychoanalytic theories of gender identity development all follow a master script that assumes that gender identity is formed and fixed through an "orderly temporal development of identifications in which the first identifications serve to unify the latter ones" (1990a, 331). She explains that in these theories, the process of primary identification with the mother and the resolution of the subsequent Oedipus crisis results in forming powerful

Page 99 identification with the same-sex parent, from whom the child learns gender role behaviors and attitudes. Butler contends that because psychoanalytic theories of infant development maintain this dual focus on primary identification and the Oedipus crisis as the source of gender role development, "gender meanings are circumscribed within a narrative frame which both unifies certain legitimate sexual subjects and excludes from intelligibility sexual identities and discontinuities which challenge [alternative] narrative beginnings and closures" (1990a, 329). Intelligible identities are those that "maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire" (Butler 1990b, 17). If this is the case, then gender identities that are unintelligible are those in which there is one or several ruptures among these four aspects of gender identity. Further, if we recall that the normative is when sex determines how one is to be socialized as gendered, then the "normal" female is socialized as feminine and therefore has sex with males. As long as our understanding of the formation of gender identity remains fixed on the idea that the primary identification/Oedipus crisis experience is the only source through which children gain knowledge of gender roles and sexuality, we are doomed to believe that in infancy, an individual forms a gender and sexual identity that is consistent and "normal" with her/his sex—a heterosexual orientation. When an individual is a homosexual male or lesbian, or when an individual does not conform to normative performances of masculinity or femininity, we seem unable to escape from binary ways of representing sexual orientation in language. As Butler explains, our language only allows us to say that a woman behaves in culturally normative masculine or feminine ways, for example. Her point is that even when individuals do not feel that their sex corresponds to their gender or when they experience ambiguity about their sexual desires, in our language and psyche only two relations are possible: "one either identifies with a sex or desires it" (1990a, 333). What we need then, are ways out of these linguistic and psychological binary restrictions so that the tenuousness of sexual identity and the multiplicities of meaning that sexuality has for individuals can be articulated. For women especially, whose sex is posited as a lack in Freudian terms, whose femininity is repressed in Lacanian terms, and whose sex is reduced to relational interactions in Chodorovian terms, different ways of organizing and speaking about gender acquisition and sexuality are needed so that individuals are not harmed by biologically compelled "false stabilization" (Butler 1990a, 329).

Page 100 Using Wendy Hollway's (1984) discourse analysis method to locate the conflicted discourses in Sandy's representation of herself will empirically demonstrate Butler's theoretically based claim that binary language is inadequate for describing the lived experiences of being a gendered and sexual being. Further, it will illustrate the difficulty in

everyday life of finding a language that articulates shifting and unstable gender and sexual identities. This analysis of Sandy's narratives will also highlight how traditional psychoanalytic theorites of gender identity overdetermine the says we speak about gender, limiting positive self-representation for women and non-heterosexist ideologies in general.

Wendy Hollway and Discourse Analysis Not only is the subject's relation to his or her body lived out through the mediation of discourse, but that body is itself coerced and molded by both representation and signification…. Even if we could manage to strip away the discursive veil that separates the subject from his or her ''actual" body, that body would itself bear the unmistakable stamp of culture. There is consequently no possibility of ever recovering an "authentic" female body, either inside or outside language…. It is crucial for feminist theory to recognize that it will be no easy matter to disengage ourselves from the bodies which we presently inhabit, and that those bodies have been zoned and inscribed in ways which have profound implications for female subjectivity. —Silverman 1988, 146 Wendy Hollway's (1984) discourse analysis is a compelling method for examining both how nonunitary subjectivity is exemplified in discourse and how women speak of themselves as gendered. Hollway bases her interpretive model on the belief that individual subjectivity is nonunitary. She explains that nonunitary subjectivity means that the ways in which we talk about the world and ourselves are divided up into a variety of discourses. Current at one time in a given society are numerous competing discourses, some having greater dominance than others. Each discourse we use might be identified with a particular approach to a situation, a particular explanation of a specific problem, a particular description of an experience, or a particular way of thinking about ourselves. Therefore, because a variety of discourses is available, people choose which discourse(s) to take up and how to position themselves in

Page 101 that discourse. This decision is based on an "investment" of the self in the discourse. An investment quite simply means positioning oneself according to what one perceives as an advantage. The decision of how to position oneself in a discourse, although not always a conscious decision, is reasoned. The options for positioning oneself in a particular discourse are limited by various subject positions such as, but not limited to, one's gender, race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age, and ablebodiedness. Hollway also explains that it is possible for individuals to be positioned in various discourses that are contradictory to each other at one time, but because people come to them through various circumstances and diverse life experiences, the contradictions may not surface into consciousness. We are often unable to know our own contradictions. While the contradictions may not surface into consciousness, they do find their way into our conversations, as the analyses below will demonstrate. In one sentence or one description of an experience or feeling, an individual may articulate a number of conflicting discourses, one after another, because people draw upon multiple discourses in attempting to make sense of and represent life experiences. Sandy's descriptions of how gender is lived and how men and women take up or reject gender-specific roles are especially marked by conflicted discourses. Most significantly, she positions herself in these conflicted discourses in a variety of ways, sometimes using her "femaleness" as an advantage and sometimes disassociating herself from her femaleness to escape patriarchal negative judgment. That Sandy can and must position herself variously in these

discourses to create her self-representation may help us to understand both how gender is lived in an uncomfortable relation with sex and sexuality, and how subjectivity is fragmented within this tension. Selecting segments of Sandy's personal narratives for this analysis was made easy by Sandy's repeated use of specific terms and phrases for representing herself and others as gendered. For example, Sandy often uses the terms "atypical" and "nontraditional" when she describes herself as female. Further, she refers frequently to men's and women's "traditional roles" and describes couples as "reversing traditional roles." As Chanfrault-Duchet explains,

Within the framework of the female life story, [the use of key] phrases aim[s] to express the image of the self the interviewee intends to provide, as viewed through the distance between, or conformity to, the image of woman that Page 102 is in current use in her family circle or social group, on the one hand, and the hegemonic social model, on the other. (1991, 80) Chanfrault-Duchet's explication of the importance of repetition seems particularly pertinent to Sandy's narratives. Her use of key terms and phrases about gender roles signals the tensions between conforming to and resisting hegemonic, feminist, heterosexist, and personal meanings of femaleness.

The Discourse of Work: "I Was Really the More Male If You Look At the Male-Female Thing" In the first discourse I explicate, Sandy describes how housework and professional work are gender-defined. The discourses she uses to make sense of women's roles are marked by conflicts, especially when Sandy is considering roles in which women are devalued. Further, Sandy positions herself in these discourses in ways that suggest that both the uses of particular discourses to make sense of situations and her various positions within them have had a profound effect on her subjectivity. Her narratives show that when women resist normative gender roles and appearances, their subjectivity is split. In the first example of the discourse of work, Sandy focuses on housework. She explains that her first husband, Dan, to whom she had been married twenty-seven years, was more "female" because he did the housework. Conversely, not doing housework made Sandy more "male."

I just have to say, that the man that I'm married to has always been, if we look at roles in our life together, he's always been the support. He is the more female role, if you look at our traditional roles in our society. He's the accommodator. I think I'm as successful as I am in my job because he's the one who does the housework. If someone comes over to our house he does all the dishes. I do the cooking, but he takes care of all that stuff. He writes all the checks, he does the grocery shopping, he makes the grocery lists. I had to go to the grocery store a few weeks ago and I couldn't find anything. I don't know where anything is Page 103 because I don't do the grocery shopping. And that was sort of embarrassing, walking up and down those aisles and I realized, "I don't even know where things are in these stores." So, I think I'm sort of

atypical in that respect. I know I am. In this narrative, Sandy suggests that because Dan did the majority of the housework, there was a gender role reversal in their relationship. She implies that female roles include being accommodating, putting home before career, and being relegated to doing tedious chores such as shopping, doing dishes, and house-cleaning. Although cooking is a womandefined role, Sandy explains that this is her responsibility; perhaps this is one of the household tasks she has not been able to shed or that she enjoys. She then implies that academic and job success are male roles, regardless of who achieves them, and shopping, doing housework, and being accommodating are female roles, regardless of who performs them. Sandy does not use the terms "male role" or "female role" with any sense of irony that would indicate that she is trying to challenge the received view of gender identity. If a woman does something that is typically expected of a male, then the woman is taking on a male role: the role itself is not modified to be less gender-determined or signified. Her descriptions of work as gender-defined demonstrate that "the social rule of gender division creates the psychological rule of personality division" (Task 1986, 43). Sandy's preference for not doing the housework is emblematic of her overall discomfort with performing tasks associated with cultural femininity and her desire to connect herself with masculinity. As Mulqueen's study of the tensions between femininity and competence explains, many women disassociate themselves from house-keeping and other traditionally female roles because "a homemaker, regardless of her actual objective competence, does not conform to society's perceptions of a competent person" (1992, 3). Hartsock also points out that male dominance is maintained by the sexual division of labor and that men achieve masculinity by distancing themselves from the home: "Masculinity must be attained by means of opposition to the concrete world of daily life, by escaping contact with the female world of the household into the masculine world of public life" (1987, 169). Sandy's association with the masculine can be seen as both a strategy for garnering recognition for competence and a means to attain cultural value. This distancing herself from housework did not begin with marriage, however, but much earlier when, as a child, Sandy witnessed

Page 104 the differences in her parents' roles. In her description of her parents, we see the beginnings of Sandy's attempts to detach herself from stereotypical gender roles by portraying her mother's contributions to the home and family in a dismissive way, while enthusiastically describing the "wonderful things" she learned from her father.

My mom was traditional in that she did all the female division of labor, and I learned to do that too. She's a quilter which she taught me too. That's women's work and we make fun of it. She's made numerous quilts and enters them in shows. My dad is the one that's the designer, who has the eye for color. My mom can piece very well, piece-quilt, so that it's perfectly done. She's more analytical. She can do perfect stitching, even at 70…. But my mom, you know, I just don't feel that she was the most significant person in my life as far as the nurturing. She was always there and she provided for the food and all that stuff, but she was never really that warm.

I think that because I was the oldest my dad just expected me to work right along side him. So I did and I learned all these wonderful things from painting chairs to refinishing furniture, all kinds of crafts, how to cut off a chicken's head and skin a rabbit and how to grow stuff. And we're still real close.

Mulqueen explains that "attempting to create a distance from femininity," as Sandy has done, "leaves women vulnerable to emulating and preferring that which is masculine" (1992, 16). The above narratives highlight the sharp contrast between Sandy's preferences for what she defines as traditionally masculine tasks over traditionally feminine tasks. Underlying her preference for masculine-defined tasks is the idea that "women's work" and tasks associated with the home are inferior (Hartmann 1987). Even when she compliments her mother's quilting, she deflates the praise by first reminding us that because it is women's work, it is ridiculed (ignoring the current celebration of American women's quilting as a record of a women's standpoint). Second, she states that her father was really the creative and artistic one. Further, by distancing herself from femininity in general, Sandy also distances herself from her mother in very personal ways. The

Page 105 gulf Sandy puts between them is especially evident in the omission of any indication that Sandy felt close to her mother, while about her father she says that they are still "real close." As Mulqueen (1992) notes, when the daughter puts distance between herself and her mother, the mother-daughter relationship becomes especially complicated, particularly if the daughter perceives herself to be the father's favorite, as Sandy does. Mulqueen also found that two of the respondents she interviewed who considered themselves their fathers' favorites, "viewed their mothers' work as housewives as insignificant in comparison to their fathers' work" (74).4 Not only does Sandy value that which is masculine, but she also represents herself as being "more masculine." This depiction demonstrates that the positive evaluation of that which is masculine has had a profound effect on her gendered subjectivity. Rather than challenging the sexist nature of gender roles in her life or the very concept of roles, Sandy's sense of her own gendered identity and subjectivity has been acutely modified:

I was definitely, from a very early age, if you look at roles, the more male if you look at the malefemale thing. And I think that I did, in some respects, see my identity as far as desirable through male eyes. Sandy characterizes herself as "more male" and insists that when she does something that is antithetical to patriarchal definitions of femininity, she is "more male." From one perspective, the above statement is problematic in that she does not broaden, modify, or expand stereotypical definitions of what it means to be female. If, however, we regard the statement from a liberal or first-wave feminist stance,5 , Sandy's professional and personal accomplishments are diminished as political or feminist accomplishments, because Sandy represents herself as more male. She does not represent herself as an accomplished female and thus does not affirm female equality. From a more radical feminist or second-wave feminist stance, Sandy's self-representation becomes even more problematic, for in these narratives she rejects as positive image of women that is central to feminist thought. By denying her own sex in her assertion that she is "more male," Sandy both reproduces a view of women consistent with the master narratives of negative stereo-types and demonstrates that she has not internalized a positive image of women. On the bright side, however, and in the spirit of multiple interpretations, we may take up Wittig's assertion that not having internalized an image of oneself as a woman is actually

Page 106 a good thing, since "… wanting to become a man proves that [a woman] has escaped her initial programming" (1992, 12)! Thus, although her representation of herself as "more male" is problematic, what is at stake here is not whether Sandy is a "good feminist," but rather, how the pernicious effects of binary language and thinking about sex and the

misogynist discourses of gender have contributed to these conflicted kinds of self-representations. Why does Sandy invest in this discourse that is both antithetical to her feminist concerns and infused with self/womandeprecation? One explanation might be that this discourse has proved extremely enabling for Sandy because of the way she positions herself advantageously in it (Hollway 1984). Because being sex-role appropriate causes women to suffer low self-esteem (Mulqueen 1992), something she may have observed in her mother, Sandy has much to gain from creating herself in opposition to what is culturally feminine. Identifying herself as male gives her great confidence, a confidence that comes from making "a claim to the phallus" (Walkderdine 1990, 50). Further, by positioning herself as "more male" and "atypical," Sandy is able to deny that she personally is oppressed. While she has read feminist authors such as Mary Daly and Betty Friedan, and while she talks knowledgeably about feminism, her positive self-image is maintained by believing that she is not a victim of sexism. In effect, being "more male" and a ''feminist" allows Sandy to think of herself as different from or even better than other women who are unable to succeed, as she perceives she has done, in a male world. When Sandy says she sees her identity "as far as [what is] desirable … through male eyes," she means, I think, something much more than seeing herself as sexually desirable to men. She means that she constructs herself as male and consequently judges her successes by what males are taught to desire for themselves: power, control, and success in public life. Further, she shares their disdain for women and work associated with them. Therefore, when Sandy says that she does not know where things are in the grocery store (an atypical female characteristic), her assertion of embarrassment is clearly feigned. Judging herself through male eyes, unfamiliarity with the grocery store symbolizes that she does not take a subordinate female role. Further, as a mode of self-representation, Sandy's assertions that she cannot find her way around a grocery store may also serve to unify her image of herself as atypical.6 The discourse of work, up to this point, has been explored through Sandy's narratives about family life and interpersonal relationships. In these narratives, Sandy invests in a discourse that is critical of

Page 107 women's work in the home, and thus she positions herself outside of it, saying that she is "more male." But for Sandy, work also takes place outside of the home, and it is to her narratives of gender roles at her job that I now turn. Sandy is one of a few women who hold top administrative positions in the Sussex County school system. As the director of staff development, she conducts a variety of workshops for school staff and teachers. One workshop that I observed in the fall of 1990, for example, focused on learning styles and personality types. School secretaries and administrative assistants participated in the workshop, the objective of which was to help participants understand their own learning styles and personality types so they could get along better with their colleagues and bosses. Not surprisingly, all the participants that day were women. They appeared to be quite enthusiastic about being there. It seemed to me that there was a festive attitude among all the participants, and Sandy met this with her usual intense energy and spiritedness. When Sandy introduced me as a Ph.D. student doing research, they gave me some goodnatured ribbing about academic researchers from the university snopping around their schools! As Sandy began the workshop, she easily gained their attention, and as far as I could tell, it dod not waver the entire time. She kept a quick pace, included physical activity for participants to stave off the sluggishness that comes from inactivity, and had the group interacting both with her and with each other. She also joked and commiserated with the participants about some of the people, especially principals, with whom they worked. Using her knowledge of their situations in this informal way created a bridge that lessened the distance between Sandy as an administrator and the participants as school support staff. She maintained a middle ground between her role as an administrator, controlling and focusing the workshop, and as a colleague and woman, sympathetic to the difficulties they face on the job. Maintaining a middle ground, however, is not always easy to accomplish, particularly when dealing with men in

administrative positions. When Sandy descries her working relationships with women across a range of jobs—administrative, teaching, and secretarial—she frequently mentions how her position allowed her to help female colleagues. Her representations of her relationships with women are presented as uncomplicated and free from conflict. However, when she describes her working relationships with men, especially men in administrative positions, conflicted discourses are much more prominent. Dealing with men who are either her

Page 108 bosses or co-workers is difficult business for Sandy, not least because she considers her male bosses and colleagues incompetent:

So I think as a career woman who really takes herself seriously and has worked hard and continues to work hard, it just is so aggravating to see, incompetence. I don't know if it's just a male thing, but all I have to work with at my level is men. Maybe if I had another fifteen years, I could find an incompetent female at the top too; maybe that's going to give us access to be incompetent at the top. But right now what I see is incompetent men. Women who go into teaching, Sandy says, are all "first class," in contrast to the incompetent male teachers who are all second class." However, despite their incompetence, the men get promoted to administrative jobs through the "old boy network." While she does not use the key phrases "traditionally" or ''atypical," the point Sandy makes is that although it is typical for women teachers to be excellent educators, it is atypical for men:

My experience is, that if you were to ask most administrators who are [the] better teachers, men or women, there would not be one bit of hesitation and they would tell you women. Because still our society discriminates so that if you're a mean, and if you're—I call 'em first-class, second-class and third-class citizens: i.e., [first-class is] healthy self-concept, reasonably attractive and intelligent, you don't mess with public education, at any level elementary, middle or high school. And so we have second-class men who are teaching in public schools, but we have first-class women. This is a result, certainly, of the institutionalized discrimination that our whole society reflects. But within education we women have no reason to feel inferior. In fact, I would say that most of us [women] have a real strong feeling that we are superior to the males with whom we teach, because we are! I mean, that's just the way it is. Sandy's explanation for there being more "second-class" men in teaching is that better men—"first-class" men—choose not to enter public education. Because teaching is historically a women's profession and therefore available to a wider range of women, it can attract the best women into its fold. Further, because the women who teach are "first class," we can infer that they have the positive

Page 109 qualities of self-esteem, intelligence, and attractiveness. With irony, she notes that even though teaching is still dominated by "first-class" women, incompetent "second-class" men flood the administration. It is interesting that Sandy believes that men in administration think that women are better teachers. Yet these same men do not work to promote women, making it rather obvious that they are happy to praise women as long as they stay in classrooms caring for children. Although Sandy knows she is exaggerating when she implies that all men in teaching are "secondclass" citizens, what she invests in is a discourse that asserts that typical male teachers are inferior to typical female teachers.

