Girlhood at the Intersection of Art and Ethnography: The Possibilities for Deleuzian Research Methodology

• In Event: Video Data and the Time-Image: Cinematic Methodologies in Education Research

Abstract

Objectives:

How might the visual open possibilities and questions for girlhood studies? I explore this through a discussion of a video art installation project I collaborated on with a professional film-maker, entitled “Voices in Longitude and Latitude.” The video was created out of eighty hours of documentary verite footage, landscape/cityscape, domestic/public documentation and a series of interviews with girls, ages thirteen to twenty-three from four different regions of Canada and from different ethno-cultural, race, class and sexual communities. I aim to show how a Deleuzian framework offers important insights into the contributions of video-based methodologies.

Theoretical framework:

In exploring video-based methodologies I am interested in the convergence of Deleuzian thinking on “becoming” and space as well as the notion of place from feminist critical geography (Massey, 2005). In a Deleuzian framework, identity/difference emerge as an effect of connections and relations within and between different bodies, affecting and being affected by each other. Difference is a continuum and a multiplicity in a constant state of becoming or differentiation in relation to each singular body (Deleuze, 1994). Moreover, space in a Deluzian sense is fragmented, rhizomatic, fluid, ambiguous, vulnerable and open to constant change. It is linked with how one encounters, constructs and performs the body, thereby mapping the relationship of space to subjectivity and ways of knowing (Springgay, 2008). Similarly, for Massey (2008), the “event of place” (p. 140) or the making of places is contingent on movement. Defining place as “the coming together of the previously inter-related – a constellation of processes rather than a thing. It is temporary – ‘the elements of this “place” will be, at different times and speeds again dispersed” (Massey, 2005, p. 141) there is an ongoing reciprocal relationship between people and the places they inhabit.

Methods:

As a visual and audio experience, rather than a written text Voices opens up the possibility of multisensory ways of knowing in which images, sounds, affect and spatial delineations are read onto and through one another. The visual, sensory material environment of the piece situates knowing and meaning in movement and in the in-between where language hesitates and falters, where uncertainty cannot be represented and where knowledge remains unspoken. Deleuzian methods enable an encounter that is not a visual/auditory objectification of experiential realities but rather performative; one that opens bodies to other bodies and encounters, and where the meanings, understandings, theories and methodologies generated become multiple and entangled.

Scholarly Significance:

In recent literatures across a variety of academic disciplines the visual is being re-situated as an element of the multisensorialty of everyday contexts (Pink et al., 2010). Engaging with the question of how to produce research from within an ontology and epistemology where affect, the pre-discursive and the discursive are mutually articulated (Tagouchi, 2012) the significance of this paper, is to show how using a video-based research offers a way of “transgressing what we already know and for extending knowing into other potential realities” (Tagouchi, 2012: 267).

Author

• Marnina Gonick, Mount Saint Vincent University