Abstract
This performative piece, an enactment of lived feminism, acknowledges the privileges and explores the similarities and differences between three cis-gendered white women in different parts of the United Kingdom and how these aid and hinder collaboratively writing together. The piece was shared at the Autoethnography Special Interest Group at International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) in 2018. We had never written together before but had presented on the same Shame? panel at ICQI in 2017 convened by Alys Mendus that also included papers by Stacy Holman Jones and Anne Harris and a memorial to Sue Porter. There were similarities in terms of themes explored including sexuality and taboo. This was our starting point but it was not easy. We realized that difficulty within collaborative inquiry is rarely written about and published but is often the topic of conversation between academics. Perhaps feminism is our ability to stand together curious and alive to our nonshared experience with a commitment to not creating a shared perspective? To stay standing together, we could be stronger in these troubling times.
Paper
We were delighted when Stacy asked us to write together, and we started the writing process face to face, an embodied presence, participation, dialogue, and co-action (Kirkpatrick, 2020) to aid communication. We initially met and went out for dinner to have a free conversation around the possibilities of our presentation; as Mexican food and alcohol were imbibed, we talked about possible themes and got playful with ideas.
The following day, we met in Edinburgh on the worst snow-day of the winter. Spaces for writing are important characters in the plot—the downstairs cafe had rounded ceilings, a wholesome smell of fresh soup, warm bread, and good coffee. It was spacious, comfortable, though we were unsettled by the challenges of official admonishments of travel chaos and red travel warnings, the ever-thickening snow outside, and a night apart had brought doubt into play. We had to begin with where we all were at that moment, which we did until we were rushed out of the (early closing) cafe, as the busses were canceled, as the snow got the better of us.
In the short time we had, we used Davies and Gannon’s (2006) approach of talk, write, read, and by the creative approaches of Speedy and Wyatt (2014). However, what we realized was working together, especially when “put together” rather than directly choosing to work together is not easy—the human aspects collide with trying to be “good” and “successful” academics, each with our own particular voices and writing styles Murray (2017). We fell out, we disagreed with main concepts and directions, but we persevered knowing that this experience was essential to collaboration within troubling times. We realized that difficulty within collaborative inquiry is rarely written about and published but is often the topic of conversation between academics. Why is this, we wondered? We didn’t step away from this rub and instead we focused our writing on the differences between us and then how this played out in terms of our commitment to an inclusive collaborative process that between us, allowed moments of commonality of experience.
Since leaving the snow of Edinburgh, we returned to our own homes and busy lives. Despite “the rub,” we felt it was paramount for our paper to be essentially collaborative rather than patchworking separate voices together. We utilized Facebook Messenger and Skype to communicate, we used writing and narrative inquiry, to soothe our disgruntled views, to give space to what wanted to speak within each of us and writing to it and sending it to one other person who read, reflected, and wrote into that first piece. They then sent it on to the final person who wrote into this response. At the end of this process, we had three disparate pieces of writing, each had one writer as a starting point but was inclusive of all three.
We met again on Skype and discussed what we felt was being foregrounded in the piece; what we felt was not so much the personal as the political (Kirkpatrick, 2017), thinking about our group as political, and with that we took the leap. A single Google document was created with all the pieces together and then in real time we all had access to editing the same document. We would take turns, leaving comments, adding references, highlighting questionable sections. Then we met up again on skype for short bursts to read through and time the piece.
We only had 8 min. Could we say what we wanted in that amount of time? And now who owned each piece of writing? Was it still essentially one person’s or had it become “ours”? It was not until we all met for coffee beside the fish-tank at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, that we had a chance to practice together in person. Although the performance of the paper was important to us, by now we knew that this piece was beyond us; the rub was beyond us. It spoke not just the words of Alys, Davina and Fiona but into feminism in these troubling times. 1
Stage Directions: Say Your Piece Step Out… 2
D: We met together, expectant and entitled. Three white women, working collaboratively. A seemingly comprehensive agenda.
A: My body has sat here
Early
In a classroom
Any classroom
So many times before.
F: As has hers.
D: As has hers.
F: The women’s march looked for a coherent goal out of convergent particularities. A shared women’s experience; a delusion of white feminism that achieves a foregrounding of unity against a backgrounding of exclusion.
A: We three women standing here, all white, all arguably middle-class, didn’t find the expected comprehensive agenda or even a shared women’s experience despite our similarities.
A: I sit at a hard, wooden desk.
F: She sits on her bed, papers around her.
D: She sits at the computer desk sending files to print.
F: I ran the hurdles.
A: I am short and the hurdles were high.
D: She was the one left unpicked in the choosing of teams.
F: Can we sense a sharpness?
Feminism often begins with intensity: you are aroused by what you come up against. You register something in the sharpness of an impression. Something can be sharp without it being clear what the point is…Things don’t seem right. (Ahmed, 2017, p. 22)
A: How then, is feminist collaboration even possible?
Can a feminist movement stick here, below the noise and the words that we create, to manifest the single meaning to drive home. Can our movement still be sharp without knowing what the exact point is?
D: Do we have to gel or merge in order to have a single point, message, meaning or perception? Or can we stand together and affectively sense? Can we ask, “what is this feminist way of knowing, this intelligence?”
A: Writing into these troubling times
This moment troubles, trembles, teases with its own agency
As the rug was pulled out from under our feet (again).
The rug that was pulled is different and the same and more than for each of us, a becoming of instability on a very climatically unstable day.