One reason that Sandy may take up this particular discourse is because she has internalized society's message that teaching is women's work and is thus inferior to male-dominated professions. Sandy's assertions about female superiority in education may be somewhat defensive, staving off the discomfort created by being in a profession that is so devalued by society. As a woman who sometimes invests in the patriarchal discourse that devalues traditional female roles, but who finds herself in a job that is considered women's work, Sandy might feel conflicted and look for ways to resolve this discomfort. Sandy remembers deciding to become a teacher because she was so deeply influenced by a high school English teacher she had who took a special interest in her. She does not suggest that she ever considered any other profession. Petra Munro (1991) suggests that when women decide to become teachers, they are taking up the dominant ideology that teaching is an appropriate female profession. Because taking up this position disadvantages women, they find ways to reconcile negative images of teachers with positive images of themselves. For Sandy, the reconciliation takes place both by her denial of the negative stereotypes of women and by her self-representation as one of the superior women in teaching. Thus, while she invokes the patriarchal discourse of the inferiority of teaching by saying that only "secondclass" men go into it, she also subverts it by making clear that "first-class" women dominate the profession. Sandy's narrative demonstrates that whenever possible, she takes up a discourse that allows her to be positioned to her advantage. This is the "investment" in a discourse that Hollway (1989) maintains is desired as a result of uneven power distribution based on gender and is continued because it has personal benefits. When talking about women's work such as housework, Sandy positions herself outside of it by saying she is more male; however, when

Page 110 talking about teaching Sandy does not describe herself as "more male" even though she is ambitious and aggressive, characteristics more typically associated with men. Why would she describe herself as more male, though? If she takes up a discourse of female superiority in the teaching profession, then there is every reason to assert her womanhood. By declaring the superiority of women, she positions herself not only above her male colleagues but above her female colleagues as well. That is, despite how superior women in general are, she is the one who has achieved the highest professional status in that school system. Taking up the discourse of men's inferiority in educational work may invest her with a sense of pride as a woman, but in daily interactions, working with incompetent men is mostly a source of frustration and anger for Sandy. During the spring of 1991, Sandy was having an especially difficult time in her job. She had been asked to attend a number of meetings with school administrators and teachers' union leaders. The purpose of the meetings was to decide on the process teachers should follow to file a grievance against the school administration. Sandy was asked to attend the meetings so that she could design a workshop for the teachers once the parameters of the process were established. As she explains, her role was to be an "implementor, not an ideas person." She expected to come out of the meetings with concrete ideas for implementing the workshop. However, she discovered that at the meetings, the participants did a lot of talking without getting anything done. When Sandy confronted them about their lack of progress and their inability to make any useful decisions, there was a great deal of anger and tension. From this experience of confronting the union leaders and school administrators, Sandy discovered that in challenging their power, she had to face her own disempowerment and vulnerability. Further, this experience affirmed for her that when dealing with conflict between men and women at work, being a woman meant having limited discourses available to take up to resolve the friction:

But it's hard, and I think this is the thing that it brings to mind that I want to talk to you about: it's hard for a woman, for fear of being typed as "bitchy." You know, assertiveness is a lot of times equated with bitchiness, and bitchiness means unreasonableness. And so what you've got is sort of an automatic means of intimidating women who are in high positions that is very effective, even though unspoken. Just a few words or even the raise of an eyebrow from a man

Page 111 can give that message to a woman in that position that she may be—you have to always ask yourself, "Am I being unreasonable? Do I have enough evidence to substantiate this position that I'm taking? And is the position that I'm taking reasonable so that it isn't one of these intuitive, emotional kinds of responses?" Sandy's questions about how, as a woman, she should speak, act, and react in the presence of male bosses and colleagues are profound. They illustrate how patriarchal power disempowers strong, intelligent, capable women like herself. Her questions about her own reasonableness and her fear of responding with intuition and emotion remind us how, under patriarchy, misogynist concepts of women as "bitchy" and "irrational" have the effect of becoming the "truths" of femaleness, which serves as part of the regulation of women (Walkerdine 1990, 135). Such fictions about what it means to be female inscribe themselves even on quite ''reasonable," thoughtful, and controlled women like Sandy, filling them with self-doubt and self/woman-hate which, in turn, compromises their self-esteem, further destabilizes their subjectivity, and fosters the creation of work environments that feel hostile to them. Under patriarchy, as Sandy puts it, women's "assertiveness is a lot of times equated with bitchiness, and bitchiness means unreasonableness"; therefore, women are denied access to a discourse in which assertiveness signifies, in positive terms, career ambition, competence, and professional seriousness. But how does patriarchy function? How are men able to intimidate women, even "women who are in high positions," by "the raise of an eyebrow? or a "few words"? How is the intimidation so effective that it takes place automatically and may therefore be, as Sandy says, "unspoken"? If we understand the "raised eyebrow" as symbolic of a form of discipline for women who speak or behave as women, then Foucault's ([1977] 1984b) genealogy of discipline and punishment is helpful for locating how the male "raised eyebrow" acts as a form of discipline or punishment. Foucault suggests that with all forms of discipline or punishment, it is the body that must be subjugated; we can extend this claim by asserting that the female body is the subject and object for discipline and punishment by male bodies. Discipline, in this case, takes the form of subjugating femaleness or the female body—even if that femaleness is fictionalized, as Walkerdine (1990) maintains. Foucault further states that "subjection … may be … subtle, make use of neither weapons nor of terror and yet remain of the physical

Page 112 order" ([1977] 1984b, 173). The raised eyebrow is one such subtle strategy for exercising power and disciplining women. The discipline serves to remind women that they may not speak as women : they may not give "intuitive" or "emotional" responses, these fictionalized "truth-effects" of women. Because women under patriarchy have internalized the negative image of speaking as women, it even becomes unnecessary for the eyebrows to be raised, or for words to be spoken: the disciplining occurs inside each woman, painfully inscribing her with self-censorship and profoundly sharking her subjectivity. In this way, male norms and their underlying misogyny function as a "perpetual penality that traverses all points and supervises every instant … compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes " (original emphasis, Foucault [1977] 1984b, 195). Thus, for Sandy, being able to talk openly at these meetings and to confront what she perceives is male incompetence means being able to resist judging her own woman's voice as unnatural, inferior, and different. As Walkerdine explains, resistance also means accepting the dangerous power of speaking even though it presents "such a threat to masculine rationality, and the bourgeois and patriarchal power which it underpins"; it also means "stepping over the gender divide," (1990, 143) which is not an unfamiliar position for Sandy in other situations.

Sandy knows that stepping over the gender divide at work is dangerous. However, she also knows that suppressing her own power means living an insupportable contradiction. Sandy sees that her choices for action are between only two options. She can asserts her power, which will result in being seen as a "bitch" who requires discipline and punishment, or she can be "flirty" and feminine, so that the male power is not threatened and she might get her way. Sandy weighs out these options for responding. She says she can "play it straight" which means "not being afraid to be assertive … even at the chance that people would interpret it as bitchy. That's one, sort of one approach.'' Alternatively, she knows that women can resort to.

female types of manipulation in order to get what you want. Now, I would have gotten along a lot better in those meetings with the men there if I had been a lot more soft spoken and a lot more conciliatory and rolled my eyes and been a lot more flirty. We may have gotten a lot farther. But that's just not my style. Page 113 In this instance, Sandy is conscious that the performance of femininity sometimes gets results; however, it is a performance she emphatically rejects. Sandy explained to me that she decided that since it was not she who was "fucked up," she would no longer apologize "for being assertive" even if it did cause friction. The decision, from one perspective, came at a cost: she leaves herself open to her male colleagues' subtle (or otherwise) forms of continued and perhaps more emphatic discipline—both for being a woman and for not appearing feminine to the masculine gaze. On the other hand, Sandy experienced the decision to not apologize for her assertiveness as "a new place of growth," thus simultaneously challenging the performance of gender roles and rejecting the fictionalized feminine.

The Discourses of Emotions: "All Tiger and Lycra" Like everything else that is human, emotions in part are socially constructed; like all social constructs, they are historical products, bearing the marks of the society that constructed them. —Jagger 1989, 143 In her narratives discussing emotion, Sandy again works through the conflicted discourses of what it means to be female, but the discourse shifts away from gendered divisions of labor to how men and women are emotionally different. As with work, men and women are socialized to fill different emotional roles, especially in interaction with each other. How women are positioned in the discourses of emotion, as constituted by patriarchal society, has a profound effect on subjectivity. When women either resist or comply with the roles prescribed to them in their lived experiences, there is a splitting of subjectivity. In the first excerpt, Sandy reflects on her parents as she attempts to make sense of how emotions are gender-defined. In particular, she wrestles with what it means for women to be emotionally strong. Note that she uses the key phrase "traditional roles," and there is another use of the role reversal:

And in some ways my parents are reversed as far as traditional roles, in my dad being more of the nurturer and my mom being more strong…. Mom's emotionally much, much Page 114

stronger than my father, and I'm kind of a blend of them, but really I think I'm more like my father in the emotional realm than I am like my mom. My mom, she's just a, she is so steely. Dad's the more soft, as far as the emotional one. Her attitude toward anything sort of emotional is, "if you are logical about it, it'll fall in place. And if it doesn't, then just don't talk about it." Before discussing how Sandy represents her own emotional investments, it is necessary to understand the term "emotion." The term emotion has been used to describe phenomena as diverse as physiological responses to physical or situational stimuli, deep depression, or a person's overall mood (Jagger 1989). Emotion can be seen as unintentional, as in a response to hunger, or as intentional and contextual, as in the way one might respond to the death of a person with whom one has a particular type of relationship. Further, as Jagger explains, in Western epistemology, "emotion has been associated with the irrational, the physical, the natural, the particular, the private, and of course, the female" (129). "Emotional" is usually used in contrast to the term "rational,'' which has "been associated with the mental, the cultural, the universal, the public, and the male" (129). In this binary structuring of these terms, rationality, as a male trait, is given cultural value, while emotion, as a female trait, is devalued. Catherine Lutz (1988) identifies a second binary construct in which emotion is contrasted to "estrangement or disengagement." Emotion in this pair connotes the warmth and aliveness of an individual and her/his ability for deep understanding. It is further associated with life, community, relationship, the subjective, the natural, the authentic, commitment, morality, and the female. In contrast, the terms estrangement or disengagement are associated with death, alienation, individualism, the objective, the cultural, the contrived, nihilism, amorality, and the male. Lutz explains that "[w]hile the emotional is generally treated as the inferior member of the set in the [emotional/rational] contrast, here the evaluation is reversed. It is better, most would agree, to be emotional than to be dead or alienated" (1988, 57). Emotion, then, is defined similarly in both sets of binaries, but is evaluated differently in Western epistemology. In the first set, when emotion is contrasted to reason, emotion is devalued; in the second set, when emotion is contrasted to disengagement, emotion is valued. Given that emotion is evaluated differently in these two binary constructs, it is important to recognize that emotion is always about someone or something;

Page 115 therefore, the social context or personal relations in which emotions are expressed and lived are critical to an understanding of the discourses of emotions. Lutz's (1988) identification of a second pair of binary constructs regarding emotions is significant because it attests to the ways that women are influenced by the specific sociocultural discourses of emotions. In addition, it allows us a more playful and open interpretive framework with which to examine Sandy's narratives. That emotion is associated with the female in both binary sets but can be evaluated as either good or bad suggests that there are sound reasons for women to feel conflicted about their emotional investments and their presentation of emotions. Further, the almost simultaneous valuing and devaluing of emotion as good and bad creates a need for women to use multiple discourses to make sense of how emotion is subjectively experienced. In her narratives, Sandy contrasts emotion both with reason and with estrangement/disengagement as male attributes, and she associates emotion with the female. She frequently uses the term "nurturing" to describe emotional connection, the terms "strong" and "steely" to infer disengagement, and the term ''logical" to describe reason. Sandy explains that she uses the term "nurturing" to mean showing affection and being understanding rather than providing nourishment or protection. She also uses the term "emotion" in her personal narratives as synonymous with understanding, sympathy, caring, and openly disclosing inner feelings and thoughts. Given these constructs of emotion, what does it mean for Sandy to describe her parents as role-reversed in her narratives? Most problematic is Sandy's description of her mother. Take, for example, Sandy's assertion that her mother is "so steely." Although Sandy says with great pride that her mother is "emotionally much, much stronger than my father,"

Sandy also expresses disappointment that her mother is "so steely." By "steely," Sandy means that her mother's lack of physical demonstrativeness and sympathy, and her admonitions to her as a child and adolescent not to "cry or get upset," made Sandy feel "isolated and alienated." Thus, Sandy's evaluation of her mother as emotionally strong and steely resides in the discourse of emotion as connection and life-giving warmth. In this discourse, emotion is contrasted to disengagement, alienation, and a cold hardness. It is therefore a negative evaluation. By cultural standards, because Sandy's mother does not exemplify the female in her emotional character, she is "rightly" judged as participating in a role reversal.

Page 116 Sandy also uses the term emotion in contrast to reason to describe her mother. Sandy says that her mother was "logical" about emotional things, in the sense that her mother did not outwardly display emotional reactions to events. She did not become emotive, as in crying; rather, she had a hold on her emotions or perhaps repressed them. As Sandy explains, her mother believed that emotions could be treated logically so that events would "fall in place." Where logic would not help, her mother suggested that you "just don't talk about it." In this context, Sandy's evaluation of her mother as emotionally strong resides in the discourse of emotion as compared to reason. However, although reason is valued over emotion in this binary set, Sandy evaluates her mother negatively for being logical and less emotional. Although the role reversal would seem to place Sandy's mother in a position to be both culturally valued and evaluated positively by Sandy, this is not the case. Sandy's mother is twice condemned: first, for being detached and ''male" and second, for being rational and "male." If, as Jagger (1989) asserts, emotions are partially socially constructed, then is Sandy's disappointment with her mother's lack of emotional warmth a socially constructed response? What had Sandy been socialized to expect of her mother that her mother could not fulfill? One of our most prevailing cultural stereotypes is that women are naturally more emotional than men; therefore, we expect women to behave more emotionally. As Jagger explains, women "along with some groups of people of color, are permitted and even required to express emotion more openly" (1989, 141; see also Lutz 1988; Spelman 1989). Many wives, for example, are tacitly expected to feel and manifest emotions for their husbands who have been socialized to suppress certain expressions of emotion, especially sadness and fear. Like Shakespeare's Lear, men do not want womanly water drops to stain their manly cheeks; however, they are allowed and even expected to feel the more manly emotion of anger (Spelman 1989, 264). Spelman further argues that anger, expected of men in dominant groups, is an emotion not tolerated in subordinate groups, especially women and blacks. Lutz suggests that the image of subordinate groups as emotional and therefore inferior is maintained by dominant culture in order to conserve their power. Wendy Hollway's (1989) research on heterosexual couples also examines how men and women split emotional roles. Hollway finds that in order to maintain gender-appropriate roles with regard to the "splitting of strength and weakness," both men and women suppress gender-inappropriate emotions and project them on the other. Hollway further notes, however, that some women suppress

Page 117 emotions in order to avoid being evaluated negatively, thus subverting the stereotype that women are overemotional. According to Sandy, her mother neither manifested emotions for her father, nor emoted in stereotypical feminine ways. Further, Sandy's mother did not fill the expectations of motherhood that Sandy was socialized to expect as a child of the 1940s.7 She "betrayed" her motherly role by not being the parent who was the most nurturing (as in affectionate and understanding). This is also a discourse that mothers are socialized to reproduce in their daughters (Chodorow 1978). Sandy's socialized expectations of mothers and women make it difficult for her to describe her mother as filling a traditional female role. By using the role reversal in which her mother is more like a man because she is "steely and

logical," Sandy confirms that "in contemporary western culture, emotionally inexpressive women are suspect as not being real women'' (Jagger 1989, 141). Sandy offers her mother's difficult life growing up on a farm as an explanation for her having developed a logical stance toward difficult situations, but she does so with little comparison. She does not show sympathy for her mother who may have been unhappy to be spending her adult life on a farm, feeling unfulfilled by missed opportunities to do more than be a wife and mother, and experiencing exhaustion and boredom from the demands of her quotidian life.8 That Sandy is unable to analyze her mother as a woman is understandable. She can only see her mother through the eyes of a daughter, and this necessarily limited vision may contribute to the underlying disappointment Sandy experienced as a child and, to some extent, still feels as an adult.9 While her mother does not fit cultural stereotypes of being emotionally female, neither does her father fit cultural stereotypes of being male, especially for men from his generation. As Barbara Ehrenreich (1983) explains, men in the 1950s and earlier were expected to be the breadwinners of the family, and the normative image of the breadwinner was a responsible, hard-working, and wise (real rational) man. They were expected not to display emotional softness, vulnerability, and deep emotional involvement in the family. As breadwinners, men's careers were expected to take precedence over being fathers and husbands; as a result of this, men often became disconnected from their families. Sandy's description of her father both fits and does not fit these images. Sandy represents her father as both emotional and rational, female and male. He was a responsible breadwinner, working both a full-time job and on the farm when he came home. But with

Page 118 his first daughter, he was also understanding and affectionate, what Sandy calls "nurturing." When Sandy represents him as having role-reversed in being emotionally soft, she uses emotion in contrast to reason. She explains that unlike her mother, her father cried when he was deeply moved, and in this sense, he is portrayed as having a female characteristic. However, for Sandy, this reversal is not negative, as it was with her mother. The implication of this is that although a man's emotional softness may be devalued culturally, if he is a competent breadwinner, his image as a "real man" is not compromised. Because women's roles are so much more limited than men's, women are more easily compromised. Therefore, while men who are emotive may sometimes be derided as being womanly or suspected to be homosexual (Jagger 1989, 141–142), Sandy speaks with price about her father's emotional softness (womanliness), a sharp contrast to her tone when describing her mother's lack of emotional softness (manliness). Sandy also uses the term emotional in contrast to detachment and estrangement when describing her father. When Sandy describes how she worked outside with her father, she uses this as evidence of their closeness and of his emotional softness. Such evidence grounds her assertion that her father role-reverses, because in the discourse of emotion/detachment, the familial connection is associated with the female. In this context, her father is evaluated positively by Sandy. Therefore, her father, unlike her mother, is twice praised: first, for being emotionally soft and "female," and second, for being emotionally available and "female." Sandy seems able to subvert normative discourses of emotion in praising her father for taking on female qualities, but she is unable to praise her mother for taking on the masculine characteristics. This demonstrates how painful and conflicted the discourses of emotions are for women. With this difficulty in mind, how does Sandy, who in other contexts positions herself as male, position herself in this discourse of emotion? Sandy appears to be more invested in identifying with her father because she values his emotional softness, but she also represents herself as "a blend of them," strong like her mother and soft like her father. However, she almost immediately corrects herself to say that she is "more like [her] father." The correction is followed by the admission that her mother is "so steely," clearly a characteristic that Sandy does not want to exemplify. The correction, it seems to me, signals a conflict in Sandy about what it means for women to be emotional and about the problems that arise in taking up the different discourses of emotion. It also signals a conflict about which parent to look

to for identification with regard to emotions.

