My thesis rough draft was due Monday, which means that in the last two weeks I of course started three new characters on an entirely new server in World of Warcraft. On an unrelated note, I had to spend all weekend camped out at Thunderbird Coffee messing around in Excel and writing 15 pages of actual content analysis, so my final project is still in formative stages.

As I write that thesis, I'm trying to be as objective as possible -- or sound as objective as possible -- because I'm aware that this will make me more convincing to other people. This is particularly so because (before I took this class) I decided that a whole lot of feminist scholarship is terrible because it relies on emotive narrative retellings of personal stories, "embodied knowledge" or "experiential data," instead of more traditional quantitative methods -- the kind you use in psychology, sociology, and the sciences. Or, you could say if you wanted to get a cat, an unfinished knitting project, or a pair of homemade earrings that clearly began life as Shrinky-Dinks thrown at you, real academic disciplines. (Sorry, sorry, it's just really hard to spend three solid months reading NWSA Journal and not want to poison the vegan tabbouleh at the next NOW conference.)

The problem I predictably began having when we started class was with Damasio's suggestion that emotion is a key part of rationality; without feeling or interrogating the appropriateness of one's emotions, one literally can't be rational.

But I still have a problem with feminist scholarship, because even if emotion is involved in rationality, one professor's story about the experience of teaching a gender studies class while pregnant has LIMITED UTILITY.

So my idea, right, is to make everyone more responsible in their research -- advocate a return to quantitative methods, not because they're inherently better but because a research base without them is totally powerless. Pure quantitative research means that a lot of truth can be obscured with numbers -- this is feminists' point by telling so many narrative stories -- but pure qualitative research is equally dumb and has no application. Viz., poetry criticism from the 70s.

My problem is that this objective style of writing doesn't come easily to me at all. Maybe it's the journalism or maybe it's having had 24-hour access to the Internet on a personal computer since I was 11 (thank you, Dad, for slaving in the telecom mines), but I naturally write with a good deal of what my kinder editors have called verve and what most people would call constant unrestrained bitchiness cut with vocabulary. I don't write for logic. I write to the emotions, even when I'm trying to be logical -- I end up saying that, logically, you should be incensed, like in my PETA visual analysis. And my thesis, about how being objective is super important, is sounding less and less logical in and of itself.

I'm afraid that this disjoint between style and content won't literally detract from my argument, but I don't think that the juxtaposition will serve my argument. I think readers might feel that I should be making a different argument with the same voice, or think that my voice compromises the logic of my argument. Why the hell did I choose a thesis statement I believed rather than one I could defend?