A red travel warning they say.
The university shuts.
Danger of death they shout.
D: What is the point of this collaboration if we can’t find a way of representing “US”? What is this “US”? Maybe we can start by interrogating ourselves and our micro collaborations, asking ourselves difficult questions? How do these moments, our moments of similarities and difference matter?
F: What is the affective atmosphere that we are creating, that we try to, fight to, create a shared perception from? What if we entitled white women can’t even find a shared perception?
A: Puar (2012) would critique our use of intersectionality, and wonder at the role of three cis-white-women working collectively together, about whom they are speaking for and for whom they can’t…
A: All three stand on the picket line, holding placards.
“How to be a feminist now,” one says, emboldened in dark print against a pink background.
And automatically the pink color causes disdain in an onlooker’s eye.
A: “Pink that is so girly. How the fuck can you call yourselves feminists now?”
A: Gay (2014) would disagree, redefining the subversive nature of hot pink.
D: We meet to write nonetheless.
We circle, stumble, stutter toward, mis-hearings, mis-apprehensions, missing words fall between the cracks of expectation and assumption.
We don’t trust each other, yet, will the act of writing together help close that chasm or open it wider?
“We were put together”; I feel I constantly put myself together,
I like to think a universe in synchronicity put us together.
F: We write together and in a sense we dance together; tango—dance that as Manning (2007, p. 2) writes,
takes place on the edges of neighborhoods, at the magic time between dusk and dawn, in the periphery of the social order. Its lyrics are about adventure, heartbreak, the clandestine, the murmurs of desire and deception.
F: The difference in musical styles and how the cadence of this difference affects the choices we make of steps and rhythms. The etiquette, how to negotiate space on the dance floor, being mindful of the bodies around you.
Stage Directions: Begin Moving Together
D: And now I wonder about performances and the political. The political performance of dance…the storytelling…the agency…the activism.
A: We know each other differently now, bodily.
A: Is this “Body-ography”: the body as collaborative inquiry (Bodies Collective, 2021, In Press) A knowing, a multiple-knowing of bodies in space, in time, in privileges and political positionality. A snapshot, a trans-materiality of embodiment. The body-ography, the collaborative body inquiring.
D: Are we dancing together or dating each other?
And then when there are three of you—
Three minds, three lives, and multiple possibilities and potentialities beyond your trio-autoethnography, or trio-ethnography?
This could be speed dating as collective inquiry.
A: I speed date at conferences: I am the speed dater and the speed date-ee
I see a paper and fall in love in an instant, such power and passion
I am the groupie… All big eyed and longing
And sometimes I take a step back from the charades of the conference
And laugh
Yes, a big belly laugh
At it all
All the game playing and intensity, the glamor and spoof
And the joke of the hierarchy or the playing at hierarchy of it all.
F: Hierarchy, is it a political game; and does this new connection have a future?
A: There is the unspoken element of the conference (Mendus, 2021, In press). The costumes and the dance around the buildings, grounds, bars and cafes.
What you wear,
How you do your hair?
Do you wear a hat?
The materiality of the nonverbal speaking loudly into the conference space. 3
D: Or even the title you give your paper (Kirkpatrick & Mendus, 2017). Will it entice people to come along? To “date” with your mind.
A: This is the performance. Performance Activism. Activism as performance.
This discrepancy in performance, whose performance is worthy to watch, who to become passionate about, patriotic about, hangs questionably in the air.
F: I am in Glasgow, watching rugby. It is Scotland versus France. But it comes with a disclaimer. It is women’s rugby. I know that those that are there are passionate, and they yell “Scotland, Scotland.” I notice how strange it is to hear cries of Scotland and to look at the pitch and see women. Scotland means men. “What an amazing performance” means a male performance.
D: We beat ourselves—and each other.
A: It is all about the whip.
It is long and thick, with a firm stout handle and an exaggerated tail.
Held tightly and with a flick there comes an almighty
CRACK
F: The whip strikes and time begins to speed up again.
Things that slip through the gaps.
Together, they feel the atmosphere, the weighty atmosphere. Is it possible to have an affective solidarity?
A: Is a feminist methodology now necessarily a collaborative methodology—a methodology that as Steward (2007, p. 45) says is where the “cultural landscape vibrates with surface tensions spied and sensed” and where is the dissonance that exposes the representational gaps that sparks the feminist curiosity? (Åhäll, 2018).
D: As Hodkinson et al. (2020, p. 8) says of Intertwangerling “When you meet someone you want to be like, then you come back next year having stolen a bit from them… we get tangled up in each other.”
F: It is through the tensions in our collaborations, through the affective-discursive that we find the political. Perhaps collaborative affective dissonance is a methodological tool after all (Åhäll, 2018). Perhaps feminism is our ability to stand together curious and alive to our nonshared experience with a commitment to not creating a shared perspective.
(Say in unison) To stay standing together.
Coda
And we did stay standing together euphoric that we had stood firm through the troubling times of writing, collaborating, dancing the asynchronous feminism.
During the Autoethnography Special Interest Group, we as more junior academics, were still aware of the tango of academic hierarchies. To what extent did this play into our work? Can we share our rubs, push edges, speak into the unspoken? What are the possibilities for academics less further down the rabbit hole?
We also loved chatting later in the pub about how we had written our piece, about our attempts to create unity in our writing, to frame our performance and tease a little, building on those before us and sometimes shaking the foundations, finding our space to stay standing together.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