Page 119 If we return to Butler's (1990a,b) argument that gender identifies are neither formed temporally in infancy and early childhood nor fixed in binary ways, then Sandy's descriptions of her parents and her assertions about parental identification raise a number of interesting problems. Her descriptions point to the difficulty of formulating a new discourse of gender identity in everyday language and life. By casting her father as the emotionally soft one, she imbues him with womanly characteristics. She then says that the identifies more with him than with her mother. Such identification with her father affords her a position of advantage because it is again like having "a claim to the phallus," that which is denied women in their identification with the mother. Patriarchy teaches women that they must identify with the mother, even if in doing so they deny themselves status and power. While she does not reject her mother, Sandy does not choose to emulate her either. Sandy evades same-sex identification by saying that her mother is more like a man, allowing her to have same-sex identification with having to identify with a "real" mother/woman because she has, in effect, said that her mother is not a real woman. Because Sandy has internalized the pervasive ideology of women as lacking, she does not want to see her mother as a woman, for to do so would be to look in her mother's eyes and see herself mirrored back as equally lacking and without power. In contrast, identification with her father affords her the position of being both rational and emotional, and because the emotional trait is now linked to the father, it is not socially devalued.10 If such gender-defined and sexist ways of understanding emotion were eliminated from our language and psyche, and if, as Butler (1990a,b) wonders, we were not reduced to the fixed concepts of male/female and masculine/feminine, would Sandy's sense of self and her manner of self-representation be different? Would it be more affirming of women and women's differences? Rather than take up the impossible task of answering this question, I wan to juxtapose the above example of the discourse on gender and emotion with another that deepens (and confounds) my understanding of Sandy's representation of being female. When, in 1989, Sandy was diagnosed with cancer, she found:

The people that were really the strong ones were the women. But the men, although they cared and you could tell … like my former principal, when he saw me, he couldn't say anything…. But the people who were really capable and Page 120 had the more highly-developed emotional system to deal with those things, were all women. [They] could deal with it in a direct way. And so there was just this huge support group… Ten women got together and had this little good luck party for me [before surgery]… I guess I do tend to be on the wild side, a tad. And they gave me all these wonderful presents: condoms, and this wonderful, really tight slinky tight leopard outfit that's all tiger and Lycra… Those kinds of experiences—I wouldn't trade those for anything. And if it took a melanoma to feel that [emotional support], okay, well, so be it. In this story, being female means being emotionally strong and connected, especially in the face of grave illness. Women's emotional strength is used in contrast to reason and detachment, and in both cases, it is cast in a positive light: Sandy respects and admires "capable" emotional strength in her friends, and believes, to use her expression, that women are more "highly evolved" emotionally than men.11 Taking up a "woman is wonderful" (Wittig 1992)

discourse that extols women's natural capacity for emotional strength in a culture that values male reason over female emotions is tricky business. Using this discourse, Sandy seems to both take up cultural definitions and subvert their evaluations. That is, she uses patriarchy's construction of women as emotional and then she subverts it by praising rather than damning it, but without radically critiquing the essentialism of these categories. Further, when Sandy describes the emotional strength of her friends, she defines it differently than when she describes her mother's way of handling emotions. Although Sandy's women friends have emotional strength like her mother does, theirs is softened by their ability to talk about her illness, to openly display affection, and to show humor, as in the gifts they gave her. She is delighted by the gifts that acknowledge her as sexual. The party itself brings out into the open that they accept that she is facing cancer; although there's nothing logical they can do about it, these friends, unlike her mother, are able to talk about it—in fact, be silly about it—perhaps because cancer does defy logical conversation. This party might be called a "social therapy" (Jackson 1983, 138) in that it attempts to alleviate any feelings of isolation that Sandy may have experienced from emotions such as depression, anger, and sadness that often cause someone who is ill to withdraw from friends (Leder 1990, 75). By comparing various segments of Sandy's personal narratives, it is possible to piece together how she uses conflicted discourses of

Page 121 emotions. But these examples in no way present a full picture of the discourses Sandy takes up to describe what it means for women to have and to share emotions and to be cast in patriarchal society as emotional. The relationship between being female and having emotions, in fact, is the area in which Sandy seems to be the most conflicted. She believes that women need and have emotional strength, and she believes that emotional strength that is without humor, warmth, and nurturance means that some women have given up their "highly evolved" emotional capabilities. While being "more male" in work and home life is a means through which women can assert themselves and achieve equality, in their emotional lives, women should not aspire to be more like men. What Sandy might be grappling with is that men and women equally need to have the ability to face difficulties openly, to give support and nurturance to others, and to accept support and nurturance from loved ones. Both men and women, she might argue, need to stop suppressing and projecting emotions based on what is socially defined as gender appropriate. Sandy positions herself variously along a continuum of emotional strength and softness in her description about her shifting identifications with her parents, her praise of her women friends, and her criticism of her principal who, although he was upset about her illness, "couldn't say anything." The various positionings provide strong evidence supporting Hollway's (1989) assertion that people invest in competing discourses simultaneously. Sandy's personal narratives are full of descriptions of her attempts to connect emotionally with friends and lovers and her dedicated care of her sister's children and a foster daughter. These stories conflict with descriptions of her equally strong attempts to maintain emotional distances and to protect herself from having to take up others' emotional problems. In this sense, the leotard gift, "all tiger and Lycra," is a symbol of the emotional conflicts that fragment Sandy's subjectivity: she wants to be soft like Lycra, but dislikes its unnatural characteristics, and wants to be strong and sensual like the tiger, though perhaps fearing its power.12

The Discourse of Sexuality: "A Lot of Women are Bisexual and I Am" My object was to analyze sexuality as a historically singular form of experience…. It means an effort to treat sexuality as

Page 122 the correlation of a domain of knowledge, a type of normativity and a mode of relation to the self. —Foucault [1978] 1984a, 333 Normal sexuality, then, would name a particular result of the process of negotiation with both the external and the internal worlds; it would designate the achievement, on the part of the subject, of the kind of sexual organization that a particular society and its institutions have decreed to be normal. And in this sense, indeed, normal becomes totally coextensive and synonymous with normative . —original emphasis, de Lauretis 1994, 23 Sandy's narratives up to now have been presented and interpreted within the ideology of sexual difference in which difference is articulated through the male-female gender differences. My readings of her self-representations suggest that Sandy has invested in social discourses and personal narrative acrobatics that position her as a woman with masculine characteristics when this is an advantage to her because it gives her "a claim to the phallus." Each of the discourses examined have demonstrated not only how Sandy can call upon multiple, conflicted discourses to represent herself in ways that make her feel enabled, empowered, and perhaps comforted, but also how nonunitary subjectivity continually splits and fragments over the contested space of gender identity even while she may be attempting to represent a coherent self. However, my interpretations have thus far failed to acknowledge the sexual dimensions of living as a sexed/gendered being; in effect, they have de-eroticized Sandy. Further, in presenting and interpreting her gendered subjectivity as only consisting of a difference between masculinity and femininity, I have failed to acknowledge the heterosexual ideologies that the interpretive text unproblematically uses and reproduces. My failure is in having read Sandy's narratives of gendered subjectivity within the economy of "the straight mind" (Wittig 1992), where gendered identity is constituted singularly by the differences between masculine and feminine. This reading is insufficient for understanding just how fragmented subjectivity is in a society that equates, regulates, and sanctions only heterosexual sexuality as "normal" sexuality. Therefore, in this section of the chapter, I would like to examine Sandy's multiple self-representations of her sexuality and in doing so, demonstrate how an analysis of gendered subjectivity must be combined with an examination of sexual subjectivity as well.

Page 123 When Sandy and I met for the first interview, she told me that she had been married to Dan for twenty-seven years and had engaged in a few extramarital affairs with other men with his knowledge. She told me that she always thought that she "would end her life with another woman." In a later interview, she said that "a lot of women are bisexual, and I am." After she and Dan divorced, she married Robert. Looking back at her life history narratives, I found that Sandy had articulated these various seemingly "conflicted" self-representations concerning her sexuality. That is, she said she was bisexual, she expressed longing for a lesbian relationship, and as an adult, she was involved exclusively in heterosexual relationships. In one interview early in our work, she recalled the beginnings of sexual activity:

My first sexual experience was with a woman—a seventh-grade girl. I was probably twelve. And we went, we did what we knew to do, which wasn't all that much, but we went as far as we knew that we could go, or that we knew to go. And then it broke my heart, because she started dating a boy, you

know, a man. I never really felt guilty about it or anything. I mean, we didn't hurt anybody else; it was just sort of experimentation really more than anything. .

In this narrative, Sandy clearly names this experience a sexual one; however, she recalls that at that time, it was an activity done with an almost childlike naiveté, presumably, about what two female bodies can do sexually together. She claims for her young self both lack of knowledge and innocence about what they were doing. And yet, that she is unsure whether to use the words "girl/woman" or "boy/man" in this narrative suggests acknowledgment of this time in her life as a transitional period from "girlhood" into "womanhood''—that is, from childhood innocence into adult sexuality in which sexual activity is symptomatic of the transition. She also claims that she "never really felt guilty about it or anything" and reasserts the harmlessness or innocence about what they were doing by stating that they didn't harm anyone in the doing. Sandy seems to be both defensively asserting the rightness of what they did by saying it was not guilt-inducing for her nor harmful to anyone else, while diminishing its importance in her life by calling it experimentation. Two things stand out in this narrative: first, her claim that she did not feel guilt and second, her recollection of feeling that her heart had been broken. The experience vividly recalled, this was a

Page 124 relationship that meant something to her, presumably, both erotically and socially. That Sandy experienced this loss of a female friend and her subsequent claim of not having felt guilty about the lesbian "experimentation" at a crucial time in her sexual development raises the question of what the experience of losing this intimate friend had on her subjectivity and gendered/sexual identity. It is this intersection of (non)guilt and loss that I wish to explore below. One way to think about her experience as narrated here is that for her, it was her first awakening of herself as not complying with "normal" (that is, normative) heterosexuality. This sexual "experimentation" must have raised her awareness that she was not living up to society's rules for girls to desire, and more importantly in our androcentric society, to respond to the desires of boys. Thus, I find it hard not to be skeptical about her claim of not having "felt guilty about it or anything.'' The veracity of her innocence is further called into question not only by what we know about adolescent sexuality (even in rural midwestern communities in the 1950s!), but by her own subsequent statement in which she asserts that "we didn't hurt anybody ." Her claim to have not "hurt anybody" implies a knowledge (conscious or unconscious) that the prohibition against what they were doing was seen as harmful to a homophobic society. Further, her statement that it wasn't harmful to "anybody else " suggests that there was harm done to her. It is not surprising that she perceived that she was harmed (beyond the broken heart), for as Butler reminds us, "prohibitions, which include the prohibition on homosexuality, work through the pain of guilt" (1993, 65). Another way to read this narrative of sexual experience and loss is through de Lauretis's "passionate fiction … of the processes of lesbian subjectivity" (1994, 258). In this feminist rethinking of Freud's (1966) concept of the psychic process of "disavowal," de Lauretis provides interesting theoretical material for thinking about Sandy's adolescent experience specifically and her nonunitary subjectivity more generally.13 Disavowal, like repression, is an "egodefense," a strategy for maintaining a sense of coherence even while it splits the ego as the ego negotiates both with the "instinctual demands of id and superego, and [with demands] from the external world" (de Lauretis 1994, 261). In Freudian terms, what the female disavows and acknowledges is the lack of a penis, which is the castration complex. As de Lauretis explains,

The castration complex in establishing the paternal prohibition of access to the female body (to the female body in

Page 125 the mother: incest; in oneself: masturbation; and in other women: perversion), as well as the "inferiority" of women, inscribes that lack in the symbolic order of culture, in terms of sexual difference, as biological, "natural," and irremediable lack—the lack of a penis. (de Lauretis 1994, 262) While for Freud the lack of the penis is central to the female ego, for de Lauretis what is central in terms of lesbian subjectivity is the "lack of a libidinally invested body-image, a feminine body that can be narcissistically loved" (1994, 262). This lack, she argues, is what "threatens the subject most deeply," and therefore, "what the female subject of perverse desire must disavow then, is not the perception of a missing maternal penis (actually a non-perception) … but rather the absence (also a non-perception) of a female body-image" (263). The threat of the erasure of a libidinally, narcissistically invested body-image and the need for a disavowal of the erasure (as an ego defense in order to be able to function in the world) could only be occasioned by a world that is both homophobic and misogynist. The importance of de Lauretis's articulation of disavowal in attempting to make sense of Sandy's narrative is that it asks us to consider the possibility of Sandy's sexual experimentation as a moment in which these processes of prohibition/acknowledgment and disavowal/acknowledgment are manifested in experience. That is, if prohibitions and disavowal are always supplemented by acknowledgment, then we may read this experience as having forced Sandy's acknowledgment of both the prohibition against lesbian sexuality (her experimentation) and "the absence of a female body-image" because of the prohibition to the other female body. Together, these acknowledgments create an internal tension and anguish that may be assuaged by the acceptance of the libidinally invested female body. Such is the stuff, de Lauretis argues, of which perverse desire is made. I would add, such is the stuff of which fragmented subjectivity is made. Thus, I read this event in Sandy's life as a critical point in which she wrestled with her sexuality, her sense of self as a sexual person, and her guilt at having had and perhaps her fear of continuing to have "perverse desire." But what happened to the same-sex desire she expressed in this narrative? What effects might her heightened (conscious or unconscious) awareness of the prohibitions against homosexuality have had on her adolescent subjectivity? According to Butler's (1993) reading of Freud, "this prohibition against homosexuality is homosexual desire turned back upon itself; the self-beratement of

Page 126 conscience is the reflexive rerouting of homosexual desire" (original emphasis, 1993, 65). Did Sandy's perverse desire get "rerouted," thus attesting to the power of a heterosexist society to inscribe itself on us in the name of normativity? Does Sandy's admission that she has never again had a sexual relation with a woman (despite her belief that she "would end her life with another woman") signal that she accepted the loss of her friend (and a libidinally invested body-ego)? Does it also signal that she internalized the prohibitions against lesbian sexuality in her adolescent (and adult) sexual practices? Or does the loss or "rerouting'' of "perverse desire" become incorporated into one's subjectivity, haunting the body's now heterosexual boundary, as Butler says, "as an internal ghost of sorts" (1993, 65)? Following this experience with her seventh-grade friend, Sandy seems to have had avoided sexual relationships, not only with girls, but with boys as well. In fact, she strongly asserts her resistance to heterosexual relationships when she recalls that even in high school,

My breasts were never touched by any man. It was almost a point of honor: that might be what they're interested in, but I'll be damned if they're going to have the satisfaction of ever touching me. Sandy not only defiantly kept men at a distance, she also did not regain a closeness with any women:

I didn't have sex with anybody, male or female, until I met my husband. And even at that point, I was a virgin. [Until then I] was never touched by any man. I mean, the only person that ever touched me was that one girlfriend of mine when I was in the seventh grade. Continuing to recall her high school social-sexual experiences, Sandy remembers that she "was friends with women to a point," suggesting a distancing, and that she mainly saw men as "insecure," and as "sex objects" whom she "manipulated" by getting them to flirt with her and like her without having "actual physical sex." It was as if she not only avoided the risk of intimacy with another woman (perhaps to avoid social censure, perhaps because she was afraid of being hurt again—or maybe she just lost that lovin' feeling) but also attempted to perform the role of normalcy as a feminine flirt by "making" boys desire her—and this is important—without

Page 127 getting involved sexually with them. Her game playing when she was a young adolescent with boys, she also explained, included "stealing other girls' boyfriends," which she was quite proud of being able to do at that time. In a sense, these actions may be seen as a way to not only avoid, but sabotage others' heterosexual relationships in retaliation for a boy's having replaced her when her friend entered into a heterosexual relationship. Or, recalling Riviere's (1929) analysis of "womanliness as a masquerade," in which femininity is exaggerated (which might be seen in contrast to Sandy's masquerade of masculinity in her role-reversals), Sandy's flirting behavior with males may disguise a "masculinity complex." I don't want this reading of her young adult experiences to signify that this one lost relationship in Sandy's life fixed her forever sexually as a repressed lesbian, or as a lesbian who denied herself lesbian relationships because of the hurt suffered, or as a heterosexual because of a successful "rerouting of homosexual desire." What I do want to propose is that in the above narratives, the varied self-representations of herself as sexually involved with another female, a hurt seventh-grader, a high school femme fatale and manipulator of men, we see the disturbing effects of heteronormativity on the subjectivity of an adolescent. With Britzman, I use the term "heteronormativity" within a sociopolitical critique to refer to "how normalcy becomes produced and sexualized as heterosexuality, that is, how normalcy becomes inserted into sex. As well, the term 'heteronormativity' begins to get at how the production of deviancy is intimately tied to the very possibility of normalcy" (1995, 8). Understanding the effects of heteronormativity helps us to empathize with the difficulties Sandy must have had finding ways to express and understand her sexuality in relation to either/both men or/and women in the external world of institutions and cultural prohibitions. With prohibitions surrounding sexual relationships among adolescents but especially same-sex relationships, as well as her need in high school (as she explained to me) to stay out of heterosexual relationships where she could get pregnant or would have to quell her own interests and intelligence to please a boy, Sandy must have felt that there were few options during her teenage years for sexual expression and fulfillment of desires. As an adult, however, Sandy has attempted to explore and negotiate the complexities of her sexuality and sexual desires. For example, while still married to Dan, she told me that she would like to have a relationship with Dan and his best friend Julie who is lesbian:

Page 128 And Dan's best friend Julie is a lesbian. I'd be completely happy if it would just be Julie, Dan, and me. I think I'd have the best of both worlds. And so I think I do have—not sexually with Julie—but I do think that I have the best of both worlds like that.

