Debates in Feminist Research – week 4 (Monday 28th January)

This series of posts 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 seek my permission before citing any of this material yourself.

Debates in Feminist Research – week 4 (Monday 28^th January)

Textual Analysis

This week’s class explored textual analysis. We started with an analogy of textual analysis, citing an example that Catherine Belsey uses, that of psychoanalysis (see Belsey, Catherine. "Textual Analysis as a Reseach Method'. Research Methods for English Studies. Ed. Griffin, Gabriele. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). In a psychoanalytic encounter there are two interacting people – the patient and the analyst. The analyst tries to find out about the sub-text of the patient through analysis to provide answers about certain ‘problems’. The way to this is through the patient’s account – the patient’s text. Thus psychoanalysis is a form of textual analysis.

One of the insights I drew from the class was the variety and diversity of texts. Anything from psychoanalytic discourse to music, paintings to photographs; all of these objects can be interpreted as texts, albeit with slightly different methods and techniques. It was suggested that perhaps this is why Belsey chose a painting as her textual example in the article above, as we are less used in English Studies to analysing an image as text.

Another example for discovering what we classify as a text comes from the influence of structuralism and the work of Claude Levi-Strauss and Ferdinand de Saussure. Structuralism crucially changed what was conceived as a text. Anthropologist Levi-Strauss’ theory is that:

• Social relations are structures and direct who you can reproduce with, either inside or outside kinship groups
• These are determined and intersected by each culture’s definition of incest taboos
• This theory is based on a simple binary of what’s in and what’s out.

The second major influence on structuralism came from Saussure’s linguistic theory, outlined in A Course in General Linguistics.

Saussure theorised that language is made up of a system of signs in which a sign is made up of:

• The signifier (the symbol used to denote something)

• The signified (the thing being denoted)

The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, as their relationship is culturally determined and therefore differs from culture to culture. Language is thus defined by difference: we know something is not a word as we do not recognise it as part of the pattern of our own language.

Further work elaborating on Saussure’s theory showed that as well as the signifier not always being the same in every culture, the signified is not always the same either – people have different ways of imagining ‘things’. Therefore meaning becomes fluid. Structure became considered as the key to language: Saussure’s theory showed that everything is focused on the sign system, for example music notation is a sign system for sounds. Analysts can read anything which has a sign-system, they just need to know the system in order to read it.

Breaking down what we define as a text like this is very helpful in considering how we can analyse a text and can help to formulate our ideas about what a text is and therefore how we can access it. For example:

When I first thought about the question ‘What features in a text do we look for when we want to analyse it in detail?’ I immediately thought that I should locate something unusual about the text. What makes it unusual? What things are out of place? However having thought about analysing texts in light of the theories above, I realised that in going straight to historical contexts in order to see what was ‘out of context’, I was also placing my own cultural contexts and expectations of norms onto the text. I realised the extent to which my context as a researcher was creating an idea of a ‘norm’ and I was thus analysing the text in this context. Therefore I realised it is very important to try and be explicit and open about analysis to avoid internalising norms and recreating them in our textual analysis.

Belsey advocated letting the text direct your analysis. If we are thinking about a written text, this would include looking for clues in the form and structure including:

• Sentence structure
• Structure of the argument or narrative
• Overall structure of the text itself (divided into sections?)
• Grammatical structures (tenses)
• Word categories (what words are used? What do they signify)
  

An analyst should not only seek differences, they should also look for similarities, which can be just as important to a textual analysis. Therefore a first step to textual analysis should start with looking for similarities and differences.

Start with the text itself – move onto using your own norms and expectations (with awareness) – then incorporate secondary sources (with caution).

Reflections

I found it very challenging to take a step back from textual analysis and, in a way, analyse myself and the ways I conduct analysis. It is not something I have been forced to examine before, and I found it especially difficult to articulate the methods that I used for textual analysis. However having examined my own analysis methods, I feel it will be really useful in clarifying my analysis of the text itself. By isolating what you are doing as a researcher and articulating why you are doing it in the way you are, this will clearly lead to a clearer and more ‘truthful’ analysis.

It also made me think of textual analysis in light of social research analysis and ethics. Often, social researchers are very aware and explicit about their own positioning within their research, thus ensuring that they minimise any potential unexplained influence over the data. However I have not encountered much discussion of this in textual analysis traditions. Thus should a textual analyst make explicit their own particular reading position in relation to the text? I feel that moving towards this position as a researcher in textual analysis will help to clarify and reveal the norms which we project onto the text during our analysis and which could ultimately skew our interpretation. If we, as researchers, are more aware of our positionality with regards to the text, it will be much easier to analyse the text in light of this and thus allow the text, instead of our internalised norms, to direct our analysis.