“Louise was not presented with the same opportunity as her husband to speak in front of audiences, yet she held class in her kitchen for her children on a daily basis.” – The Three Mothers, Anna Malaika Tubbs

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. I have settled on “Methods are the tools that we use to build our theoretical frameworks and methodology is how we use those tools.”

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 its 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 are 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.

I think there is room for conversation because academia has historically honored the subjective bullshit of racist, conservative, elitist, white, masculinity…

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 ________, even though I operate from blank blank places of power?” Should this even be an issue? Should all subjectivity matter? Is it the same? 

OR will this like Jennifer C. 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” AND 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.”

Similarly, Savannah Shange in Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship, describe “the methodological demand of a Black/queer/diaspora anthropology is to move, I write in transit, shuttling between times and places, first and third persons, academic and AAVE registers. A text in motion seeks to unsettle the stability of our inherited relation to language itself, even as it dances around the scholarly convention. I invite readers to move with me, our intellectual gestures syncopated but never synchronized.”

I struggle with how to use this as a tool because 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 have no idea 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 people can understand what you 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).

For my 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 even if it is 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, I am interested 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 analyze the space between – I need two points. I need 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.

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?

Tool #5 Common Sense 

Savannah Shange’s text defines so many of the methods that I implored in my own work. She invokes Kara Keeling’s conceptualization of “common sense”:  

Shange argues that “while each of our queer subjects is indeed figured “outside” of the order of normative gender, the coordinates of our outsideness are still mapped onto the languages and logics of normative gender...We outchea, but we ain’t outside the realm of common sense, queer or otherwise.” 

I see this again and again in my research. Women are not a monolith. Feminism means something very different to most women, and women perpetuate power structures created for and by patriarchy every day. Like Shange’s queer subjects women operate within the parameters of normative logistics and language. Nicaraguan and Irish women often have to navigate their revolutionary experiences and lives under the cloak of catholicism. For example, the ideological glorification of motherhood remains unchanged. Religious and educational institutions celebrate motherhood as women’s natural role, a god-given biological imperative. This doctrine reinforces the structural oppression of women.

Key Texts

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) 

“What Are the Iranians Wishing For? Queer Transnational Solidarity in Revolutionary Iran” by Sara Mameni,  is an intimate dive into the experience of Kate Millet’s tape recordings and her photographs taken when she and her lover traveled to Iran in 1979. From the tapes, Mameni deduced that Millett had not received with the kind of enthusiasm she had expected, and wondered aloud “What are the Iranian women wishing for.” She felt side-lined and wanted to be a part of “their” movement. (958)  A big part of her expectations came from her mother back in the United States who was recorded repeatedly calling her “mothers perfect warrior.” (974) “Millet held that her own presence in Iran was inevitable since Iranian women were not merely involved in a national uprising but were spearheading a global feminist movement at whose forefront Millett imagined herself. In this light, Millett’s casual remark about what Iranian women might be wishing for can be read as a desire to incorporate her body into their world and a longing for intimacy, alliance, and global sisterhood. Her words ex- press her displacement within Iranian women’s uprising and her inability to transform “their” protest into “our” global feminist revolution.” (959)

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).

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.

“The Cultural Politics of Emotion”, by Sara Ahmed’s argued that demanding national shame rather than personal guilt is important for the process of healing.  Women have always been tasked with healing. Recovery rather than forgetting the traumas of the past which are defined as both personal and national.  In Ireland, the home represented the marriage of father God and mother Ireland – but for revolutionary Irish women “Our family motto wasn’t ‘For God and Ireland,’ Ireland came before God.”

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 its 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.”

 

“Memory as a vision of the future, language as a tool of resistance, oral history as a form of struggle” – Alessandro Portelli

Historical documents are themselves reflections of the people who write them, and the society they are written for. Simone Kolysh’s analysis of sociology, in Everyday Violence tells us that “Instead of pretending one’s social position as a researcher does not bear on the research process, reflexive sociology is about doing science more rigorously and with more awareness of the power differential that exists between scientist and those we study” (18). Legitimizing memory and storytelling allows researchers tools to unearth the histories of people erased.  Not having birth records, not being mentioned in newspapers, not being included in a government report immediately disqualifies poor, black, immigrant, indigenous, rural people from being historical agents. Countries that have been ravaged by war lose these documents if there were any. Their ignored histories are not legitimized in academia, they are held sacred in the lessons of our grandmothers, our families and our communities. They are woven into the fabric of our survival. 

The stories that surround events tell us the impact of the events that a chronological timeline simply cannot. A timeline can not, by itself, give us a picture of generational impact. Alessandro Portelli argues, “The discrepancy between fact and memory ultimately enhances the value of the oral sources as historical documents. It is not caused by faulty recollections but is actively generated by memory and imagination in an effort to make sense of crucial events. If oral sources had given us ‘accurate’ ‘reliable’ factual reconstructions of the death of Luigi Trastulli, we would know much less about it.” (26) 

Tubbs in The Three Mothers explains that Ablerta, Berdis and Louise “sharing their stories made this book possible. “Louise practiced the tradition of oral history…Berdis left her mark through letters, and Alberta fostered others’ talents and her tutees remember any time they sang to played their instrument.” (218). Tubbs acknowledges that when doing biographical work it is hard to navigate between “what is and is not factual” especially when history has already written you off as unimportant (Tubbs 14). For example, there is a discrepancy in whether Louisa’s birth year was 1894 or 1897, and Berdis was said to have been born in 1903, but her mother’s death certificate was dated 1902, a scholar described Alberta as quiet and a family member described her as lively. History is “composed of many sources that might contradict one another in small ways, but it still holds true about the significance and influence of each of these mothers and speaks to their legacy” (Tubbs 14). 