What this relationship would actually be is somewhat ambiguous in this brief passage with its "now you see it, now you don't" expression of same-sex desire. It is as if she is trying to convince herself that being close to Dan's lesbian best friend while being in a sexual relationship with him only is a perfect triad. That is, she first says, "[I]f it would be just Julie, Dan, and me … I'd have the best of both worlds," which, in her use of the tentative "if it would be" implies that the best of both worlds does not yet exist. This is followed by the admission that she does not have a sexual relationship with Julie, but then she corrects herself by saying that she does have the best of both worlds through this triadic relationship despite the lack of sexual relationship with Julie. If we recall Sandy's statement that she is bisexual, how could this configuration of the triad be understood as "the best of both worlds"? Recent theories of bisexuality, while diverse, all agree on a few issues. First, they argue that to theorize bisexuality is to reject universalizing or generalizing definitions and to instead focus on the specificity of individuals, to "emphasize the relationships between particular locations at particular times" (Hemming 1995, 51). Second is Elizabeth Wilson's (1993) rejection of the monosexual epistemology of both homosexual and heterosexual theorizing that suggests that "bisexuality is either the same as homosexuality, but weaker, or different from it, in which case it must be in the sphere of heterosexuality" (Cited in Hemming 1995, 50); for bisexual theorists, this position is untenable because it maintains the invisibility of bisexuality. However, it is difficult to break the hold of the binary or monosexual epistemology and to make a paradigm shift (Firestein 1996). As a result, "bisexual women are generally either classified as lesbians or heterosexual" (Knopf 1996, 142). Third, bisexual theorists agree that "there are probably as many definitions of bisexuality among bisexual women as there are bisexual women; there is clearly no consensus either on what bisexuality is, or on who is bisexual" (Rust 1995, 207). However, what seems to have consensus is that bisexuality can refer to "actual sexual behavior" or "a potential for actual sexual behavior" as well as emotional or sexual feelings of attraction (Rust 207) for both males and females even if the attraction is never acted upon (Rust 1992).

Page 129 Deborah Gordon further explains that "for most bisexual women, ticking off the sex of their current and recent sexual partners would not convey the substance of what they mean when they say 'I am bisexual'" (1983, 144). Bisexuality then, refers to "a fluid movement between relationships, between sincere emotional, physical, and intellectual ties to a variety of people" (Knopf 1996, 158). The mobility of bisexuality (Gibian 1992) is explained by Clare Hemming as "the positive desire not to label bisexuality as one particular set of desires, choices or behaviors" (1995, 51). Bisexuality is a potential as well as an act, and it is a fluidity of emotional, intellectual, and/or sexual attractions. Finally, as Maria Pramaggiore explains, bisexuality is also an epistemology:

Bisexual epistemologies—ways of apprehending, organizing, and intervening in the world that refuses one-to-one correspondences between sex acts and identity, between erotic objects and sexualities, between identification and desire—acknowledge fluid desires and their continual construction and deconstruction of the desiring subject. (1996, 3) Given these understandings of bisexuality, we may read Sandy's narratives as a lived confirmation of the ways that bisexual theorists talk about bisexuality. Moreover, as an interpretive practice, by reading Sandy's above narrative "through the lens of bisexuality, there is a possibility to escape the either/or mentality of the hetero/homosexual binaries" (Knopf 1996, 144). According to Sandy's description of her relationship with Julie and Dan, her claim to have "the best of both worlds" allows for the fluidity of her bisexuality because she does have a relationship with both Julie and Dan that includes some combination of the emotional, sexual, and intellectual. Her narrative, therefore, may be a reminder that some bisexuals "are happier and more secure receiving sexual, emotional, and romantic support from a variety of people instead of only one person" (Rust 1996, 131–132). But the fact that initially she used a tentative statement in imagining what would be the best of both worlds compelled

me to alternative interpretations as well, particularly when I recalled the strength of the longing for a woman expressed in the following narrative:

And since I've never really had a sexual relationship, other than that one that I was telling you about that wasn't really Page 130 orgasmic when I was young, with a woman, I really don't have any idea what it would be like, but I think it would be pretty powerful. I think that if I ever experienced that, I probably would never want to be with a man again because I think there would be an honesty that I have not been able to establish, at least not yet, with a man. I would like to—I wonder what that would be like. I think there would be an honesty. And maybe I'm deluding myself to think that. In this narrative, Sandy envisions a same-sex relationship as the ultimate experience, both in terms of "powerful" sexual pleasure and emotional honesty and intimacy.14 Narrated to me at a time when her marriage with Dan was disintegrating, this poignant narrative more than anything else Sandy told me conjures up Butler's (1993) image of the ghost. Butler explains that unfulfilled lesbian desire becomes incorporated into one's subjectivity, haunting the body's heterosexual boundary "as an internal ghost of sorts." Can she have the best of both worlds in the absence of a sexual relationship with another woman? Despite this expression of her longing for a same-sex relationship, after she and Dan divorced, Sandy married Robert, a man with whom she had been having a relationship for some time. I asked Sandy why she married another man given that she had told me that she was bisexual and that she always thought she would "end her life with a woman." She explained that Robert was different from most men—again using the gender role reversal seen earlier. She said that he "embodies the [emotional] characteristics that [she] found very attractive in women." In other words, having married Robert, Sandy maintains that she does not need a woman to have the kind of intimate relationship she dreamed of. Sandy's articulation of the unimportance of her partner's "maleness" initially was troubling to me because it negates the importance of how meanings of male and female differentiated (both materially and symbolically) bodies are inscribed on and may be catalysts to our sexual desires. That is, despite how imaginary, symbolic, overdetermined, invested, and produced bodies may be, bodies do matter (Butler 1993). Therefore, I found it difficult to accept the view that the particular sexed body is insignificant in a relationship. Was this an indication of my inability to "stop reading straight" (Britzman 1995)? Was it also an indication of my inability to "read and reread beyond dualistic hierarchies of binary desire" (Knopf 1996, 158) that is a part of both straight and lesbian epistemologies? The answer to both of these questions is yes and therefore

Page 131 suggests that I needed to adopt a "bisexual epistemology" in order to understand what Sandy was telling me about herself and her relationship with Robert. Adopting a bisexual epistemology meant that I needed to understand the fluidity of bisexual desire and believe Sandy when she told me that in Robert she had found a partner who gives her multiple pleasures and fulfills multiple desires. As Deborah Gordon claims, for many bisexual women,

It is not maleness itself which attracts us, nor do we seek something from men that we find lacking in women. Often we look for the same emotional and sexual qualities, the same spiritual and physical qualities, in men as in women. And the truth of our experience is that sometimes we do find those qualities in a man. (Gordon 1983, 146)

Further, according to Paula Rust, when a bisexual woman finds the qualities she desires in a partner, she may choose a monogamous relationship as Sandy did with Robert:

The cultural model of the monogamous relationship does work for many people, including many bisexuals, who find it possible to have their sexual, romantic and emotional needs met by a single other person and who find a person who can meet these needs. (Rust 1996, 131) Sandy's narratives about sexuality and sexual relationships are powerful reminders of the need to make sense of subjectivity as it is continually produced not only through gendered relations, but sexual relations and experiences as well. These narratives further suggest that narratives are meaningful to interpret because they help us to see the limitations placed on individuals by normative, causal, binary discourses of sex, gender, sexual practices, and desires.15

Playing with the Bisexual Phallus In the first section of this chapter, I analyzed Sandy's statements such as, "I'm the more male if you look at the malefemale thing," and, "I see my identity as far as desirable through male eyes," and her descriptions about role reversals where she positioned herself as masculine or male. I discussed how such positionings gave Sandy a "great confidence, a confidence that comes from making 'a claim to the phallus'" (Walkerdine 1990, 50). I said this again in my

Page 132 analysis of how she made being emotional a good characteristic of her father so that she could associate being emotional with being male. I suggested that her desire to position herself as male/masculine has had an important effect on her subjectivity in that she judges herself as successful by standards of normative masculinity. While these interpretations may have challenged androcentric thinking and provided alternative ways of understanding gendered subjectivity, they do not also challenge normative and heterosexist ideologies of gender difference. Reading Teresa de Lauretis's (1994) book, The Practice of Love , helped me to understand that the consequence of such interpretations is to imply that Sandy has a "masculinity complex," which de Lauretis, following Freud, explains is the heterosexual female wish for the castrated penis. This interpretation is normatively heterosexual because it accepts that to be female is to always mourn, however unconsciously, the castrated penis; thus, the penis—or more accurately, its symbolic surrogate, the phallus—maintains its privileged status in our social cognition, in the symbolic order, and, of course, in individual subjectivity. My focus on Sandy's disdain for that which is feminine also contributed to the interpretation that she has internalized this view of women as lacking (the penis) and (therefore) inferior—hence her invested assertions of her own masculinity. What I wish to question, then, is the way that my interpretations of her self-representation as masculine—as attempting to "claim the phallus"—accept that she is doing nothing more (and nothing less as well) than rejecting cultural stereotypes of men and women that do not allow her full expression of her gendered subjectivity. These stereotypes position her within the discourse of a masculinity complex. Is it possible that something more is at stake with regard to Sandy's subjectivity that has not been addressed in this simplified version of gendered subjectivity as sexual difference? That is, if we include in the matrix of Sandy's gender identity sexual practices and desires, and if we accept that "'identity' is an effect of discursive practices" (Butler 1990b, 17), then what happens to my previous analyses of gendered subjectivity? How would we be compelled to reinterpret Sandy's gendered subjectivity (her assertions of having masculine characteristics) if we take into account Sandy's narratives about her bisexual and lesbian desires and heterosexual relationships?

Butler's (1993) theory about the "lesbian phallus" offers a creative, although complex theory that I would like to use for rethinking

Page 133 Sandy's narratives. Butler suggests that the phallus (as a signifier of the penis) may be strategically and imaginatively restated as a lesbian phallus. First, Butler demonstrates that the phallus, as the signifier of masculine power, retains its power by its continual restatement both in language and in the imagination. But because the phallus as a signifier must be reiterated to retain its power, and reiteration leaves it open to challenge, change, and subversion, its power is vulnerable:

If the phallus is a privileged signifier, it gains that privilege through being reiterated. And if the cultural construction of sexuality compels a repetition of that signifier, there is nevertheless in the very force of repetition, understood as resignification or recirculation, the possibility of deprivileging that signifier. (Butler 1993, 89) Further, Butler demonstrates that the phallus, as a signifier, need not be directly linked to the penis; rather, it "has the capacity to symbolize in relation to other body parts" (84). Thus, if we think of the phallus as a floating signifier and hold that as a floating signifier it is open to subversive and imaginative restatements, then we can, if we so desire, imagine a lesbian phallus.16 The benefit of challenging the power of the phallus by imagining the lesbian phallus is that the lesbian phallus may allow for an "aggressive reterritorialization," one that will necessarily and ultimately challenge the stability of not only the phallus as a signifier of masculine power, but the very categories of masculine and feminine inasmuch as this binary distinction upholds the heterosexist symbolic order (Butler 1993, 86). But I want to push Butler's argument one step further and play with the idea of resignifying the phallus to account for bisexual subjectivity. If we can restate the masculine or paternal phallus as a lesbian phallus for the purpose of opening possibilities for understanding the processes of lesbian subjectivity, it seems to me that it is equally plausible to restate Butler's lesbian phallus as a bisexual phallus for the purpose of understanding bisexual subjectivity. For if the phallus can be restated to symbolize in relation to any body part, it must therefore have the mobility to signify the complex fluidity of the bisexual body and its desires. While restating the paternal phallus as bisexual runs the risk of reinscribing its relation with the penis, the risk of restating it only as lesbian inscribes it with the monosexism I am attempting to avoid in the interpretation of Sandy's narratives.17

Page 134 For the purposes of interpretive work, then, the bisexual phallus as a product of a non-heterosexist and non-monosexist imagination provides an alternative framework for thinking about Sandy's narratives and, therefore, provides yet another dimension for thinking about the complexity of subjectivity and gendered identity. Within this imaginative scheme, we are challenged to question my interpretations of the "masculinity complex" in Sandy's role reversals and my statements about her attempts to "claim the [masculine] phallus." What if we were to restate Walkerdine's (1990) assertion that for women there is a great confidence that comes from "making a claim to the phallus" by saying that a great confidence comes from making a claim to the bisexual phallus ? How would that help us to, if not rethink the interpretation of Sandy's narratives, at least engage with them, from the non-heterosexual/non-monosexual perspective that better honors Sandy's multiple self-representations of herself? The bisexual phallus, because it both unavoidably recalls masculine power (and its effects) while it simultaneously

transgresses and displaces this signification, creates a space in which to understand Sandy's role reversals as expressions of desire for a "power" that is not normatively circumscribed within the heterosexist, heteronormal, monosexist androcentric, and misogynist sociocultural script. To claim the bisexual phallus may foster, rather than punish as "unfeminine," Sandy's desires for recognition of her professional achievements, uninhibited self-expression, and the freedom to enjoy sexual pleasures that answer to her specific and multiple desires. Having a "claim to the bisexual phallus" shatters normative concepts of sex and gender by opening up the possibilities of multiple, endless resignifications in which power may reside in a person such as Sandy as the complex person she is, not as a woman attempting to be masculine, to gain a lost penis or to be a Superwoman. Thus, the bisexual phallus is a trope both for rethinking power without attaching it to either male or female power and for reconceiving the desire for a sense of wellbeing. That is, as an interpretive trope, the bisexual phallus aggressively and even playfully helps us to displace "the hegemonic symbolic of (heterosexist) [and monosexist] sexual difference" (Butler 1993, 91) in the interpretations. And after all, this displacement may be what Sandy's narratives unconsciously attempt in the first place.

In Praise of Non-Intelligibility Feminist postmodern psychoanalytic theories, lesbian, bisexual, and queer theories, feminist theories, and discourse analysis theories,

Page 135 all help us to rethink how we articulate what it means for each of us and those we study to be gendered, sexual beings in a particular cultural/social location. By rejecting essentializing ideologies of subjectivity, we have a tool that can be used to dismantle the discursive structures that seek to falsely stabilize individuals. Interpretive research especially has the opportunity to demonstrate ways that we can make sense of ethnographic or life history data using alternative ideologies that do not police identities, punishing them for unintelligibility from a normative stance. Sandy's narratives are instructive, for she tells a different story, one of incoherences and discontinuity among sex, gender, sexual practices, and desires. Although socialized to femininity as a female, she talks about herself as "masculine"; although female, she identifies herself as bisexual rather than heterosexual or lesbian; and although having lesbian sexual desires, she is exclusively involved in heterosexual practices. In the normative, heterosexist, homophobic, gendered world, such misalignments as those found in her "conflicted" narratives of sexuality and gender would render Sandy unintelligible. However, in conclusion, I want to suggest that it is her conflicted discourses that finally do make her intelligible if we are willing to read her narratives through alternative lenses. It is in her narratives and through her conflicted discourses that she is able to express her multiple desires and to represent the complex aspects of her sexuality and gendered experiences and senses of self. Thus, reading her narratives as conflicted in a negative or pathological sense (rather than as expressive of a more realistic mode of gendered/sexual subjectivity in which discontinuities are constitutive of subjectivity) may serve as a heterosexist and monosexist master in that it punishes her for not having sex, gender, practice, and desire in a relation of coherence. Sandy's narratives further give weight to the need to reject stable categories of sexuality and Oedipal fictions and to replace them with a "relatively open-ended process of sexual structuring " (original emphasis, de Lauretis 1994, 261). Sandy's narratives illuminate ways that she both consciously and unconsciously lives in a continual negotiation of her gender and sexuality. I think we all do. But our ability to negotiate our gender and sexuality, even in the face of strong yet often evanescent external (institutional, cultural, etc.) forces and internal pressures (instinctual drives) leaves open the possibility of subversive gender identities. These identities are not only not punished for nonunitary subjectivity, but they also pave the way for changing social structures and language. The possibility of negotiation also

Page 136 reminds those of us who do interpretive work to be open to multiple interpretations, reinterpretations, and playful interpretations. Most importantly, it reminds us (those of us who needed it) to learn the practices of ''not reading straight." And isn't this a sign of hope?

Page 137

6 Conclusion: The Signs of Hope I began this book with the assertion that feminist methodology challenges the masculinist modes of research embodied in the description of Paule Marshall's anthropologist-Juju man who asks "questions and more questions" of his participants without a word about himself. Feminist methodology, in contrast, encourages interpersonal and reciprocal relationships between researchers and the participants, and it breaks down traditional binary constructions of subjectivity/objectivity in the research relationship. The benefit of this methodology is that the richness of data collected may advance feminist theory and politics by allowing for greater understanding of women's subjectivities. I also claimed in the introduction that by reconceptualizing both methodology and subjectivity, feminist researchers could write "under the sign of hope," which may foster a better future for women. Hope, in this context, is grounded in the belief that feminist methodology "offers a powerful opportunity for praxis to the extent that it enables people to change by encouraging self-reflection and a deeper understanding of their particular situations" (Lather 1991, 56). Additionally, feminist methodology offers hope because it "can provide a valuable means for critical feminist researchers to begin to address the relationship between structural oppression and the realities of individual lives" (Weiler 1988, 59). I also began with the assertion that this book would be about the promises, possibilities, and limitations of feminist methodology. In each of the chapters of this book, I then attempted to address, in situated ways, the relational and interpretive concerns that emerged in my study, demonstrating how my own practices of fieldwork and interpretation variously resulted in fulfilled promises, glimpsed but ungrasped possibilities, or disappointing limitations and failures. I attempted to address these problems and benefits by speaking openly

Page 138 about my experiences with fieldwork and interpretation, and I attempted to be critically self-reflective of my practices. What I hope has become apparent from this book is that feminist methodology is as nonunitary as is human subjectivity. Feminist methodology resists normalization and attempts to falsely stabilize it; it is created through situated relationships and social contexts; it is internally conflicted as a sometimes conformist and sometimes subversive practice; it fragments with conflict; it is rife with shifting positions of power; it demands the freedom of mobility; and it is continually being constructed in language and discourse. Feminist methodology, like women's nonunitary subjectivity, is a means through which we may reinterpret the world, others, ourselves, and our lived experiences. As a nonunitary concept and practice, feminist methodology resists definition, since it must be understood as tentative, residing to a great extent in the idiosyncratic, subjective practices and beliefs of the person doing the research and interpretation. But feminist methodology does have a "herstory," and despite the multiplicity of meanings that are conveyed by the term "feminist methodology," the practices evoked in its name have significance to feminist

researchers. Therefore, I would like to end this book by taking up the question of what constitutes a feminist methodology through an overview of important work on feminist methodology and through closing reflections on my own research praxis.

