Analyzing for critical resistance in narrative research

Doing deconstruction trace analysis

The deconstruction trace analysis can begin with a ‘duality search’ (Boje, 2001: 23). The duality search identifies either explicit (‘men aren’t as good at communicating as women’) or implicit (‘a man is a leader’, implying women are followers) binaries. It then looks for the relationship between the two sides of the binaries; are they ‘either/or’ and/or ‘both/and’?

The either/or, both/and binaries can be categorized in tables under broader themes like man versus woman or heterosexual versus homosexual. Then the analysis interrogates these tables for statements suggesting the participant’s relationships to these binaries. Are they natural, resistive, or troubled? Statements, arguments or other binaries that contradict or trouble the binaries (finding the exception, looking between the lines) can also be identified at this point. Finally, the deconstruction analysis can yield memos for each of the broader binaries, describing their elements, the participants’ relationships to them, how they break down, and how they are restored or reconceptualized (resituating the story).

A deconstruction trace analysis with Clark

Clark’s account of performing a feminized masculinity in the classroom makes use of male/female, heterosexual/homosexual and teacher/student binaries. Across these three binaries, Clark constructs the male-heterosexual-teacher and positions him in opposition to the female-heterosexual-student. Clark shows that he is very aware of the power of what Butler (2004) calls the ‘heterosexual matrix’ when he describes masculinity and heterosexuality as intertwined. To be a man is to be assumed heterosexual and together these two subject positions are associated with a kind of sexualized power. Clark attempts to undermine this power by intentionally performing a masculinity not easily located in the normative heterosexual matrix. When Clark makes the ‘important distinction’ that he is not attempting to pass as a gay man in his class, but to come across as ‘less heterosexual’, Clark suggests that masculine heterosexuality is not one side of a binary identity opposite to being gay, but a graded identity that can more or less enacted.

Yet, Clark seeks to undermine masculine heterosexuality and the social power it conveys because he does not want to be a ‘threat’ in the classroom – and by threat, Clark is specifically concerned with ‘sexualizing’ his female students. Couched in terms of an untroubled student/teacher binary, Clark’s concern for female students is recast in a reified male/female, heterosexual/homosexual divide that, at best, positions females as objects of male desire and at worst entails that females are hapless victims of male perpetrators. Similarly, in stating that Clark wants (female) students to know he is ‘off limits’, he reifies a binary assumption that heterosexual women are attracted to heterosexual men whose gender performance is not ambiguous. He makes this claim despite earlier in the interviews describing his relationship with a ‘masculine’ female who finds his feminized masculinity ‘very sexy’.

A deconstruction trace analysis of Clark’s antenarrative reveals the troubled and untroubled binary subjects required for Clark to resist power in the classroom. While Derrida (1997) holds that deconstruction happens, that binaries fall apart on their own in text, Clark’s antenarrative also points to the hard work of intentionally undermining gender and sexuality binaries and the ease with which one can unwittingly reify a naturalized heterosexual matrix. This analysis of Clark’s antenarrative suggests that the logic of subject position binaries can overflow the initial binary to which it is meant to refer. In Clark’s case, the untroubled binary is that of the teacher/student. Once the teacher and student are taken to be in a mutually exclusive relationship, the other subject positions with which they are associated (male teacher/female student – both assumed heterosexual) will also be (re)locked into dualistic relations, even when they are troubled elsewhere. In the next analysis I turn to the arguments and logic associated with subjects in order to understand how these binary and troubled subjects are constructed in their social contexts.

Doing discourse-argument analysis

Discourse-argument analysis begins by seeking out arguments related to subjects. The following definition serves as a frame for locating the participants’ arguments: ‘An argument is a piece of reasoning in which one or more statements are offered as support for some other statement’ (Engel, 2000: 9). After defining what is being argued and the supporting statements, the discourse-argument analysis is followed to its conclusion or end. Next the argument is searched for jargon, theories, and/or philosophies (dominant discourses). How these are used and their underlying assumptions and contradictions are noted. Finally, memos are written that describe the arguments, their components, assumptions, contradictions, and uses.