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. Like in Chile, where dictatorship failed to expunge popular memory of revolutionary empowerment and entitlement, in today’s Nicaragua and Ireland, women’s memories of utopian feminist dreams remain alive and relevant.  The events that created these utopian dreams merit closer historical analysis.

Collective Memory

Memory protects our history from the massacre of colonialism. It is a tool for survival. Portelli argues that exaggerations of an episode don’t take away from the facts of the event, they enhance and inform the importance, further that chronological shifts don’t weaken the two separate events but rather they show how those events worked to create a national narrative. Memory works to heal wounds in two distinct ways: some narrators amplify the description of the episode, and some invoke a chronological shift. (Portelli 19-20) The next generation of workers attests to how memory worked to heal the wound of political set back by the union organizers. Trastulli was created into a martyr that died for the “struggle for jobs.” “He did not die fighting for jobs in 1953, the workers carried him along in their minds when they took to the barricades then.” (Portelli 20). Even though written historical texts are granted greater validity, orality is woven into the very texture of the written official word. (5) Witnesses are hardly impartial: police, non-union office workers, government employees etc. (Portelli 6) 

Mothers 

I’m is what I’m is but what I am is like my mama” – Missy Elliot 

The reason that ideology changed even while national policy-making took its time is that the vehicle of ideology and the creators and sustainers of ideology are women – particularly mothers.  Mothers hold the power of storytelling and often story re-telling. Women are the keepers of family secrets and personal and national shame.  Mothers have also been leaders in demanding national recognition for shameful acts shifting the focus away from personal guilt.

In The Three Mothers, Tubbs concludes that while Alberta, Berdis, and Louise themselves did not “care deeply for formal recognition” they did care deeply about “passing on lessons to their own children and grandchildren.” (207). Louise Little for example did not get many opportunities to speak publically, “yet she held class in her kitchen for her children on a daily basis.”

“Cassette no. 1: Kate Millett on the phone with her mother. (973) Mameni begins this paragraph with “I start at the beginning” of course the beginning, the very first cassette would be a conversation with her mother! Millet spends the conversation annoying Mameni, but also doing her “best at making her mother worry” (974). Her mother and sister disapproved of the trip and warned of bugs in the water, danger, salmonella – but Millet is annoyed by it and responds that “she is not a damned idiot.” Millet however LOVES being “her mother’s perfect warrior” and repeats the phrase often, “it’s a refrain” explains Mameni. (974). This is important because Millet relishes in the identity of being her mother’s perfect warrior. It served as an impetus for her work, where she did it, why she did it. If she isn’t making her mother worry “more than usual” is she even working. (974). While we don’t have her mother’s perspective and account, what we know based on Millet’s telling of it in her cassette recordings is that this is an integral piece of who she is. 

Mameni describes being at her workstation silently sobbing listening to Millett narrating, “We are quieting down now to respect the patients at the hospital. The nurses are all on the balconies waving. They have such great style. Neat capes and hats. The nurses are all waving at us. They are blowing kisses. Aren’t they great? Nursing is the chosen profession of first wave feminists.” Once they pass the hospitals the women hail the nurses with the chant: Dorood Bar Parastar!” Mameni describes having to stop taking notes to wipe her cheeks. Why? Because she explains, “I see my mother on the balcony. Waving and blowing kisses. I see her in profile like the one photograph I have of her wearing her nurse’s uniform. I see her hair flaring under her white hat and around her face. She is not wearing her cape but sports a white robe.” (975)

The best (and most familiar) part of her story comes when she calls her mother. 

Why Does this Matter (to me)?

This project matters to me because the home is the catalyst for revolutions and rebellions. To tell the story of activism, or organizing, without a kitchen table would be futile. However, women’s participation in those political acts is continuously and consistently missing from the retelling of revolutions outside the home. There is an inherent and purposeful divorce between the home and the nation that codifies women’s exclusion from political rhetoric. 

When I first began researching private versus public spheres, I knew that they were innately gendered. The world around me defined that for me every day of my life. The way chores were divided boys took the garbage out and did yard work, girls did the dishes and laundry. The line was drawn around girls at birth.  What took me a couple of degrees to figure out was that these lines are geographical structures with borders like nation-states.

Kitchens are nation-states. There is an absolute monarchal nature to the power wielded out of kitchens – power divinely granted to employ responsibly – because women in kitchens are the engines of resistance. Angela Davis in Reflections on the Black Women’s Role in the Community of Slaves, describes revolts as only the tip of the iceberg.  Resistance expressed itself in the seemingly trivial forms of….”daily minor acts of sabotage that harassed the slave master to no end. The slave system had to deal with the black woman as the custodian of the house of resistance. Black women often poisoned food and set fire to the houses of their masters” (Davis 86-87).  

While women poisoned masters, they also cured their communities because they alone held the recipes of remedies in their minds. This constant work – these daily acts of resistance is the bedrock of revolution. It is also the fundamental way that women acted locally in their homes and affected national movements.

Some questions I begin with are:

Is academic research without incorporating storytelling and memories inherently unethical? 

Why is it important for academics to uncover their own stories before they begin producing knowledge about others?

How do the stories that start at home create a national identity?

Does it matter what the “real” story is?