What Is Feminist Methodology? In the introduction to the important book, Feminism & Methodology , Sandra Harding (1987) asked, "What is a feminist method?" She explained that the term "method" is all too often confused with the term "methodology." Similarly, in their review of numerous books and articles on feminist methodology, Stanley and Wise (1990) also noted that many authors use the terms method and methodology interchangeably. The difference, Harding (1987), Stanely and Wise (1990), and Taylor and Rupp (1991) explain, is that methods are research techniques, procedures, and practices, and methodologies are the theories or perspectives that inform the production of particular kinds of research and justify it in terms of its knowledge making. The distinction between methods and methodology is critical because methodology is deeply rooted in and should be consistent with the epistemological beliefs that a researcher brings to her

Page 139 inquiry. Feminist methodology, therefore, is understood to be deeply rooted in the feminist beliefs and feminist theories that the researcher brings into her work. Feminist methodology, therefore, as Lather asserts, is "research as praxis" (1991; see also Stanley, 1990). Reinharz (1992) suggests that because feminist research is guided by feminist theory, and because there are multiple definitions of feminism, it follows that "there are multiple feminist perspectives on social research methods" (1992, 241). However, within the diversity of perspectives, there are a number of common concepts across the different strands of feminist social science that make it possible to assert that there are multiple feminist methodologies—despite how elusive and vulnerable the concepts that constitute these methodologies really are. I have identified five of these concepts or issues that were critical to my work and that I would like to focus on: the social construction of gender, the study of women's diverse lives, the contexts of the research questions, the critical self-reflections of the researcher, and researcher-respondent relationships.

The Social Construction of Gender One of the most distinguishing features discussed in the literature on feminist methodology is the critique of the human construction of a binary gender/sex system in which women are hierarchically placed below or subsumed by men. In feminist theory and methodology, gender has been one of the fundamental categories used for analyzing and critiquing social and political relations and systems (Acker, Barry, and Esseveld 1991; Hartsock 1987; D. Smith 1987; Harding 1987; Reinharz 1992). The purpose of using gender as the primary analytic category is to account for and overturn patriarchal domination in order to create social change. As Patti Lather explains, the "overt ideological goal of feminist research in the human sciences is to correct both the invisibility and distortion of female experience in ways relevant to ending women's unequal social position" (1988, 571). For Lugones nad Spelman, feminist research "is, among other things, a response to the fact that women either have been left out of, or including in demeaning and disfiguring ways in what has been an almost exclusively male account of the world" (1983, 573). In feminist work by white, straight, middle-class theorists, sexism (rather than racism, class elitism, or homophobia) is typically placed at the forefront of analysis—although not necessarily excluding the ways that each of these may combine to form a system of domination.

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Using gender as the primary or single analytic category in feminist methodology is problematic, however, when it asserts that gender is the , rather than a , foundational form of domination. Using gender as the primary analytic category of feminist research may diminish the ways that race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and so on are equally constitutive of some women's understandings of themselves as subjects and of their experiences of marginalization, unequal treatment, domination, or oppression. Feminist women of color in particular note that feminist theory from U.S.-born, white, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian women tends to rely on gender as the sole category of critical analysis because sexism is the form of domination most relevant to them . For black women, however, according to Carole Boyce Davies, "the politics of race is so ubiquitous, so overt and overwhelming … they … subsume all other discourses," thus making it "difficult to fully articulate Black feminist positions…. Still," Boyce continues, the "combined politics of gender/race oppression are perhaps the most insidious" (1994, 30). bell hooks (1989) also critiques the use of gender as the sole category of analysis in feminist research. She suggests that such research is misleading because it masks the ways that women themselves participate in politics of domination and racism (see also Lerner 1990; Collins 1991; Lugones and Spelman 1983). In addition to practicing racism, especially in the form of white supremacy (Blee 1991) and class elitism, some feminists practice domination by their "lesbophobia," which Bette S. Tallen explains has caused "true divisiveness of the feminist revolution" (1990, 257). Additionally, Jewish feminists and "Third-World" feminists describe ways that Christian and "First-World" feminists treat them as invisible or colonize them (Martin and Mohanty 1989). Reflecting on how cancer had affected her life, Audre Lorde (1985) also noted that age and disability must be considered critical factors in women's experiences of oppression. What all of these critiques of feminism suggest is that numerous factors determine the social construction of femaleness and the diverse experiences of oppression (hooks 1989). These charges make clear that while gender is important as an analytic category, it is not the single most useful category of research for all women. Therefore, sexism, as one form of oppression, and gender, as one analytic category for feminist research, must be problematized, contextualized, and localized to include the variety of ways that women understand who they are, given their histories and current changing situations. Similarly, women who are privileged in this

Page 141 society (white, middle/upper class, Christian, and heterosexual women) must bring to the analysis of gender the ways that these privileges function for them in their lives. It is only through such complex and self-reflective analyses that feminists (of various dominant subject positions) can avoid the kind of universalizing or totalizing tendencies in their research that lumps all women into one similarly oppressed or marginalized category (Christian 1988a,b; Harding 1991; hooks 1989; Young-Bruel 1996). These critiques, however, do not mean that gender cannot or should not be used as an analytic category in feminist methodology or that eliminating patriarchal domination should be abandoned as one of the central goals of feminism. On the contrary, bell hooks explains that because sexism "directly shapes and determines relations of power in our private lives … [f]eminist effort to end patriarchal domination should be of primary concern" (1989, 21–22). For example, she believes that if women do not learn to resist sexism in the home—that special place in which there should be care for others—women will never have the strength to resist prejudices such as racism, class elitism, antisemitism, ethnocentrism, and lesbophobia/homophobia in the world. hooks sees the feminist movement as central to eradicating oppression in all its forms because it focuses on the "need for transformation of the self, of relationships, so that we might be better able to act in a revolutionary manner, challenging and resisting domination, transforming the world outside the self" (1989, 22). Such self-reflection as a part of feminist methodology has the potential to be empowering for both researchers and respondents; it will ultimately serve to strengthen the feminist movement, and it has the potential to generate theories that are "change-enhancing" (Lather 1988, 570). Another critique (or perhaps an alternative of the same critique expressed above) of using the social construction of gender as an analytic category for feminist methodology is that it may give a false promise of universality among

women or essentialize women. That is, we must question and problematize the category "women" for analysis by asking what are the meanings of and practices motivating the use of the term "women" in feminist research. Using the social construction of gender as a focus for research is called the "constructional position." This position holds that women are socially constructed within cultural and historical discursive practices. Therefore, constructionist feminists suggest that it is strategically necessary to pluralize by breaking down women into multiple categories (ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation) to avoid essentialism or universalism. In addition, this position asserts that

Page 142 how one is socially constructed may give or deny access to power. As Harding explains,

[I]t is important to remember that in a certain sense there are no "women" or "men" in the world—there is no "gender"—but only women, men, and gender constructed through particular historical struggles over just which races, classes, sexualities, cultures, religious groups, and so forth, will have access to resources and power. (1991, 151) In contrast to the constructionist position, the "essentialist position" assumes that females have an unchanging essence of femininity that is not socially, historically, or culturally constructed. This essence includes characteristics such as being nurturing, passive, or emotional. The essentialist position is exemplified by Cixous ([1975] 1976), among others (Irigaray [1977] 1980), who calls for an écriture feminine , or writing of the body, which expresses women's essential nature. Fuss (1989) points out that the social constructionist method of naming categories or subject positions does not eliminate the underlying presumption that there is a collective known as "women." The problem is that any collective mention of women is open to charges of essentialism. As Fuss explains, "the essentialism at stake is not countered so much as displaced " (original emphasis, 1989, 4) when feminist constructionists use historic and social specificity, Fuss's argument is compelling. By careful deconstruction of both positions, she shows that the debate over essentialism and constructionism stands on shaky ground, most notably because the debate takes place on a false binary construct. Fuss demonstrates that anti-essentialist claims are in fact undergirded by essentialism and that essentialist claims are mediated historically, socially, and culturally; therefore, she believes that "the bars" that separate this pair are less uncompromising and inflexible than the rhetoric of the debaters of each would suggest. In other words, one can practice essentialist constructionism and not be institutionalized for being an ideological schizophrenic. Fuss (1989) proposes that it is not important to ask whether a text or concept is essentializing (for she would persuasively argue that just about everything is, including the term "essential"); rather, she proposes that we ask what motivates the deployment of the essentialism. Fuss's question is critical to my discussion of feminist methodology, for while I do believe that gender is a social, historical, and discursive construction, I also believe that we cannot do

Page 143 away with the collective category of "women" at this point. As Fuss (1989), Kristeva ([1974] 1980), and Irigaray ([1977] 1980) argue, doing away with the "concept of women" would diminish efforts to change the way that gendered social norms are unequally constructed. Since women as a group still live in uneven, oppressed, or victimized relations to men and are thought of as a collective, Fuss concludes, we might replace femininity as the essential nature of women, with political feminism as the essence or core that binds the collective for strategic purposes. I quote Fuss at length, for she not only eloquently expresses that which has been critical to my research, but she also writes "under a sign of hope":

Many anti-essentialists fear that positing a political coalition of women risks presuming that there must first be a natural class of women; but this belief only masks the fact that it is coalition politics which constructs the category of women (and men) in the first place. Retaining the idea of women as a class, if anything, might help remind us that the sexual categories we work with are no more and no less than social constructions, subject-positions subject to change and to historical evolution. I am certainly not the first feminist to suggest that we need to retain the notion of women as a class for political purposes. I would, however, wish to take this conviction of its furthest conclusion and suggest that it is politics which feminism cannot do without, politics that is essential to feminism's many selfdefinitions…. To the extent that it is difficult to imagine a non-political feminism, politics emerges as feminism's essence. (original emphasis, Fuss 1989, 36–37) As I reflect on the ways that I used the analytic category of "women" in this book, I realize that I maneuvered back and forth between essentialism and constructionism. The work of maintaining this dual use of the analytic category of women is particularly critical to feminist empirical work, where the researcher is responsible to not only feminist politics as a part of a collective struggle, but also to the individual participants of the study, whose personal struggles must not be diminished or colonized by theory. Therefore, in my work with Sandy, using the analytic category of gender was useful for making sense of her investments in gendered discourses about emotions and her roles in her home and family relationships. It was less useful for interpreting our research relationship and her sexuality. Therefore, I had to problematize the concept of gender

Page 144 in those contexts and combine it with other analytic categories and theories. In my work with Olivia, the analytic category of gender provided a useful lens through which to examine her self-representations and her mobile subjectivity as she thought through her life history. Gender was an insufficient analytic category, however, for analyzing the complexities of her relationships with the women in her corporate work and for making sense of the intersubjective relationship we shared; therefore, I found it necessary to call upon other analytic categories to inform the interpretations. All of my analyses of Sandy's and Olivia's narratives, however, do demonstrate the point that it is not uncommon for white researchers and their white participants to maintain the centrality of the analytic category of gender. While gender may no longer be an "invisible, seamless wrapping of the self" (Fox-Genovese 1987, 168), it is nonetheless a compelling mode of analysis. Gender, gender equality, and gendered relations within their families-of-origin, marriages, and work sites were central concerns of the participants and major themes that emerged in their life history narratives. Although they were concerned about racism and classism and they were of course cognizant of the multiple subject positions they occupied, gender nonetheless was the most salient issue in their lives. Therefore, it gender is a useful category of analysis for feminist methodology, it is because it still has interpretive power for some women. But gender as an analytic category remains powerful only in that it has the flexibility to be adapted when multiple subject positions and the complexities of life, nonunitary subjectivity, and interpersonal relationships are considered in relation to gender.

The Study of Women's Diverse Lives and Personal Narratives Another commonly agreed upon feature of feminist methodology is the use of women's diverse lives as the primary sources of data. This "feminist standpoint" asks researchers to begin their research by "listening to women tell us about their lives and experiences," from which researchers may subsequently "articulate observations of and theory about the rest of nature and social relations" (Harding 1991, 123–124). It is fundamental to feminism to recognize that because we live in a world that "systematically silences and devalues the voices of women," feminists have a responsibility to

make public and validate the diverse voices of women (Harding 1987, 7) and to analyze these voices through feminist theoretical lenses.

Page 145 The reasoning behind the "demand that the woman's voice be heard and attended to," explain Lugones and Spelman, is "because the articulation of experience (in myria ways) is among the hallmarks of a self-determining individual or community. These are not just epistemological, but moral and political reasons for demanding that the woman's voice be heard, after centuries of androcentric din" (1983, 574). One of the benefits of studying and analyzing women's diverse lives is that it may help feminist researchers to avoid universalizing and stereotyping "Woman" by illuminating the many differences as well as similarities of women's experiences of class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion (Harding 1987). Maria Mies believes that the emphasis on personal experiences as a starting point for generating feminist theory is critical in feminist methodology because of its "subjective concreteness" (1991, 66). She explains that the term "experience," in reference to women's lives, "denotes more than specific, momentary, individual involvement. It denotes the sum of the processes which individuals or groups have gone through in the production of their lives; it denotes their reality, their history" (Mies 1991, 66). Such ''subjective concrteness" is especially important because, while it cannot do away with essentialism, it may help to evade it, at least in its most vulgar, pervasive, or reductionist forms. Patricia Hill Collins (1991) also belives that starting from the lives of women is critical because it allows women to define themselves, and in doing so, they resist stereotypes, racism, and objectification, and they validate their own experiences. Collins, Mies, and Harding all maintain that it is imperative to explore the individual experiences of women's lives for the tensions and contradictions that must necessarily exist as a result of different ways each woman identifies himself in socially situated ways. As Harding explains, these individual conflicts challenge the traditional notion of a unified identity, and are therefore a "rich source of feminist insight" (1987, 8). Examining women's experiences as sources of research data asserts that women, as researchers and researched, are producers of knowledge. Typically, the study of women's diverse lives is accomplished through the interpretation of women's personal narratives or, as demonstrated here, the interpretation and deconstruction of the narratives. Personal narratives provide primary data through which we can explore ways that different dominant ideologies and power relations are maintained, reproduced, or subverted in the discourses of the respondents' narratives. The importance of using personal

Page 146 narratives as data in feminist research has been extensively discussed in feminist literary, sociological, educational, and anthropological writings. Perhaps one of the most comprehensive, and certainly one of the most influential and often cited discussions is in Interpreting Women's Lives , edited by The Personal Narratives Group. The editors/authors maintain that:

[P]ersonal narratives are particularly rich sources because, attentively interpreted, they illuminate both the logic of individual courses of action and the effects of system-level constraints within which those courses evolve. Moreover, each life provides evidence of historical activity—the working out within a specific life situation of deliberate courses of action that in turn have the potential to undermine or perpetuate the conditions and social relationships in which the life evolved. (The Personal Narratives Group 1989, 6) Thus, the importance of focusing on women's lives in their personal narratives is great: they illuminate the course of a life over time and the relationship between the individual and society; they demonstrate how women negotiate their

"exceptional" gender status both in their daily lives and over the course of a lifetime; and they make possible the examination of the links between the evolution of subjectivity and its shifts and changes and the development of female identity. The narratives selected for interpretation in this book, which were culled from the longer life histories of Olivia and Sandy, certainly indicate the kind of diversity that is raised in personal narratives and the multiple ways that women have of working through gendered relations in daily life. However, we must also recognize the limitations of using personal narratives uncritically. While it is imperative as a feminist strategy to continue collecting and interpreting women's life stories and ethnographies of women, we must not fall into the fallacy of assuming the transparency of the narratives. We must recall that people are invested in maintaining particular identities and forms of cohesion of "the self," are caught in webs of structures that determine particular kinds of storytelling, and have the capacity for managing self-representation. Therefore, while feminists may want to continue the practice of approaching our research participants with an empathetic heart and open mind, we must also approach the analysis of narratives with a somewhat skeptical or at least, un-idealistic eye, remembering that narratives never are able to represent either an absolute truth or a lived experience. We

Page 147 would do well to heed Rigoberta Menchu's warning to scholars: "I'm still keeping secret what I think no-one should know. Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets" (1984, 247).

The Contexts of the Research Questions Harding (1987) also asserts that feminist research must answer the questions women have about their lives. She explains that research on and about women traditionally derives its focus from questions men and male-dominated institutions have about women. Men's need to know is typically based on a need to control people and institutions. When the inquiry focus of the research is derived from the vantage point of women's perspectives on their own lives, the research questions that emerge may be different. For feminist researchers, the need to know is based on a need to understand the forces that shape women's lives and a need to discover ways for women to transform and have authority over their own lives. As Geiger (1990) explains, only if the research questions that drive the feminist research project eschew androcentric, ethnocentric, or racist assumptions, can they truly be called "feminist." For this reason, feminist research often needs to be creative and spontaneous (Fonow and Cook 1991), focusing on the respondents' questions about their own lives that emerge from whatever situation they are in at the time. In my work, I found this to be true. Sandy's immediate concerns about her health, her marital situation, her sexuality, and her work relationships did become central to the study. Similarly, Olivia's anxieties about her recent career change and her thoughts about what this meant for her became central to our work. But it is not only the participants' questions that structure the research. Fonow and Cook (1991) also believe that questions the researcher has about her own life based on her "situation at hand" are valid questions for framing the research project. Reinharz, too, notes that many "feminist researchers frequently start with an issue that bothers them personally and then use everything they can get hold of to study it" (1992, 259). In this sense, Reinharz and Fonow and Cook reaffirm Harding's (1991) assertion that in feminist research "the context of discovery'' is critical as an epistemological starting point for research and a meaningful feminist reinterpretation of research questions. When I try to articulate what the "context of discovery" was for me in this project, I find myself feeling rather muddleheaded,

Page 148 unable to separate my own multiple questions from those of my respondents that emerged in the process of collecting data. Perhaps it would be equally difficult for them to separate their questions from mine. I began the project at a time when I first began to name myself a feminist despite earlier academic and grassroots dabbling into feminism while an M.A. student in English and Art History and while in the Peace Corps. Deciding to explore feminist methodology and analyze the life histories of feminist educators—what life experiences, beliefs, influences, and commitments brought them to feminism—most likely emerged out of my own desire to understand these things in myself.

