Analyzing Approximations: Reexamining Experiences in a Personal Identity Narrative
I have just completed my first response to the Personal Identity Narrative I wrote for Gender, Sexuality, and the Body. Having spent the first part of this semester working through the problematic research issues that were originally raised in Joan Scott’s chapter “Experience”1, I am now attempting to answer those criticisms in my own work.
Scott took issue with a number of practices she saw in the academic community, but the naturalization of experiences was at the top of the list.
“[Scholars] rhetorical treatment of [experience based] evidence and their use of it to falsify prevailing interpretations, depends on a referential notion of evidence which denies that it is anything but a reflection of the real” (24).
Scott is complaining that when experiences are presented as data in academic research, say the experiences of several African-American women in 1872, it has the tendency to silence or otherwise not represent the diverse experiences of individuals whose stories were not included.
This seemingly obvious point (that different people have different experiences) becomes much less clear when the experiences represented come from a vastly different culture, time, or context than our own. Carrying on with the example of our 19th century black woman, Scott would ask us as researchers to consider not just the histories of those individuals, but also the history of womanhood, race, location, culture and time, historizing all of these factors into their relative and holistic context.
This was the task at hand when revisiting my previous narrative. I threw up a wall between myself as a researcher and myself as the researched. I wrote for quite a while, assessing absent labels in my story, presumptions I had made of the presumed readers, and the contexts in which the story took place. I ruminated on unclear aspects of the narrative, outlining possibilities which “the author” might have intended.
This is when things got strange.
Footnotes:
- Scott, Joan W. “Experience.” Feminists Theorize the Political, 1992.↩
gnovis, the online academic forum sponsored by Georgetown’s Communication, Culture and Technology program has accepted a short article of mine on the 
In order to improve my qualitative research methods, I am part of a seminar this semester entitled Gender, Sexuality and the Body. In order to both generate experiential data to work with and personal means by which to experience the theorists we will be discussing, Dr. Coventry open endedly asked us to come to class the first day with a written personal identity narrative. We were told that it should narrate our relationship with our gender, sexuality and body, and to keep it short (a task that proved substantially difficult and ended up having large ramifications on the product).
“You know in Las Vegas,” he continued, adjusting his fashionably thick rimmed glasses and not missing a single beat, “every night at the Celine Dion concert there is this encore. And people have talked about this…” He proceeded to describe how the show includes a second encore that is engineered with such intimacy that every night the audience is meant to feel as if this encore was just for them, that no one else had seen it before.
