Debates in Feminist Research- week 3 (Monday 21st January)

The following series of posts will relate to a course I am currently taking as part of my Women's Studies degree. The aim of the course is to explore the key issues and debates in women's studies research.

For my assessment as part of this course, I am producing a critical journal, detailing my assumptions and realisations about women's studies research and about myself as a researcher. It will include some preparation work for classes and reflections on this preparation, as I discover new ways of researching.

NOTE: Please feel free to read this blog and comment freely. I am not presenting facts, this is a record of my thoughts and processes. However I will ask, given that this will form part of my assessed degree course, that you ask me before using any of this material yourself.


Debates in Feminist Research- week 3 (Monday 21^st January)

This week we were asked to prepare an ‘intellectual autobiography’, identifying a textual artefact which linked our sense of self with our reading of a text in order to explore the potential usefulness of ‘intellectual autobiography’. We referred to two texts during the session:

Hennegan, Alison. "On Becoming a Lesbian Reader". Sweet Dreams: Sexuality and Popular Fiction. Ed. Susannah Radstone. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988. 165-190.

Lynne Pearce. "Finding a place from which to write: the methodology of feminist textual practice". Feminist Cultural Theory: Process and Production. Ed. Beverley Skeggs. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. 81-96.

This is my own attempt at an ‘intellectual autobiography’.

I found it very difficult to write this. I found myself reading through old diaries and notebooks, frantically searching for a clue to the root of my ‘womanness’ and ‘feministness’. I didn’t know how to separate my identity as a ‘woman’ from my identity as a ‘feminist’. When did I start to be ‘feminist’? Most of all, I found it almost impossible to place myself back into the thoughts and feelings of my 15 year-old self, discovering her identity, without analysing myself with the knowledge I now have. For example, I am not sure my 15 year-old self would have referred to herself as a feminist, or even as a ‘woman’. The artefact I chose - Lady Chatterley's Lover by D . H. Lawrence - may not actually represent the pivotal moments in my identification as a woman and a feminist – this may have happened six months after reading the book, or perhaps the process had already begun– however from what I remember of my reaction to this novel (and also the fact that I do remember) these were clearly important moments for me and contributed to my development.

first read Lady Chatterley’s Lover when I was around 13 or 14 and it was the first book I had read which described sex in such detail. With a teenager’s appetite for texts which described sexual encounters (most ‘proper’ texts I had encountered did not talk about sex) I found this book at once racy, and troubling. I tried to identify with Connie, however there was always something about the book, particularly the ending, which left me cold. I found that, even though these were the first sexual encounters I had really read about, I didn’t believe them. I couldn’t identify myself with the couple or with their encounters and I wasn’t quite sure why I felt vaguely dissatisfied.

Later learning has revealed to me the deeply sexist views of women’s sexuality in the novel and its engrained heteronormativity, however even though I wasn’t aware of this view of the novel when I first read it, there was obviously something in my reading which prevented me from identifying with it and this perhaps allowed me to consider that female sexuality, my sexuality was maybe not universal or pre-prescribed in a certain way. Perhaps this was the beginning of my rejection of prescribed sexuality and signalled the start of my exploration of my sexuality and myself. Furthermore, subsequent editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover have had images of women (in various dramatic poses) on the cover, thus indicating that this novel has something to do with women. This may have enhanced my identification with it, had I initially read a copy with a similar image on the cover. (Have a look at the many different covers for this novel here).

In later texts I read I much more readily identified with the authors/female characters and sought to use certain aspects of their identities to inform and validate my own. I was outraged at Offred’s treatment in The Handmaid’s Tale, I loved the sex in Tipping the Velvet and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s intellectual angst in Prozac Nation inspired me to write about and explore my own feelings. I would jealously guard copies of these books in my room, looking at their spines on the shelf and feeling that the books held messages that only I could interpret – although others might read these books they couldn’t get the same meanings from them as I did – they couldn’t feel them like I did.