The Critical Self-Reflections of the Researcher I want to attempt [self-critique] as aware as possible of its inevitable shortcoming, all that which remains opaque to myself. There is much in my performance as a researcher that I can not reach, much that eludes the logic of the self-present subject. —Lather 1993, 685 Another central goal of feminist methodology is that the researcher learns to openly locate her history, values, and assumptions in the text so that she, like those researched, are open to critical scrutiny by her readers (Harding 1987; 1991). Usually only the researched, her experiences and words, are scrutinized by the researcher, who comments on the respondents and the research setting as if from afar and above. Harding explains that it is especially critical for a feminist researcher to explicitly disclose her values and assumptions to the readers, so that the researcher "appears to us not as an invisible, anonymous voice of authority, but as a real, historical individual with concrete, specific desires and interests" (1987, 9). As discussed in chapters 2 and 3, such openness places the researcher on the same critical plane as the researched, leaving the researcher open to critical scrutiny from the readers. When both researchers and respondents are open to critical scrutiny, quips Deborah Britzman (1991), "everyone's slip is showing!" The issue here is epistemological; by disclosing and analyzing her identity and values, the researcher asserts both that what she knows cannot be separated from who she is and that her warrants for making knowledge claims are subjectively situated and historically contextual.

Page 149 Critical self-reflection will only be useful, however if it is constructive and genuine, not self-blaming. To be critically self-reflective is not mere self-indulgence on the part of the researcher. Rather, our reflections must be acknowledged as analytic data and offered as part of the overall epistemological project of interpreting women's lives and experiences—particularly when that interpretation emerges, as it does, from an intersubjective relationship between women. Further, as Harding (1991) warns, critical self-reflection must do more than make simple declarations of researcher identity or subject positions. The real task for researchers in self-reflection is to take responsibility for our identities, particularly by learning how we are related in society to others. One does this, Harding explains, by taking "responsibility for my identity, my racial social location, by learning how I am connected to other whites and to people of color; by learning what the consequences of my beliefs and behaviors as a European-American woman will be" (1991, 283). Therefore, rather than simply making "a [self-reflexive] gesture that is enforced by politically correct convention" (Marcus 1994, 572), as in a list of ways we identify or socially position ourselves, we must engage in a critical analysis of our roles as researchers (and human beings) with regard to our social identities or positionings. Although troubled by "inevitable shortcomings" (Lather 1993) such as the powerful human need for "impression management" (Goffman 1959), critical self-reflection finally helped me to understand my responsibility and social location as Jewish woman in relation to Sandy and as a middle-class woman in relation to both Sandy and Olivia. Similarly, critical self-reflection was meaningful to the authors of Repositioning Feminism and Education (Jipson,

Munro, Victor, Jones, and Freed-Rowland 1995) who asked themselves how their social locations may have contributed to their feelings of "impositions" into the lives of their research participants. Their critical self-reflections help them to better understand what desires motivate their fieldwork interests and relations (Victor 1995) and what cultural roles were possible for them within particular contexts (Freed-Rowland 1995). Self-critical analysis was also central to Karen McCarthy Brown's (1991) study of Mama Lola, in which Brown's self-reflections on her relationship with Mama Lola motivated her to completely rethink her fieldwork methods and her conceptions of herself within that relationship. Such reflection and participation, Brown declares, made "it increasingly difficult to maintain an uncluttered image of [herself] as scholar and researcher in [Mama Lola's] presence'' (1991, 9).

Page 150 As feminist researchers write of their critical self-analyses, we must also remember to apply theories of nonunitary subjectivity to ourselves and, in doing so, recognize that we are in a process of change and flux and fragmentation as we do our research. Finally, self-scrutiny should be genuine and educative: it should lead us "to a place where [we] do NOT conclude that 'I will never do research this way again'" (Lather 1993, 685). It should also participate in a conversation of what may be as we continually transform our methodological theories and practices while writing under the sign of hope.

Feminist Research Relationships In attempting to transform interpretive social science research, feminist researchers pay great attention to the personal relationships that develop between the researcher and the respondents. The most critical components of feminist methodology and perhaps its most distinguishing features are the concern for the research relationship and the enlargement of the definition of rapport in the fieldwork process. It was one of the issues that most impressed and concerned me. Feminist research assumes that what women tell about their lives, the nature of interactions they have with others in daily life, and the ways in which they interpret their own stories and experiences constitute valid and knowable empirical data; therefore, the research relationship depends on a deep rapport with respondents. When reflecting on their biographical and narrative projects, authors of the Personal Narratives Group (1989) and the many biographers who contributed to the book Between Women (Ascher, DeSalvo, and Ruddick, eds., 1984) felt that the personal identifications they felt with their research subjects were significant to the rapport they built with their subjects, even those who were historical figures. What they found was that the experience of explaining, defending, comprehending, and celebrating the life of another woman was analogous to doing the same for themselves; thus, the sense of identification with them emerged. Bell Gale Chevigny, for example, described her biographical research as "a series of deepening endeavors to seek out and understand the sources of my position in the world, my current sense of myself" (1984, 367). Martha Wheelock, whose university tried to discourage her from writing her thesis about a living writer, credits her relationship

Page 151 with May Sarton as having given her a "dedication to following the path to who I am" (1984, 428). As these quotations demonstrate, writing and researching another woman's life has the potential to be both an intellectual task and a journey through which researchers and respondents have potential for gaining critical selfunderstanding. It is also a process through which women may recover a lost, woman-centered past or a sense of sisterly solidarity. For Gloria Hull (1984), Alice Dunbar-Nelson became an inspirational role model; for Bell Gale Chevigny (1984), Margaret Fuller became a recovered foremother. Chevigny's use of the word foremother is deliberate, for she believes that in writing women's lives we may create "surrogate mothers … from whom we can integrate and separate

more effectively than from our biological mothers" (1984, 373). The use of familial terms is not uncommon to social science research relationships either. Marjorie Shostak, for example, explained that she and Nisa, her informant, "often joked about how I (her 'niece') was a child and she (my 'aunt') was a woman of vast experience whose task it was to teach em about life" (1981, 39–40). Karen McCarthy Brown describes how Mama Lola treated her like family and introduced her to people as here "daughter" (1991, 8). These descriptions of how biographers and anthropologists come to identify with their subjects and participants demonstrate that in feminist research the traditional stranger-friend continuum may be lengthened to a stranger-friend"family" continuum as a symbol of how the connection between women is a source of both intellectual and personal knowledge. These descriptions also demonstrate that in feminist methodology there is a belief that a researcher's identification with her respondents or biographical subjects enhances the researcher's interpretive abilities, rather than jeopardizes validity. However, many feminist theorists (Cotterill 1992; Glesne 1989; Stacey 1988) also raise concerns about the assumptions of inherent closeness and identification between women, such as in implied in Oakley's (1981) influential call for longlasting friendships to develop out of the research relationships. Although these theorists remain committed to the goal of attempting to achieve trusting and caring relationships in the field, they are wary of over-romanticizing feminist research relationships. Reinharz explains that such over-romanticizing comes from the mistaken notion that "feminists are supposed to feel toward other women as if they are their sisters, the presumption being that sisters have profound positive relations and shared interests" (1992, 265). Further, these theorists

Page 152 note that assumptions about "sisterly" solidarity in the field evade issues of difference in social subject positions and power. Mies (1991) particularly suggests that a researcher's uncritical identification with a respondent can cause blindness to differences, especially differences in power that exist among women. She contends that when researchers believe that differences between themselves and their poorer or less privileged respondents are moral or psychic, rather than material, or when they attempt to "de-class" themselves as a way of deepening identification, researchers bury the reality of their social relations under an idealistic facade. Mies believes that this occurs when the researcher mistakes total identification with the more productive partial identification. Partial identification, she explains, allows for differences between the researcher and respondents to emerge and be used positively in the struggle against women's exploitation. In accord with Mies's support for partial identification, Reinharz suggests that women engaged in this type of research need to let go of high expectations of sisterly rapport to avoid making it "the normative, not the special condition" (1992, 265). Thus, reasonable and socially responsible goals replace idealistic ones. To let go of high expectations for identification and sisterly rapport may liberate feminist methodology from setting unrealistic regulative ideals for intersubjective personal interactions. This can be done without backsliding into the subject/object dualism if, as Pamela Cotterill asserts, we "distinguish between friendship and friendliness and not feel that the research relationship has somehow 'failed' if only the latter is achieved" (1992, 595). She pragmatically suggests, therefore, that we replace the stranger-friend continuum found in traditional research, with a stranger—"friendly stranger" continuum because "the friendly stranger … relationship exists for the purpose of the research and is terminated when the interviews are complete" (596). As I reflect on my research relationships with Olivia and Sandy, I find Cotterill's articulations of and recommendations for feminist research relationships both comforting and useful, as I do those of Reinharz and Mies. They speak to the richly rewarding but complex and sometimes troubling realities of my experiences with both Olivia and Sandy. They allow me to reevaluate my relationships and, indeed, judge myself in ways that are more realistic than the idealized version of feminist relationships that I initially had. Their comments further help me to "acknowledge that [feminist

methodology], whatever else it is, is a form of human relationship" (Brown 1991, 12).

Page 153 As I come to the close of the process of writing this book, I want to reaffirm that feminist methodology and interpretation can be written under the sign of hope. Hope does not require ignorance of limitations and problems any more than it needs the erasure of ambiguities and complexities to be kept alive and generative. Feminist methodology and interpretation has the potential to "speak to the future" by creating contexts in which women, as epistemic subjects, can learn to be critical of or even free from essentializing, naturalizing, constraining, and oppressive identifications. Feminist methodology and interpretation help us to unlearn the techniques of the "Julu man," are rendered unintelligible. If feminist methodology fails to prepare us for the problems of fieldwork or interpretation that I discussed in this book, it is not a failure of the methodology or a warning to give up hope; rather, it s a reminder of the limitation of models of research to account for or predict the complexities that emerge in intersubjective relationships. Methodologies themselves do not fail; what fails us is our expectations that methodology can guarantee particular kinds of experiences or results. We are particularly susceptible to this if we treat methodologies as unitary—as models that are stable across multiple contexts and uses. Treating feminist methodology as unitary is no different from the quantitative methodologists' claim for the "primary of methods" in which researchers believe that if they follow certain procedures in certain ways, they will get it "right." Feminist methodology is alive with contradictions, ambiguities and nonunitariness. As a theory of practice or praxis, it must be seen to offer open, partial, situated, and fluid guidelines to research practitioners. Its assertions of situatedness and partiality; its insistence on diversity of thoughts and expression; and its commitment to acknowledging individual and nonunitary subjectivities will necessarily destabilize each attempt to assert unity and stability. Feminist methodology, then, may not provide the kind of strong scaffolding from which to build a comfortable or predictable practice, but maybe, after all, this is just what we want: a theory of research that neither stabilizes our practices nor essentializes us as researchers. And this, I believe, is a sign of hope.

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NOTES Chapter One 1. The term "methodology" is used here and throughout the text rather than "methods" to indicate that what is central to he feminist project is an understanding of the theories and perspectives that inform the production of the research and justify it in terms of its knowledge making (Harding 1987). Methodology is deeply rooted in the epistemological beliefs that a researcher brings to her inquiry. 2. I am in accord with Jane Flax (1990), who clearly articulates, in Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West , that it is necessary to differentiate between psychosis (in which loss of self is a frightening

illness) and the postmodern fragmentation of subjectivity. As Flax argues, in the postmodern concept of nonunitary subjectivity, the individual has what she calls a deep coherent self that allows for fragmentation to be thinkable. Rosenau (1992), too, notes that postmodern subjectivity is not so much a doing away with the subject as a repositioning of her. 3. Analyzing subjectivity can be oriented toward various focuses. In this manuscript, I focus my analyses of subjectivity in the following ways. In Part One I concentrate on the intersubjective relationships between me and the research participants. Concerns about differences of ethnicity and class, for example, are taken up in the context of examining our intersubjective research relationships. In Part Two, the focus is primarily on gendered subjectivity in the narratives of Olivia and Sandy. Gender and gendered relations are central to the analysis because these were expressed as the major concerns in the lives of the research participants themselves. Analyses of race, class, sexuality, ethnicity/religion are also brought into focus in the narrative interpretations within the context of specific narratives. Amina Mama's (1995) book, Beyond the Masks , is an excellent example of an analysis of the intersection of racial and gendered subjectivity. Page 156

4. Pseudonyms are used for the research participants and place names. 5. It is difficult to articulate why and how theories are selected and whether or not a particular theory or theoretical perspective resonated with what I was already thinking or gave birth to a new way of thinking. Rather than try to untangle that conundrum, it might be more useful to think about how doing interpretation is always simultaneously an intellectual or academic practice and an act of personal reflection, or an "intimate critique" (Freedman, Frey, and Zauhar 1993). As Susan Kreiger notes, perhaps the most honest way to account for our use of particular theories is not only that they have explanatory power with regard to the data we collected, but that we personally have a fondness for a theory (Kreiger 1991). The multiple, interdisciplinary, feminist theories of interpretation that I engage in this book are ones that I am fond of, for they inspire me intellectually and speak to me personally as they help me to articulate my belief that individuals do have the capacity to change not only their own immediate personal world of experience and relations, but the social world as well. Further, the theories I engage speak not only to my feminist understanding of social transformation and individual agency, but also fill a need in me to do interdisciplinary work. It is no wonder, then, that I find Marilyn Strathern's explanation of many feminists' commitments to inter-disciplinary work helpful for

explaining my own theoretical tendencies: Much feminist discourse is constructed in a plural way. Arguments are juxtaposed, many voices solicited, in the way that feminists speak about their own scholarship. There are no central texts, no definitive techniques; the deliberate transdisciplinary enterprise plays with context. Perspectives from different disciplines are held to illuminate one another; historical or literary or anthropological insights are juxtaposed by writers at once conscious of the different contexts of these disciplines and refusing to take any single context as an organizing frame. (Strathern 1987, quoted in Reinharz, 1992, p. 245–246)

6. I want to credit Sara Mills, Lynne Pearce, Sue Spaull, and Elaine Millard (1989), whose book on feminist literary theories, Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading , suggested to me the relevance of examining diverse interpretive theories in this way.

Chapter Two 1. It is extremely difficult for me to give details of Olivia's and my meeting and additional background information about her while still attempting Page 157

to protect her anonymity as much as is possible. As a result of what must be left unsaid, some of the important circumstances surrounding our relationship are omitted, which, I am sorry to say, results in a less than adequate description of the context of the research relationship. However, I feel that my first responsibility is to her, which includes respecting her right to have her identity masked as much as possible. 2. The excerpts that I use to analyze feminist methodology in this chapter are taken both from the transcripts of our interviews and from my dissertation chapter on Olivia's and my research relationship. The original dissertation chapter was co-authored and presented as two conversations on research. Olivia and I taped discussions about methodology; we then edited, revised, and developed our ideas from the taped conversations while working together at the computer. Excerpts from the dissertation chapter are typically introduced here with the words, "Olivia recalls." For this book, I have culled additional data from the interview transcripts and combined these with excerpts from the co-written dissertation chapter. This chapter also differs from the dissertation in that here I focus exclusively on the interview process and provide a much more in-depth analysis of feminist methodology. Further, in this chapter, the research story is more grounded in my perceptions of the research process than was the original text.

3. The following works were deeply influential to me during the research process. Carol Ascher et al. (Eds.), Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teacher and Artists Write about Their Work on Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984); Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli Klein (Eds.), Theories of Women's Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 1983); Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Biography (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1989); Mary Margaret Fonow and Judith A. Cook (Eds.), Beyond methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Susan Geiger, "What's So Feminist about Women's oral History?" Journal of Women's History 2(1990): 169–182; Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (Eds.), Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York and London: Routledge, 1991); Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Sandra Harding Feminism & Methodology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988); Patti Lather, (1991) Getting Smart: Feminist Research and pedagogy With/in the Postmodern (New York and London: Routledge, 1991); Henrietta L. Moore, Feminism and Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Helen Roberts (Ed.), Doing Feminist Research (London: Routledge, 1981); Personal Narratives Group, Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Page 158

Press, 1989); Shulamit Reinharz, Feminist Methods in Social Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Liz Stanley (Ed.), Feminist Praxis: Research, Theory and Epistemology in Feminist Sociology (London: Routledge, 1990); Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983). 4. Patricia Sawin is a feminist folklorist and close friend who works in the area of feminist linguistics and discourse analysis. Her help in talking through this chapter was invaluable. 5. Most of the contributors of Tokarczyk and Fay's (1993) book Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory share this sense of affiliation.