Discourse-argument analysis with Clark

Clark makes two arguments important to understanding the construction of subjects in his antenarrative. First, he argues that the way to avoid ‘sexualizing’ his female students and to be seen as less of a threat is to act ‘less heterosexual’. He does this by moving his hips, changing the way he walks and talks in the classroom. Second, Clark argues that performing a more feminized masculinity is not seen as a sexual threat by men in the classroom in the way a non-feminized performance would be interpreted by women students. Instead, Clark argues that his performance is a threat to men in the sense that it challenges men’s traditional understandings of masculinity; it is a threat to their ‘personality or way of life’. Clark further argues that this feminized performance of masculinity helps ‘homosexual or bisexual, transgendered individuals’ to feel more comfortable in his classroom.

Clark’s arguments rely on a performative understanding about the nature of gender and sexuality and are situated well within poststructural discourses that critique the gender order as reductively binary (Butler, 1990, 1993, 2004). The poststructural discourses allowed Clark to talk about masculinity in terms of action (‘acting’, ‘sliding’, ‘passing’), rather than as a set of characteristics. The argument that performing a feminized masculinity creates a safe space for ‘homosexual or bisexual, transgendered’ students is supported by Butler (2004: 17) who suggests such an ambiguous performance would increase the number of people whose ‘lives count as lives’.

In contrast, Clark does not problematize a moral policy discourse governing the relationship between ‘teacher’ and ‘student’. Or at least Clark did not problematize this discourse in an interview with me, a heterosexual female graduate student with known connections to the Women’s Studies and Programs department on campus. In the context of our conversation, Clark’s account assumes that (hetero)sexual desire between student and teacher is universally ‘bad’ in the college classroom. He is concerned that he cannot ‘connect’ with students in an ‘immediate fashion’ without ‘sexualizing the conversation’. Yet, as hooks (1996: 46) wonders, ‘rather than perceiving desire between faculty and students as always dangerous, negative and destructive, what does it mean for us to consider the positive uses of that desire…?’. What becomes clear is that Clark, as a graduate student being socialized in his discipline, has begun to use the theories (discourses) of his discipline to work on his own issues around gender and gender in the classroom. However, he did not employ them to frame his understanding of the student–teacher relationship in the context of our interview. As such, his resistance antenarrative does not reflect counter discourses that would enable him to think of erotic interaction in the classroom as enabling and positively transforming (hooks, 1996).

Taken together, the deconstruction trace analysis and the discourse-argument analysis show the kinds of subjects Clark constructed (male/female; heterosexual/homosexual; teacher/student) and how he understood the nature of those subjects (performative and binary). Both analyses indicated Clark’s relationship to those subjects was troubled, but it is as yet unclear how those subjects were resistive of hegemonic norms and how Clark navigated his desire to be and not be heterosexual.

Doing resistance analysis

The resistance analysis interrogates the participants’ interviews and analyses with the following questions: ‘How do the participants’ subjects relate to one another?’ and ‘How do the participants submit to, resist, and/or critically resist normative ideals?’. In my study I examined the relationship between the participants’ constructions of the hegemonic man, the ideal man (the man they aspired to be), and ‘Othered’ men and women identified in the above analyses. I then wrote memos about these relationships and the participants’ relationship to these constructions.

Resistance analysis with Clark

In his antenarrative, Clark most clearly describes two kinds of men: the man he performs in class, a feminized man, and the man embodied by a male student who Clark sees as fitting ‘the stereotype’. This stereotypical heterosexual male student was ‘hockey player man and Mr. Muscle and Mr. Smartass and cool and calm in class’. Clark’s description positions this student’s heterosexual masculinity as hegemonic, the culturally, socially, and politically dominant and taken-for-granted version of what it means to be a man (Connell, 1995). From a critical structuralist perspective, Clark’s feminized masculinity is a subordinated masculinity that deviates too far from the hegemonic norm (Connell, 1995). The student’s challenging of Clark was perceived to be a response to the threat that deviant and subordinated masculinities, in vying for legitimation, present to hegemonic ones. From this perspective, Clark’s feminized masculinity can be seen to resist the hegemonic form, a resistance that may be particularly impactful given Clark’s position as teacher relative to the student.

From a poststructural resistance perspective, however, Clark’s feminized man is not as much a form, an identifiable male subject with a nameable set of characteristics, as he was constructed and performed by Clark to serve a function. As an active construction, this feminized masculinity can be seen as a subject enabled by critical resistance, an understanding of masculinity that Whitehead (2002) would argue checks the structure of male dominance and the power of the heterosexual matrix. While Clark certainly sought to value a subordinated form of masculinity, he was also willing to maintain a critical distance from the desire to be recognized as a heterosexual man in the first instance.

