I just finished reading Stanton's paper, and having read through the initial
responses to it and the exchange between Diane and Stanton over his own
stance, I'm delighted to see the question of positioning through narrative
thematized in and enacted, reflexively, through our email CHAT-theoretical
interactions.
My first reaction to the paper was that it was a helpful analysis, one wh.
provided useful tools for my own work, and so I didn't fully appreciate what
Diane, Eva, and Phillip were responding to. But Diane eloquently unpacked
the re-enactment of trauma through the analyst's re-distancing of the
narrator's experience narrating trauma in the interview setting, and then
Stanton put in a plug for rigor and scientific methods. And then Diane
outdid herself...
So now I am reading Diane's challenge to Stanton sympathetically, although I
realize that it is, in some sense, a challenge for him to take up a "less
male" stance -- to be someone other than who he is as a researcher.
Because I know that I would have appropriated Stanton's 'tools' to do an
analysis that would likely pass the test of compassionate, I am less
critical of what he did as Stanton -- the analyst who displays scientific
rigor and dispassion, risking nothing in the analysis, emotionally...
I've become corrupted by a bit of realism, perhaps?
Judy
Stanton
>It seems to me that the position of the analyst in such work is one of
>various legitimate issues for discussion, not the only one. So you ask
>whether my analysis is "a further extension of institutionalizing this
>woman's experience." Not in the sense that it will affect her at all,
>under the almost certain assumption that she will never see this work.
>In the sense that it too adopts a distanced stance on her experiences,
>perhaps. But it's a long way from institutionalizing someone to writing
>analytically about them.
Diane
>I am concerned that you see no conflict with reading a woman's
>trauma-narrative in the contexts of scientific rigour - this is what
>discourses and objective practices have done to women for thousands of
>years- how do script this for yourself as so unproblematic?
>
>As for self-accounts I don't mean 'what's your trauma?' but what's your
>investment? Where are you in this writing? What's your account ? what's
>your story? What's it like to read how an academic-scripted interview
>evoked the grief in another?
>The art of how people like Margaret represent their
>trauma, the maintenance and perhaps the transformation of processes that
>sustain the impact such trauma has on people, take place in part through
>the sorts of positioning that I am trying to study. If we give up
>working systematically on these sorts of data, we lose an opportunity to
>understand and perhaps intervene.
At 05:53 PM 12/10/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Diane--
>
>You say: "the only interaction, it seems to me, that you can - or ought
>to - account for, is that of the absent analyst, interacting with your
>own desires to re-present personal trauma in the contexts of social
>science discourse."
>
>Do you really mean the "only"? Shouldn't we try to analyze interactions
>that do not involve ourselves for various reasons -- including an
>attempt to develop better scientific understandings of how they work?
>Personalization of everything would become narcissism when directed to
>self and rudeness when directed to others.
>
>It seems to me that the position of the analyst in such work is one of
>various legitimate issues for discussion, not the only one. So you ask
>whether my analysis is "a further extension of institutionalizing this
>woman's experience." Not in the sense that it will affect her at all,
>under the almost certain assumption that she will never see this work.
>In the sense that it too adopts a distanced stance on her experiences,
>perhaps. But it's a long way from institutionalizing someone to writing
>analytically about them.
>
>--
>Stanton Wortham
>Graduate School of Education
>University of Pennsylvania
>3700 Walnut Street
>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216
>(215) 898-6307
>http://www.upenn.edu/gse/fac/wortham/
>
>
>
Judith Diamondstone (732) 932-7496 Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183
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