Chapter Three 1. As Elly Bulkin wrote in 1984, "As a Jew, I have a special relationship to Israel. That relationship will remain whether I embrace it or rage against it. Attempting to ignore it is like trying to ignore my Jewish identity: someone is bound to remind me of it, out of

solidarity or hostility. However I define the connections, I am affected by some people's assumptions that, because I am a Jew, I support not only Israel's existence but the policies of its government and have only minor, if any criticisms of Israel's role—and that of prestatehood Zionists—in creating the current impasse" (155). 2. Narayan suggests that three important ways that "sympathetic outsiders" lack understanding are: (1) insensitive reactions to an insider's response to a situation; (2) failure by outsiders to avoid crude and stereo-typic generalizations about insiders; and (3) failure to see why something that is not explicitly insulting to a person or group may be implicitly so. Sandy's comments to me on both of those nights manifest these types of lack of understanding Narayan lists. 3. But taking on this pedagogical burden is, of course, not so simple. By responding to such remarks, however kindly, the one who is hurt risks the possibilities of heightened confrontation, of defensive reactions and the potential for being further hurt and angered, as happened to me in other situations during those same two years I was working with Sandy. For example, a year before I met Sandy, a fellow graduate student and school principal, harshly criticized the work of a scholar. He said of him: "what do you expect from an asshole Jew?" When I confronted him, he told me that he wasn't being prejudiced, but that lots of Jews use that term about Page 159

themselves kidding around, so it was okey. He denied my assertion that Jews do not refer to themselves as "asshole Jews" and was offended that I did not believe his explanation. However, his defensiveness, his denial of prejudice, and his lack of apology was less troubling than what followed: three women friends of his and, I thought, mine too told me they were angry at me for not accepting his "sincere apology." When I tried to explain why there was no apology to accept, they completely disregarded his blatant antisemitism and my feelings. These same students, just a few months later, remarked that I was hired as a research assistant for a Jewish faculty member only because I'm Jewish. Another incident occurred later that year. I had a summer job as a Faculty Development Consultant and a full professor I was working with remarked to me that another faculty member was difficult to get along with because she was an East Coast Jew. When I told him that I too am an East Coast Jew, he simply said that we were different because I am a younger generation, and he changed the subject without an apology. In this climate of antisemitism and its denial, it becomes exhausting to try to battle

ignorance and prejudice. Some of my reticence in overtly confronting Sandy may have come from dealing with three incidences of antisemitism that I encountered just before meeting her.

Chapter Four 1. Jackson (1989) uses the word "being" not in the humanist sense of a fixed essential being, but as a being always in the process of change. 2. Olivia's second version was quite long and detailed; I have edited from it some of the details, especially those that describe locations of work sites. 3. Although these early memories could be analyzed using feminist narratology, I will limit my use of them to explore the grounds from which the two versions of the sexual harassment story emerges. 4. Olivia's father was alive, although quite ill, during the time that I was conducting fieldwork. He died in 1995. 5. Olivia narrated this story just months before Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas at the latter's Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1992 challenged silence about sexual harassment and made way for an outpouring of such stories by women all over the country. Page 160

6. Ellsworth and Miller (1996) developed these ideas out of their conversations after reading Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992) and Patricia J. Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor , (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1991). 7. DuPlessis (1985) also argues that women speak from different subject positions. She states that one aspect of female identity is the oscillation between hegemonic processes in social and cultural settings: ''In the social and cultural arena, there is a constant repositioning between dominant and muted, hegemonic and oppositional, central and colonial, so that a woman may be described as (ambiguously) nonhegemonic or, with equal justice but less drama, as (ambiguously) hegemonic if her race, class, and sexuality are dominant" (38). 8. When Olivia read her transcripts, she drew my attention to the language of her

narrative. She said that she was struck most by the anger that is so clearly depicted in the words I used. It is very unlike me to talk about people in such an ungenerous manner. I reduced this man to being a "sexual pervert," denying him a more complex identity and balanced description. I talked about him as if he can be best understood as scum, something to get "rid" of. Like garbage? The harshness of my words reflect bitterness and anger that has been buried for some time. The retelling of this story surfaced for me many unanswered and still unanswerable questions about this entire incident. It is difficult to talk about what we do not know. And as I progressed in this project I found that the interpretations offered, often raised more questions for which I have no answers.

9. I offer here Olivia's written response to reading the final draft of this chapter: I read the chapter through three times. Putting my feelings about this chapter to paper is not an easy task. I have before me a compelling and powerful analysis of how and why my initial telling of the investigation of sexual harassment might have occurred. Leslie and I worked through a previous version of this chapter, and were able to identify interpretations that did not feel accurate, and further develop paths of interpretation that resonated more deeply with my own sense of my life and how it evolved. I agree with the great majority of what is written here. It fits. Page 161 Intuitively I knew that the need to be independent, and the desire to be successful, yet, remain truly feminist were primary themes in my adult life. But through Sartre's analysis, I was taken aback by the many ways in which these themes were depicted in the stories of my childhood and have been revisited many times throughout my life. About fractured subjectivity—Ah yes, I was (am) all those things. One self does not negate the others. It did feel good to be a corporate manager. I did feel accepted and valued by others in the corporation. But I also experienced all of the rest. During the time of the sexual harassment investigation particularly, I felt disappointed. I felt ashamed, angered, stunned, and furious. I felt a part of management, and I felt I didn't want to be a part of management. I was indeed caught between the boundaries. I deeply value this chapter. I think that it gives me new ways of thinking about my life and life choices. I know there are also many other ways—but this is a beginning. And a good one.

Chapter Five 1. The critiques are specifically about the binary constructs of sex (the biological/chromosomal classification as in female and male) and gender (the social and cultural construction of sex as in feminine and masculine). 2. The central theories of infant development referred to here include the Oedipus complex, the male castration complex, and female penis envy (Freud 1966), theories in

which Freud was attempting to make sense of the relations between biology and human behavior. Freud theorized that humans develop behaviors according to patterns that are influenced not only by the biological processes, but by specific events in early life. Of paramount importance, according to Freud, was the phallic stage, which is the first phase of development that boys and girls experience differently. This biological and experiential differentiation between the sexes at ages four to five produces psychological differences in boys and girls. The phallic stage for a boy is characterized by his realization that girls (mothers) differ because they do not have a penis. This gives rise to the boy's fear that he may lose his penis—hence, the male castration anxiety. Further, during the phallic stage, a boy will develop hostility toward his father, who becomes his rival for his affections of the mother. The projection of hatred toward the father and the fear of his retaliation lead to what is known as the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex is resolved for boys because of their disappointments with the mother, because of fear of the father, and because of the gains the boys receive Page 162

through identification with the father. Thus, the necessary resolution of the Oedipus complex for the boy is distinguished by keeping the mother as a love object through identification with the father. The identification with the father also symbolizes the boy's integration into the father's world of values and morals, and signals his development of a strong superego. But what of the girl in the phallic stage? Freud speculated that when the girl discovers that she lacks a penis, she blames her mother and develops penis envy. Penis envy causes her to switch her attentions from her mother to her father as the love object, in hopes that by choosing her father, she will have the lost organ restored to her. Thus begins the Oedipus complex for the girl. The Oedipus complex is resolved for the girl by keeping the father as the love object, but by gaining him through identifying with the mother. However, the girl's resolution of the Oedipus complex is never as complete as is the boy's because she neither had the fear of castration nor the experience of having to permanently give up the mother, the original love object. As a result of a "less significant" Oedipus complex and the final identification with the mother, girls become less integrated into the father's morals and values, and they therefore don't develop strong superegos. Without a strong superego, girls develop softer personalities and have different morals and values than boys. 3. In Jacques Lacan's ([1966] 1977) rethinking of Freudian theory, he, too, considered

the transition into the father's sphere as a critical stage in human development and socialization. According to Lacan, prior to six months, the infant is undifferentiated from the mother: the infant has no sense of self or boundaries of self. At about six months, however, when the child is first able to recognize the self in a mirror, the child enters the Imaginary stage, which for Freud is the pre-Oedipal stage. In the Image and the separate mother's face. At this point, the child knows itself to be separate from the mother. With the acquisition of language, the child enters what Lacan calls the Symbolic Order, the world of the father, or the Oedipal stage in Freudian terms. In the Symbolic Order, the child learns to speak "I" and have a sense of self; however, because the "I" position depends on the law/language of the father, the "I" position is necessarily male. Therefore, if the language needed to say "I'' derives from the father's Symbolic Order, and the "I" position is male, then the utterance of "I" for a girl is complex: she can never say "I" without nullifying her gender identity, yet she must say "I" to achieve the Symbolic Order, which is necessary for survival. For the girl, then, the conflict of making her way into the Symbolic Order at the expense of her gender identity constitutes a splitting of herself as a subject. That which she cannot articulate (a full sense of self) in the Symbolic Order is repressed and silenced. While the subject position for boys is more Page 163

unified, they too have elements from the Imaginary that cannot be expressed in the verbal world of the Symbolic Order, and these elements are also repressed. Nancy Chodorow's (1978) feminist psychoanalytic theory developed out of her critique of those psychoanalytic theories that do not examine the nature of the mother-infant bond and the impact of mothering on infants. She posits that the male world view and experience of fatherhood distorts men's ability to take into account the power of the relational bond between mothers and babies. Chodorow therefore charges that Freud and his followers miss the boat when they emphasize the phallic, Oedipal stage, and rush past the pre-Oedipal relationship between mother and baby. Focusing on the relational aspect of the mother-baby bond, Chodorow asserts that the mother-daughter bond reproduces females who have a greater capacity for "relational interaction" than males whose separation from the mother gives them greater capacity for autonomy. In attempting to explain why whomen reproduce mothering, which places them in an inferior position to males, Chodorow raises a number of interesting problems with regard to identity formation. However, as Fraser and Nicholson (1990) point out, Chodorow's theory of mothering is problematic in that it assumes that as a result of their relationship with their mother, all women (and men) develop a similar sense of self, "which is constituted in early childhood through one's interactions with one's primary parent and which remains

relatively constant thereafter" (30). 4. Sandy was intrigued by this description of how she distanced herself not only from her mother but from femininity more generally. Reflecting on this, Sandy said that her efforts to distance herself from her mother may be due to her own struggles to separate from her mother's generation of women: "As a female who is trying to have a career, who is only one generation away, it's like the pendulum swinging away." For this reason, Sandy found it especially "true where you said that I put a distance between myself and femininity. I do see that in most career women." 5. In "Women's Time," Julia Kristeva ([1979] 1986) describes three generations of the feminist movement and suggests that differentiating among them is a useful way to understand the historical and political aspects of feminism. Toril Moi (1985) summarizes Kristeva's generations of feminism as follows: "1. Women demand equal access to the symbolic order. Liberal Feminism. Equality. 2. Women reject the male symbolic order in the name of difference. Radical feminism. Femininity extolled. 3. (This is Kristeva's own position.) Women reject the dichotomy between masculine and feminine as metaphysical" (Moi 1985, 12). 6. Luce Irigaray ([1974] 1985) offers an alternative perspective for interpreting Sandy's representations of herself as masculine that should also be considered in light of Sandy's claim that she is a feminist. Irigaray Page 164

suggests that appropriating patriarchal discourse and making oneself more "masculine" may be interpreted as a feminist strategy. Since femininity is male-defined according to male desires, Irigaray maintains that women's mimicry of patriarchal discourse reveals the ways in which the discourse exploits women and therefore undermines its authority. Given Irigaray's concept of mimicry, it is possible to read Sandy's denial of her connection with the home and her mother, especially in light of her self-representation of her own feminism, as a strategy. 7. It is important to note that during Sandy's childhood, the image of the "nurturing mother" was being challenged by competing images in the media of independent women in the work force. Ehrenreich (1983) explains that the images of independent women were in turn challenged with misogynist images of women by men who feared their presence in the work force. Thus, while I focus on Sandy's disappointment with her mother's lack of nurturing, these two other discourses may also have contributed to both Sandy's disappointment with her mother and her conflicting ideas about women's roles in

society. 8. Again, if Sandy had had more sympathy for her mother, she might have seen in her mother's quilt making the desire to create beauty in the practical. As Apthekar (1989) explains, for many women who lived lives of routine rural existence, quilting "gave meaning to their daily lives, thecumulative effect of their quilts finally transforming the ragged and the mundane into discernible patterns, beautiful, sturdy, enduring" (69). 9. Eichenbaum and Orbach's (1988) research on women's relationships offers an additional way to think about the tension alluded to in Sandy's relationship with her mother. They explain that one of the complexities of the mother/daughter relationship stems from the mother's own difficulty responding to her daughter's needs for dependency. When "the mother … continually restrains both her own needs for emotional nurturance and her own initiatives, [she] is unable to respond to her daughter in an open and generous way. Her responses to her daughter are characterized by annoyance and withdrawal, leaving the daughter confused and rejected" (Eichenbaum and Orbach 1988, 58). As Eichenbaum and Orbach's analysis suggests, mothers' emotions, especially toward their daughters, in whom they see themselves, are not as simple as cultural stereotypes would have it. 10. When Sandy and I talked about the above interpretation of her emotional investments, she felt that the analysis accurately conveyed her disappointment that her mother was not more affectionate and the internal conflict this engendered. As a child, Sandy recalled feeling "not anger, but isolation" when her mother wouldn't discuss or give her comfort when Page 165

something sad or disappointing happened to her. However, Sandy also felt that in talking about her mother, she "didn't give my mom enough credit." Reading the analysis also compelled Sandy to realize that she "may be running away from some of those characteristics that I didn't like in my mom; the harsh side, and the judgmental side, and I don't want to be like that because I saw what it did to my dad." Nonetheless, she felt that she did not adequately express the respect she had and increasingly has for her mother. 11. While time does not permit me to analyze fully the problems with Sandy's assertion that women are more highly evolved emotionally than men, I do want to flag this as an example of how a discourse can be internally contradictory, asserting simultaneously a positive view of somen and one that may maintain a problematic essentialist stereotype of women. I think that it is useful, however, to remember that Sandy is basing her

assessment on the concrete experiences she had interacting with both men and women after they found out about her cancer. 12. I am indebted to Nancy Lesko, who raised this point about the symbolism of the tiger and Lycra leotard. 13. According to Freud's (1966) essay, "An Outline of Psycho-Analysis," disavowal is when the ego finds itself in the position of fending off some demand from the external world which it feels distressing and that this is effected by means of a disavowal of the perceptions which bring to knowledge this demand from reality…. The disavowal is always supplemented by an acknowledgment; two contrary and independent attitudes always arise and result in the situation of there being a splitting of the ego. Once more the issue depends on which of the two can seize hold of the greater intensity. (Freud, cited in de Lauretis 1994, p. 258)

While Freud was theorizing infant/early childhood development, I have restaged the discussion for my analysis of an adolescent experience. I found this interpretive strategy particularly useful in this instance, for making sense of Sandy's nonunitary subjectivity. 14. Following Kitzinger's (1987) studies of lesbians and Western discourses about lesbians, it is also possible to interpret this narrative within the discourses of lesbianism as the height of romantic love. Kitzinger explains that the fantasy or representation of a lesbian relationship as more honest is in keeping with the discourse "of romantic love [that is] used to assert the superiority of lesbianism over heterosexuality (1987, Page 166

107). Kitzinger critiques this idealization because in drawing "on the ideology of 'true love' [which] is clearly borrowed from the official morality," it assimilates lesbianism into the romantic myths of heterosexual culture and in doing so, ironically supports "the dominant [moral] order" (1987, 109). Thus, Kitzinger concludes, "in invoking the culturally approved rhetoric of romantic love [the lesbian] is accredited with a fundamental humanity and similarity to heterosexuals; and the morality of the dominant order is articulated, vindicated and reinforced" (1987, 109) even while this same order positions lesbians as deviants. 15. In a conversation I had with Sandy before this book went to press, I talked with her about my interpretations of her bisexuality. She was very pleased that I had come to understand what she had been trying to express about her sexuality in her life history narratives.

16. Discussing Butler's work, de Lauretis suggests that the "deconstructive trope" of the lesbian phallus is useful as a signifier of desire although she prefers "to call the signifier of perverse desire "a fetish " in order to avoid the unavoidable semantic complicity of phallus with penis, even at the risk of evoking the negative (reductive) connotations that the term fetish also currently carries" (de Lauretis 1994k, 231). 17. In her critique of de Lauretis's revisionist use of psychoanalytic theory, Elizabeth Grosz (1994) argues that while notions like the lesbian phallus have the effect of unsettling or disquieting presumptions about the "natural" alignment of the penis with social power and value, they do so only by attempting to appropriate what has been denied to women and to that extent remain tied (as we all are) to heterocentric and masculine privilege. Such modalities remain reactive, compensatory." (p. 9)

I suspect that Grosz would critique my use of the bisexual phallus on the same grounds! However, I would argue that the ability to unsettle masculine power as well as monosexism is not insignificant if such theories infiltrate individuals' abilities to rethink their own lived circumstances and subjectivities. Page 167

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INDEX A African-Americans: distinctions of, 92 on feminist methodology, 140 women writers, 68 Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women, 67 Anderson, Kathryn, 31 androcentrism. See "master scripts"; patriarchal

anthropology, 2 -3, 10 , 22 , 137 , 146 ; roles of power in, 35 anti-Zionism, 50 -52 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 89 , 90 Apthekar, Bettina, 164 n. 8 Ascher, Carol, ed.: Between Women, 150 authoritative discourses: in communication and interviews, 26 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 in power relationships, 35 -36, 37 autobiography, 62 -63, 74

B Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 25 -26, 40 Barry, Kathleen, 65 , 71 being, 65 , 159 n. 1 Between Women (Ascher et al., eds.), 150 binary opposition, of gender, 97 , 99 -100, 106 , 119 , 122 , 139 biography, 65 See also narratives bisexuality, 123 -34 blacks. See African-Americans body: discipline of, 111 -12 phenomenological exploration of, 18

stamp of culture on, 100 borders (boundaries), psychological, 90 , 91 Bourne, Jenny, 53 -54 Bowles, Gloria, ed.: Theories of Women's Studies, 2 Briggs, Charles L., 29 , 33 Britzman, Deborah P., 4 , 127 , 148 Brown, Karen McCarthy, 149 , 151 Bulkin, Elly, 158 n. 1 Butler, Judith: on binary language of gender identity, 99 -100, 119 on homosexual prohibitions, 124 , 125 -26, 130 on "lesbian phallus" theory, 132 -33, 166 n. 16 on psychoanalytic theories of gender identity, 98 -100, 119

C career. See work castration, 78 , 124 -25, 161 -62n. 2 Chanfrault-Duchet, Marie-Francoise, 101 -2 Chevigny, Bell Gale, 150 , 151 Chodorow, Nancy, 98 -99, 162 -63n. 3 Christian, Barbara, 68 Cixous, Hélène, 5 , 63 , 74 , 142

class. See social class collaborative relationships, 2 , 45 -46 See also reciprocity Collins, Patricia Hill, 145 colonization, power inherent in, 34 , 35 , 140 Page 182

commonality, false assumption of, 47 -48, 51 -52 See also sisterhood communication, discourses of, 29 -33, 40 communicative hegemony, 33 conflict: centrality of, 67 -68, 88 -91 in discourse, 101 , 102 , 107 -8, 110 -11, 113 , 120 -21, 135 -36, 165 n. 11 masking of, 67 , 68 , 77 constructivist feminism, 141 -42, 143 -44 contradictions: in discourses, 5 , 101 , 112 , 135 , 165 n. 11 in feminist methodology, 19 conversation, as feminist research method, 16 -17, 18 -19, 20 -21 Cook, Judith A., 147 Cotterill, Pamela, 27 , 34 , 35 , 152

