I am not where I was 15 weeks ago where the definition of methods was that little fuzzy thing you kind of see in your eye that you can’t even quite catch.

BUT I am still working through my own definition. Today I am trying on “Methods are the tools that we use to build our theoretical frameworks and methodology is how we use those tools.”

Some tools I am applying to my project are (including but not limited to):

Tool #1: Subjectivity/Intuition

Phillip Brian Harper’s argument of subjectivity in “The Evidence of Felt Intuition: Minority Experience, Everyday Life, and Critical Speculative Knowledge”: “The speculation in which I engaged during that encounter, then, was thoroughly bound up with the material factors that constituted my subjectivity within it, and it is in relation to those factors that my speculative rumination derives it’s ultimate meaning, however abstractly theoretical it may appear at first blush. This, I guess, explains why I harbor no reservations about theory because I don’t see it as every being “merely” theoretical. Moreover, as far as queer studies is concerned, the theory may in some respects be all that we have, if by theory we mean (to be etymological again) a way of seeing that allows us to apprehend our world in different and potentially productive ways.”

This is why and part of how I argue that personal stories are necessary for historicizing events and in imperative to documenting realities. Legitimizing the intuition of the storyteller has incredible power in shaping the knowledge produced about an event, or a person, or a place. Honoring the subjectivity of a story does not make it less real – in fact, it colors in much of the negative space that would otherwise be gray.

Reasons why it isn’t perfect, there aren’t any.

Reasons why I think there is room for conversation – academia is historically based on the subjective bullshit of racist, conservative, elitist, white, masculinity (the list goes on) and it is gross. Will using subjectivity and intuition as a method justify folks who are marginalized in any way to reinforce some of the grossness of the academy? Will there be a “my subjectivity matters because I am a woman, even though I am rich and white…or my subjectivity matters because I am an immigrant, even tho I am a rich hetero man.” Should this even be an issue? Should all subjectivity matter? Is it the same? Should it be?

OR will this like Nash argued about intersectionality, create a burden on marginalized people to have to proprietarily use this method because it is OURS.

In my work this is both foundational to my question “does it matter what the real story is” but also clearly gets to some important questions Jeremy posed to me:

“Are there good-faith and bad-faith versions of individual truths?

Is purposefully distorted or falsified information still a valid version of the story?

How does this question/topic align with your vision of justice?”

Tool #2: Disorder/Messiness

Matt Brim and Amin Ghaziani’s celebrate disorder and messiness as a method. They explain “gender and sexuality scholarship recognizes disorder as generative….’queer methods’ exploit the possibilities that arise from the ‘messiness’ of LGBTQI social life.”

Reasons why this isn’t perfect as a method there aren’t any because it is.

Reasons why I I struggle with how to use this as a tool…writing is hard. Much harder for me than researching. I usually have an outline that is at least 10 more pages than the paper I turn in because my brain must compartmentalize things or else I have a really hard time organizing them. How do you write about the messiness in a clear way? How do you concisely and efficiently write about disorder? In academia, limits have set me free…outlines, borders, deadlines, organized chaos…lines that I can’t cross because “that is the next paper not this one.” How do you simplify the messiness, the disorder, into something contained and orderly? I love this tool, but I don’t know how to use it.

For my project – I want to live in the space between real and true. Between your story and my story. I want to float between hard stops in a map. I want to both use definitions that are important to me and validate the very different definitions created by others. Language is nebular, but also concrete. Like stories, our identities, and where both of those come from. How do you write about that so that people can understand what your are saying and follow your thought process?

Tool # 3 Reconstructed History

The Death of Luigi Trastulli: Memory and the Event (1991 SUNY Press) by Alessandro Portelli,   “…Oral sources…are not fully reliable in point of fact. Rather than being a weakness, this is however their strength: errors, inventions, and myths lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings.’ (2) The timeline and details of the death of Trastulli are not as important as “the fact that it became the ground upon which collective memory and imagination built a cluster of tales, symbols, legends, and imaginary reconstructions” (1) Many narrators of the story don’t think that Trastulli died in 1949, but in 1953 during a massive labor protest. (14) “Trastulli’s death was such a dramatic shock that it created a need for adequate circumstances. (15) 

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr.m Malcom X, and James Baldwin shaped a Nation, by Anna Malaika Tubbs unearths the buried stories of the mothers of national heroes. She does not just tell their stories of motherhood, but she honors their lives as complete individual people. “Highlighting their roles as mothers does not erase their identities as independent women. Instead, these identities informed their ability to raise independent children…” (6). Tubbs combats “erasure, misrecognition and historical amnesia” by recognizing the multi-faceted stories of these black women and argues “this writing is even more needed and holds even more power, when thinking about groups who have historically been erased and misrepresented, groups who have kept from telling our side, groups who suffer the repercussions of such exclusion to this day, and group who continue to resist all of this.” (6,10).

Reasons why this isn’t perfect as a method …none… 10 out of 10 would recommend.

Reasons why I struggle with how to use this as a tool…for this project most of the folks I want to interview for the auto-ethnographic portion are my people – so that wouldn’t be hard. BUT for future work, and for the national/state story sections…. traveling to interview people is EXPENSIVE wven if it inside the United States. If I want to use this tool – I am going to need serious funding. THAT IS A CHOQUE! I am interested in folks who may not have already been interviewed which means that there might not be anything in the archives already. Also in places where the history of revolution has made document preservation impossible, which intensifies the need for oral histories but also creates a lacuna in finding historical anchors. Do I need them? I don’t know, but if I want to compare the “real story” with the “true story” with what “actually happened”…I am going to need some kind of anchor.

Tool #4 Memory

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Sexuality, Gender and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973 by Heidi Tinsman emphasized the importance of transformations in ideology (even when practice did not match discourse) and her long-term view. She explains the remarkable feminist agency of Chilean women agricultural workers in 1991—just after the fall of Pinochet’s seventeen-year military dictatorship—as a legacy of “an earlier utopian moment: the radical populism of Chile’s Agrarian Reform between 1964 and 1973.”   When studying the Nicaraguan Revolution and the Irish Troubles —like the Chilean Revolution—political defeat and reversal of economic gains must not erase recognition of the longer-term significance of transformations in consciousness.

ZIP ZERO reasons this is not a perfect method.

Reasons why it isn’t a perfect fit for my project. Individual memories help create a larger collective memory – but they aren’t carbon copies of each other. The process of transferring from individual to collective is what I am interested in – but synthesizing those memories would also then carry the tint of my own interpretation – my memory/story/subjectivity is now a thread in the fabric. How does the author/knowledge producer both allow for a space where an egalitarian relationship the border between subject/author can be erased without superimposing themselves into the picture?

For my work, how much of my own relationships, identity and stories filter/edit what I hear and understand from what is said and understood?