Reflections on the process of writing 'intellectual autobiography'

Following the seminar, I found it very useful and illuminating to think about some of the findings of Hennegan and Pearce in relation to my own work. Pearce’s presentation of various literature theories, particularly ‘the Death of the Author’, made me reconsider my personal critical stance with regards to this theory. Having come from a literary background, ‘the Death of the Author’ had become engrained into my critical reading skills and I am generally very wary of reading the author or any context into the novel, even where I personally ‘felt’ I needed to acknowledge the context. From a feminist point of view, maybe we need to know if the author is a woman, as a female author may find it more difficult to get published or receive authorship training. It was also interesting to consider the extent to which we think and read differently when aware of the author and it was suggested that it would be an interesting exercise to write three responses to a text, one acknowledging the author, a second denying the presence of the author and a third giving a reader’s response.

I also found it useful in the session to link the idea of ‘preferred readership’ with feminist thought. The Resisting Reader argues that readers who are not the preferred reader must read texts at a distance, and Mills et al. argue in Feminist Readings (1989) that readers look at texts from different perspectives and therefore draw different things from the text. During discussions in class about the novel I chose, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it was clear that all of us who had read it had taken different readings of it and even my own readings and interpretations had changed over time, as I became aware of other ways of reading the texts.

Exploring Hennegan’s idea of a reading ‘instinct’, I found it useful to formulate what this might mean for me in order to further understand what she means by this. Hennegan says that her instinct is ‘a pricking of the thumbs’, (166) and ‘akin to women’s instinct’: 'no genetically determined, paranormal power but a complex and subtle system of noticing and connecting a myriad of facts usually deemed irrelevant or insignificant’ (167). I initially felt very wary of this ‘instinct’, having never considered it as part of my reading selection. However the more I thought about it and when we discussed instinct in class, it led me to reconsider what ‘instinct’ might mean in a critical academic context. I feel instinct is closely related to experience and my sense of self: we form our identities through the cultural objects we encounter and interpret, therefore to be comfortable with an aspect of this culture, we create a certain order of signs around us which must be ordered and all present in order for us to be at ease. If, in looking at a book or a film, we recognise those signs that we have as part of ourselves, then we will feel an ‘instinctual’ pull towards that book. However if another book did not contain all the signs, or presented them out of order, or attacked the signs, then your instinct would draw you away from the book. Therefore we feel instinctive about certain things in the way that they correspond to or go against our experiences and thus our sense of self. This aspect of ‘instinct’ I found much easier to codify into my reading and research. Furthermore it was raised that whilst it is significant to recognise and acknowledge our instincts, we should also challenge them, due to our awareness of political or social contexts, e.g. acting in a certain sterotypical ‘feminised’ way, or acting in a certain sexual way.

[Following the session on textual analysis in week 4, I can now expand on this feeling of ‘instinct’ in relation to signs being out of order and thus feeling wrong. Saussure’s theory of sign systems clearly indicates that language itself is a sign and we experience something as different when we do not recognise it as part of the sign system of our own language. Thus in reading, it is our understanding and recognition of language which determines our relation to it.]

The context of our reading is very significant for the way we think about and read about texts. I can observe that the way I reacted to Lady Chatterley’s Lover initially was very different from the way I regarded it in 2006 when I studied it in a feminist, university context. I had also had a lot more reading experience to compare it with and had gained other author’s and lecturers opinions on the text which undoubtedly influenced me.

[Adding to this from classes in week 5, I can see that I could identify this knowledge more formally as my cultural capital.]

Through reading Pearce I discovered that perhaps I shouldn’t disregard texts I don’t identify with, or that I feel ‘instinctually’ averse to. In an academic forum, perhaps it is useful to challenge these texts and our reactions to them in order to address the way we read and the way that discourses can address us and how we are positioned by the texts. Perhaps we also form part of our identity in opposition to these texts and in order to fully explore our reading pasts, we need to address these texts.

There are different ways we allow texts to be read and to read texts – we read using varying methods, switching from one to the other, and I recognise this in my memories of my reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It seems to me to be useful to examine the way we change our minds about the texts through further education and changes in reading context. However our discussion in class of children’s stories and the similarities in our reading material as children implied a potential for universal reading and the extent to which perhaps reading does not change in its relevance as much as I had thought it would.