D

Daly, Mary, 106 Davies, Bronwyn, 4 Davies, Carole Boyce, 4 -5, 140 de Lauretis, Teresa: definition of subjectivity by, 4 on narrativity, 69 The Practice of Love, 132 on sexuality, 122 , 124 -25, 132 ; suspicion of narratives genres, 66 , 74 on women's autobiographical narratives, 62 , 69 -70 Denzin, Norman, 65 DeSalvo, Louise, ed.: Between Women, 150 Devor, Holly, 98 difference: blindness to, due to identification, 39 , 152 and role differentiation in interviews, 28 disavowal, 124 -25, 165 n. 13 discipline, 111 -12, 113 discourse: male ("discourse of man"), 5 , 63 subjectivity (re)constituted in, 5 -6, 100 -101, 102 woman-centered and woman-defined, 63 , 93 See also heteroglossia discourse analysis method, 97 , 100 -101, 109

domination: in autobiographical "master scripts," 62 by gender, 139 -40 versus power, 40 in sexual division of labor, 103 , 104 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, 151 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau: on feminist narratology, 66 -68, 69 , 70 , 72 , 74 , 93 , 95 on nonunitary subjectivity of women, 160 n. 7 Writing Beyond the Ending, 94 on "writing beyond the ending," 66 -68, 70 , 74 , 93 , 95

E education studies, 3 , 146 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 117 , 164 n. 7 Eichenbaum, Louise, 164 n. 9 Ellsworth, Elizabeth, 88 -89, 94 emotions, 2 , 68 , 95 , 113 -21, 132 empathetic listening, 30 , 32 See also listening skills English (literary) studies, 3 , 146 essentialism, 6 , 63 , 96 , 135 , 141 essentialist feminism, 142 -44

estrangement (disengagement, detachment), 114 -15, 118 , 120 ethics, feminist, 2 ethnicity, 38 , 53 ethnography, 10 , 65 , 94 everyday life (lived experience), 94 , 95 , 144 -47 existentialism, 64 experience, lived, 94 , 95 , 144 -47

F feminine (modes of) communication, 29 , 30 , 31 femininity; and competence, 103 -5 displacement of, 143 effectiveness of, 112 -13 exaggeration of, 127 feminism, identification with, 38 -39 feminist coalitions, 5 , 143 feminist interpretation, definition of, 7 -8 feminist methodology: author's reflections on, 52 -56, 137 -38 (continued on next page)

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background reading in, 2 ; context of research questions in, 147 -48

critiques of, 52 -53; definition of, 138 -53 discourses in, 27 -39 limitations of, 2 , 9 , 25 , 26 , 32 , 137 -38 multiple roles of power in, 33 -40 rethinking about, 39 -41 feminist narratology. See narratives, feminist feminist poststructural theory, definition of subjectivity in, 4 feminist transformational politics, 55 Ferguson, Kathy E.: definition of feminist interpretation by, 7 -8 definition of subjectivity by, 4 , 5 , 6 The Man Question, vi fieldwork. See interviews Fine, Michelle, 53 Flaubert, Gustave, 70 Flax, Jane, 155 n. 2 flirtation, 126 -27 Fonow, Mary Margaret, 147 "foremothers," 151 Foucault, Michel, 8 , 111 -12, 121 -22 Freed-Rowland, Gretchen: Repositioning Feminism and Education, 149

Freud, Sigmund, 98 -99, 124 -26, 132 Friedan, Betty, 106 friendships, 18 , 20 , 23 -25, 47 Fuller, Margaret, 151 Fuss, Diana, 142 -43

G gaze, male versus female, 69 -70, 113 Geiger, Susan, 147 gender heterogeneity, 53 gender identity: as binary, 97 , 122 , 139 reversal of, 102 -18, 119 , 130 in Sandy's narratives, 102 -13, 121 -34 social construction of, 139 -44 genealogy, definition of, 7 -8 Gordon, Deborah, 129 , 131 Greene, Maxine, 65 Grosz, Elizabeth, 166 n. 17 Gulf War, reactions to, 47 -48

H Hammond, Michael, 18

Hancock, Emily, 79 Haraway, Donna J., 39 Harding, Sandra: Heminism and Methodology, vi , 2 , 63 -64, 138 ; on feminist methodology, 138 , 148 on gender constructivism, 142 on individual women's lives, 145 , 147 on self-critique by researchers, 148 , 149 on taking responsibility for personal identity, 54 Hartsock, Nancy, 103 Heilbrun, Carolyn: on feminist narratology, 68 -69, 70 , 72 , 74 , 92 -93 Hemming, Clare, 128 , 129 heteroglossia, 25 -26 heteronormativity, 127 heterosexuality, 38 , 68 , 97 , 99 , 122 , 124 Hill, Anita, 159 n. 5 Hollway, Wendy: discourse analysis method, 97 , 100 -101, 109 , 121 on gendered emotional roles, 116 -17 homosexuality, 99 . See also bisexuality hooks, bell, 140 , 141 hope, sign of, 10 -11, 137 , 143 , 153

Howarth, Jane, 18 Hull, Gloria, 48 , 52 , 151 humanism, 3 -4, 6 Hurston, Zora Neale, 66

I identity: and blindness to differences, 39 , 152 essentialism of, 6 , 63 , 96 , 135 , 141 , 142 -43 influence on researcher-respondant relationship, 54 , 150 -52 psychoanalytic theories of, 98 -100 See also gender identity Page 184

Imaginary stage (of infant development), 162 -63n. 3 individuality, unified: in "master script," 74 -75 replaced by nonunitary subjectivity, 2 , 3 -4, 6 in Sartre's modified Marxist-existentialist philosophy, 64 -65 infant development, 98 -99, 161 -62n. 2 internally persuasive discourses, 26 , 27 -28, 29 -30, 31 , 32 , 33 , 38 interpretation, definition of, 7 -8 Interpreting Women's Lives (Personal Narratives Group), 146 , 150 intersubjectivity, 1 -2, 9 , 17 -18, 23 -27, 34 -36

interviews: data collection during, 9 -10, 41 as neutered social encounters, 15 with Olivia, 16 -25 reciprocity in, 1 , 45 -46, 49 , 50 , 54 -55 role differentiation in, 28 with Sandy, 44 -52; structure of, 16 -17, 18 -19, 20 , 21 -23, 48 subjectivity (roles) negotiated in, 9 , 27 , 33 -39 trust as factor in, 44 , 54 -55, 57 -58, 95 , 150 , 151 Irigaray, Luce, 142 , 143 , 163 -64n. 6 Israel: American Jewish support for, 48 , 50 -52, 53 -54 missile attacks on, 47 -48, 50

J Jackson, Michael: Paths to a Clearing, 18 on role of empathy in analysis, 87 use of progressive-regressive method, 65 -66 Jagger, Alison M., 113 , 114 , 116 Jipson, Janice: Repositioning Feminism and Education, 149 Jones, Karen Froud: Repositioning Feminism and Education, 149

K Keat, Russell, 18

Keller, Evelyn Fox, 15 Kitzinger, Celia, 165 -66n. 14 Klein, Renate Duelli, ed.: Theories of Women's Studies, 2 Knopf, Marcy Jane, 128 , 129 Kreiger, Susan, 156 n. 5 Kristeva, Julia, 143 , 163 n. 5

L Lacan, Jacques, 98 -99, 162 -63n. 3 language. See discourse Lather, Patti: on feminist methodology, 139 Research as Praxis," 2 , 139 on self-critique by researchers, 148 , 149 , 150 LeCompte, Margaret D., 35 Le Guin, Ursula K.: The Left Hand of Darkness, 61 -62 lesbianism, 99 See also bisexuality "lesbian phallus" theory, 132 -33, 166 n. 16 "lesbophobia," 140 life history narratives. See narratives listening skills, 19 -20, 23 , 29 , 37 , 58

Lorde, Audre, 52 , 140 Lugones, Maria, 55 , 139 , 145 Lutz, Catherine, 114 -15, 116

M Mama, Amina, 5 ; Beyond the Masks, 155 n. 3 Mama Lola (vodou priestess), 149 , 151 marginalization, 5 See also Other; power; racism; sexism Marshall, Paule: The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, 1 , 22 , 137 Marxism, 64 masculinity, 103 , 105 , 117 -18, 163 -64n. 6 "master scripts": of hero(ine)'s journey, 73 -75, 85 , 86 , 87 as patriarchal, 62 , 63 , 66 -68, 70 , 93 -94, 95 -96 persistence of, 74 of psychoanalytic theories of gender identity, 98 -199 Page 185

Menchu, Rigoberta, 147 method, definition of, 138 methodology: changes in focus of, 2 -3 definition of, 138 , 155 n. 1

limitations of, 153 See also feminist methodology Mies, Maria, 39 , 55 , 145 , 152 ''migratory subjectivity," 4 -5 Miller, Janet L., 88 -89, 94 Minister, Kristina, 20 "mobile" subjectivities, 4 , 144 Moi, Toril, 3 , 163 n. 5 Morrison, Toni, 92 , 160 n. 6 mother-infant bond, 162 -63n. 3 motion, metaphors of, 4 -5 Mulqueen, Maggie, 103 , 104 , 105 multiculturalism, 55 Munro, Petra, 40 , 46 , 109 Repositioning Feminism and Education, 149

N Nader, Laura, 34 Narayan, Uma, 55 narratives: autobiography in, 62 -63, 74 fact versus fiction in, 61 -62, 147

feminist, 66 -71, 95 interpretation of, 9 , 145 -46 limitations of using, 146 -47 master scripts" in, 62 , 63 , 66 -68, 70 , 73 -75, 93 -94, 95 -96 of Olivia, 19 -21, 33 , 62 , 71 -94 of Sandy, 45 , 46 -47, 101 -2 self-representation in, 62 -63 narrativity, 69 Nisa (!Kung informant), 151 nonunitary subjectivity. See subjectivity, nonunitary normalization, 127 novelists, freedom with characters, 94 -95

O Oakley, Ann: influence of, 36 interview patterns recommended by, 25 , 27 -29, 30 , 32 on researcher-participant relationships, 151 Oedipus complex, 98 , 99 , 135 , 161 -62n. 2 O'Hara, Frank, xiii Olivia (research participant): anonymity of, 15 , 156 -57n. 1 beginning interviews with, 16 -25

decision to participate in research, 15 -16 first meeting with, 15 narratives of, 19 -21, 33 , 62 , 71 -94 negotiated research relationship with, 23 -25, 26 , 27 -28, 29 -30, 31 , 32 -33, 36 , 37 39, 149 , 152 reflections on experience as respondent, 160 -61n. 9 subjectivity in narratives of, 64 , 71 -94, 96 , 144 , 147 , 160 -61n. 9 oppositions, 92 Orbach, Susie, 164 n. 9 Other: marginalization of, 153 whites as, 92 women as, 62 -63

P patriarchy: and binary gender identity, 97 limitations imposed on women within, 64 , 67 , 69 , 78 -79, 93 -94, 111 -12 penis envy, 124 -25, 131 -34, 161 -62n. 2 people of color: as emotive (emotional), 116 on feminist methodology, 140 personal experience, role in feminist research, 20 , 22 -23, 30 -31 personal narratives. See narratives Personal Narratives Group, Interpreting Women's Lives, 146 , 150

phallic stage (of infant development), 161 -62n. 2 phenomenology, 18 -19, 28 Pinar, William, 65 Plath, Sylvia: The Bell Jar, 82 Pogrebin, Letty Cottin, 51 polite social communication, 29 , 30 -32, 37 political feminism, 55 , 143 Page 186

polyvocality, 2 positionality, 2 postmodernism, 2 , 6 , 7 power: in feminist narratology, 68 -69 multiple roles of, 33 -40, 56 phallus as signifier of, 133 , 134 unidirectional notion of, 34 -36 Pramaggiore, Maria, 129 professor-student subject relationships, 36 -38, 54 progressive-regressive method, 62 , 63 -66, 70 -71, 83 , 95 -96 "pruning away," 79 , 81 , 83 psychoanalytic theory, feminist and feminist postmodern critiques of, 97 , 98 -100

Q qualitative methodology, 1 , 2 , 10 , 153 departures from, 28 ; discourses in, 26 roles of power in, 34 -36, 54

R racism, 68 , 73 , 77 -78, 92 , 140 radical empiricism, 18 rationality (reason), 114 , 115 , 116 , 118 , 120 reciprocity, in interviews, 1 , 45 -46, 49 , 50 , 54 -55 reflexivity, 2 Reinharz, Shulamit: on disbelief, 31 -32 on feminist methodology, 41 , 139 , 147 Feminist Methods in Social Research, 41 on feminist sisterhood, 151 , 152 on need for observing in multiple contexts, 47 on realistic attitude toward research relationships, 55 relativism, 39 religion, 38 , 47 -48 Repositioning Feminism and Education (Jipson et al.), 149

researchers: agenda of, 17 -18, 44 -45 authority of, 2 identification with participant subjects, 2 , 18 , 39 , 152 listening skills of, 19 -20, 23 , 29 , 37 , 58 relationships with participant subjects, 1 -2, 9 , 17 -18, 23 -27, 34 -36, 53 , 54 , 70 71, 147 -48, 150 -52 self-reflections of, 148 -50 "researching up," 36 , 37 respondents: power of, 34 -36 researchers' responsibility toward, 94 -95 skills of, 19 , 20 -21, 27 -28, 33 , 47 , 57 Ribbens, Jane, 15 Riviere, Joan, 127 Robinson, Sally, 4 Roman, Leslie G., 37 romantic love, 165 -66n. 14 Ruddick, Sara, ed.: Between Women, 150 rule making, 39 Rupp, Leila J., 138 Rust, Paula C., 128 , 129 , 131

S

Sandy (research participant): beginning interviews with, 44 -52, 123 conflict over religious issues, 47 -48, 50 -52, 54 , 55 decision to participate in research, 43 -44, 45 discourse of emotional in narratives of, 113 -21, 132 discourse of sexuality in narratives of, 45 , 97 , 101 -2, 121 -34, 135 , 143 -44 discourse of work in narratives of, 102 -13 first meeting with, 43 -44 narrative of, 45 , 46 -47, 101 -13 negotiated research relationship with, 44 -46, 50 -52, 149 , 152 reflections on experience as respondent, 49 -52, 56 -58, 163 n. 4, 164 -65n. 10 , 166 n. 15 subjectivity in narratives of, 97 -98, 100 , 101 -2, 147 Sarton, May, 151 Sartre, Jean-Paul: on constraints imposed by conditioning, 75 on manifestations of "positive (continued on next page)

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praxis," 65 , 77 -78, 95 -96 progressive-regressive method, 62 , 62 -66, 70 -71, 76 , 83 , 95 -96 Search for a Method, 64 , 70 , 95

Sawin, Patricia, 32 , 41 , 50 -51 self-criticism, by researchers, 148 -50 self-representation, in personal narratives, 62 -63, 105 -6 sexism: as focus of feminist methodology, 139 -41 inherent in binary gender theory, 97 , 106 in workplace, 68 , 70 , 73 , 74 , 78 , 92 sexual harassment, narratives about, 71 , 72 -73, 78 , 85 -88, 92 sexuality: development of, 98 of Sandy, 45 , 97 , 121 -34, 135 , 143 -44 See also bisexuality; heterosexuality; homosexuality; lesbianism Shostak, Marjorie, 151 Silverman, Kaja, 100 sisterhood, 52 , 55 -56, 151 -52 "situated responsiveness," 89 Smith, Sidonie: on feminist narratology, 74 on hope in autobiographical writing, 10 -11 on redefinition of unitary self, 3 , 6 Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body, vi suspicion of narratives genres, 62 -63, 66 social class, 38 , 53 , 91

social communication, 29 -33 "social therapy," 120 sociology, 3 , 146 speech genres, 40 -41 Spelman, Elizabeth, 55 , 116 , 139 , 145 Stacey, Judith, 34 , 58 Stanley, Liz, 138 story. See narratives Strathern, Marilyn, 156 n. 5 subject, agency of, 4 -5, 8 , 71 "subjective concreteness," 145 subjectivity: definition of, 4 formation of, 79 , 81 , 83 -85 fragmentation of, 5 -6 subjectivity, nonunitary: definition of, 3 -7, 34 , 100 -101 and gender issues, 97 of informants, 2 represented in personal narratives, 9 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 69 , 87 -88, 89 -93 of researchers, 150 situated responsiveness of, 89

subordination, and power, 51 Symbolic Order (of infant development), 162 -63n. 3 "sympathetic outsiders," 55 , 158 n. 2

T Tallen, Bette S., 140 Taylor, Verta, 138 theory: feminist poststructural, 4 "lesbian phallus," 132 -33, 166 n. 16 psychoanalytic, 97 , 98 -100 trust, as factor in interview research, 44 , 54 -55, 57 -58, 95 , 150 , 151 turn-taking, in communication, 30 , 32

V validity: of informants' narratives, 18 , 20 , 150 of research, 18 , 151 Victor, Susan: Repositioning Feminism and Education, 149

W Walkerdine, Valerie: on centrality of conflict in narrative, 88 on discipline, 111 , 112 on empirical research on subjectivity, 3 -4 on women's "claim to the phallus," 134

Weedon, Chris, 3 , 4 , 5 Wheelock, Martha, 150 -51 Williams, Patricia J., 160 n. 6 Wilson, Elizabeth, 128 Wise, Sue, 138 Wittig, Monique, 105 -6 Wolf, Margery, 10 Page 188

women, as category, 141 , 142 -44. See also gender identity women of color. See people of color work: as gender-defined, 102 -13; and sexism in workplace, 68 , 70 , 73 , 74 , 78 , 92 working-class women, 38 -39, 91 "writing beyond the ending," 66 -68, 70 , 74 , 93 , 95 writing of the body (écriture feminine ), 142

Z Zionism, 50 -52, 158 n. 1