The final analysis, while optimally conducted alongside the previous analyses, takes into account that Clark’s antenarrative was elicited in an interview with me. Focusing on intersubjectivity attends to myself as the interviewer and the subjects I brought to the interview setting and analysis. This analysis makes clear that narrative researchers use their interpretive authority (Chase, 1996), even as that authority is not supreme. The intersubjectivity analysis is conducted to ensure the final product is not read as a master narrative, but as one among many possible narratives (Daiute and Fine, 2003).

Doing intersubjectivity analysis

The intersubjectivity analysis involves examining three data sources: a) the researchers’ notes, diary, or other recordings, b) recorded transactions between the interviewer and interviewee, and c) interview questions/discussions related to the process of interviewing and the interview/interviewee relationship. Each of these data sources is interrogated for the kinds of subjects that were (de)constructed and how these subjects related to one another (perhaps employing strategies from the deconstruction trace analysis). Memos can then be written about the subjects that emerged and how they may have been co-implicated in one another’s (de)contruction. It is important these memos be explicitly written from the researcher’s perspective as the researcher cannot know, unless told, how the participant felt or reacted during the interview.

Intersubjectivity analysis (with Clark)

My study of masculinity in higher education is/was framed by the poststructural theories of Foucault and Butler and draws on the work of Whitehead (2002), Boje (2001), and Hoy (2005) who similarly site Foucault and Butler. My work assumes that masculinity and male dominance are both negotiated phenomenon, rather than universal conditions of immutable gendered power. Further, my interview method intentionally sought to promote deep reflection and personal change in alignment with an ethic of critical resistance (Wolgemuth and Donohue, 2006). The poststructural feminist and troubled heterosexual female subjects I brought to the interviews very much admired Clark’s feminized masculinity and his critically resistive self that enabled the mixing of gender codes. Much of this is revealed in the question I posed to Clark:

… to what extent can we even attempt to leave our sexuality at the door? And I think what you’re saying is that you don’t try to do that, you try to convert your sexuality… and that way when you do that you act more homosexual, you act more ambiguous. Do you feel like that’s a threat to the male students?

By asking this question, I was pointing out what I believed to be incongruent in Clark’s narrative. It seemed to me paradoxical to talk about masculinity and heterosexuality as intertwined and performed and yet to work inordinately hard to control, set aside, subvert, or corral one’s sexuality in school.

Given my clear alignment with poststructural discourses and the poststructural feminist subject I brought to the interviews, Clark presents an interesting problematic. Clark’s adoption of poststructural discourses and his performance of a feminized masculinity most closely matched my ideal. In the interviews and in this analysis I was tempted to cheer, ‘Yes, you’ve got it right! I couldn’t have said it better myself!’ (As if in this write-up I’m not saying it. As if I’m not using my interpretive authority). Examining the above question posed to Clark from the perspective of the poststructural feminist subject reveals that my next statement, ‘what you’re saying is that you don’t try to do that, you try to convert your sexuality…’ can be read as me feeding him a line. In this instance I am telling him what I want to hear and suggesting how he should reframe his antenarrative. But Clark doesn’t bite and his antenarrative continues along the same logic, that he seeks to be ‘less (hetero)sexual’, rather than to ‘convert’ his sexuality. As in the interview, my analysis seeks to make the same point – that all subjectivities, including the teacher/student ones should be critically resisted.

All this suggests that I may need to be wary of my attachment to Foucault and Butler whose worldviews with which I am so enamored nevertheless limit my thinking. As St. Pierre states, ‘I suspect that I can best honor Foucault by being wary of my attachment to him, by working to get free of the subject he has allowed me to think and be so that I might become a different subject’ (2004: 327). I am led, for example, to wonder whether it is ‘fair’ to present Clark as not being critical of the student/teacher binary. Clark was a second year student in a Master’s program and it is perhaps unlikely that he had come to think of himself as a teacher to the same degree he thought of himself as a man. Had I read my data through a model of graduate student identity development (e.g., Adler and Adler, 2005), I might have understood Clark as transitioning into the teacher role and his performing an alternative masculinity as less about problematizing masculinity and heterosexuality and more about developing himself as a caring and ethical college teacher, attuned to the needs of his students.