Love and Validity in Feminist Storyworlding Methodology

• In Event: Being Irresponsible: A Feminist Undoing of Academic Research

Abstract

This paper offers conceptual understanding for including love as a way of knowing through the WomenWeLove (WWL) Project, which is being conducted by the Feminist Research Collective (FRC). Undertaking any social research implies that other human beings concern us emotionally as well as intellectually, and that their well-being should concern both authors and readers. In the WWL project we make this tacit ideal explicit, and translate it as love, (broadly defined). Using the stories and process in the WWL project, reflecting on the discussions with the women we research, and sharing experiences we and other women in the FRC have gathered through getting to know the research participants over the course of our lives, this paper presents our arguments about love applied to qualitative approaches in general as well as to our research project.

In contemporary ethnography, validity, or trustworthiness, is established through a set of practices which include transparency about one’s position and intention, rich, detailed description, time in the field, participant feedback, participation in daily activities, a recognition of impermanence and willingness to both acknowledge and set aside (or try to set aside) ethnocentric assumptions. We argue that there is considerable overlap between these practices and the practices that go into developing and maintaining close relationships. In this essay we take these markers of ethnographic validity one by one and note how each is also central to human connection or love.

Two features of the WWL project are pertinent to critical and feminist theory as well as to ethnography. One is the recognition that the practice of love in research requires as much or more rigor as reason and measurement. In North American and in Indian culture, human emotions other than anger – love and empathy in particular - tend to be gendered as female. While neither emotion nor reason are essentially male or female, we note that reason has historically been given higher status. We argue that love as a way of knowing also requires time, insight and integrity, and that “the intelligence of emotions”, to use Martha Nussbaum’s phrase, deserves to be valued alongside purely cognitive approaches. The other feminist element of the WWL project is that we have chosen to make women the central protagonists of the stories we share. These are women we are in close relationships with, and in many cases, they are socially marginalized. There is a long cultural history wherein a flow of service, sympathy, attention and unpaid or poorly paid labor goes from women to men, and from people of color to White people; a phenomenon that is passed off in our cultural narratives as the natural order of things. Our project counters the direction of this flow, pulling the love and imagination of the reader towards the ordinary women in our lives.

Authors

• Lucinda Carspecken, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Pooja Saxena, Indiana University - Bloomington