M/othering and a Minor Methodology

• In Event: M/othering a Bodied Curriculum: Emplacement, Desire, and Affect

Abstract

We engage the minor in order to destabilize the autobiographical in both feminist research on mothering and in curriculum scholarship. The minor, according to Deleuze and Guattari resists authorial power, and the role of interpretation in uncovering hidden meanings in a text. The minor is a concept that deterritorializes the major, the major being dominant systems of signification and representation. The minor has no model; it is a becoming, a process. According to Simon O’Sullivan (2006) there are three characteristics to describing the minor. First, the minor involves a kind of stuttering, or what he refers to as a “becoming stranger” (p. 70). The minor is not habitual; it is unfamiliar and inventive. Second in the minor everything is political, meaning that the individuals who are imbricated by the minor are always linked to larger social spaces. Third, the minor is always collective. There is less emphasis on the autonomy of the individual, for instance, and more importance placed on the collective production of work and meaning. These characteristics provide a framework for thinking about curriculum as the “collectivization of subjectivity and the calling forth of new kinds of community” (p. 71), not based on common universal characteristics but on the coming together of difference in and as difference (Nancy, 2000). Collectivity, in this sense moves beyond comfortable understandings of individuality and knowledge production, and rather foregrounds knowing as an intercorporeal process.

We turn to the concept of the minor in an effort to tangle together the theories of the body that are central to the very ways we imagine a methodology emerging out of our work. There is a compulsion in academic scholarship to structure research through common frameworks or methodologies. When methodologies don’t quite fit, scholars may choose to use a bricolage approach or in some cases to invent a new methodology. We have struggled with framing our work concerning the maternal body through the lineage of currere, autobiography, and arts-based research because the instant we brought the theories into relation with these existing frameworks, our work no longer performed the becoming minoritarian that we felt was so important. Rather than completely disregard these existing methodologies and their relationships with curriculum theory, we chose to think of methodology as a minor practice, where a minor reading is not a counter movement but “a space surprised by difference into the performance of practices of not-knowing” (Lather, 2007, p. 7). A minor methodology isn’t a new methodology with its own set of criteria or renderings; it is a way to unhinge the potential stasis of methodologies, the familiar, and the known. Engaging in a minor methodology means to develop alternative accounts of knowing, to debate essentialist ideas that emplace the mother, and to demand complexity (Lather, 2007).

Authors

• Stephanie Springgay, OISE/University of Toronto

• Debra M. Freedman, University of Waterloo