Final project proposal

For my final project, I'd like to shamelessly borrow material from my thesis, even though it's going to be really boring.

I'm doing a content analysis of about ten years' worth of NWSA Journal, a major feminist journal known for interdisciplinary work. My theory about feminist scholarship, which I'm so far confirming, is that quantifiable and rigorous research methods have become less important to feminist scholars than what is often called "embodied knowledge" or "experiential knowledge" -- the narratively cast personal stories of various women and the emotional and affective responses those stories garner from an audience, whether live or academic.

I think this obsessive focus on testimony allows feminist scholars to distinguish themselves in a discipline which emphasizes coalitional and cooperative action over individual achievement -- since feminist scholars learn that good feminists don't seek attention but still as humans crave it, they invent ways to cast their personal experiences as meaningful. This usually takes the form of 20- and 30-page articles about one women's studies professor's experience of being unable to find a steady job with benefits after she left graduate school, which was recast as a metaphor about the negative effects of globalization. By pretending to talk about globalization but really talking about herself, the scholar was able to redirect Brennan's "living attention" to herself.

I would like to write an 8-page research paper exploring the reasons why feminist scholars privilege embodied experience and personal narratives over more traditional and frankly more useful research methods. I will analyze the ten years' worth of NWSA Journal I conveniently have on hand and attempt to make connections between the text and the ideas we read about this semester concerning the transmission of affect, the desire for living attention, rhetoric as a form of energy, and the emotional/affective construction of borders. As I vaguely mentioned in my last post, I think borders can be a reaction to the tension of unity as well as a producer of contrast tension -- since women's studies is a discipline which privileges the destruction of borders and the rejection of any kind of definition, those within the discipline might strive to distinguish themselves through pathos-laden personal narratives rather than conducting "real" research.