"The Eye, The Finger, and the Foot": Methodological Sententiae for Embodied Research Creation
- "The Eye, The Finger, and the Foot":Methodological Sententiae for Embodied Research Creation
Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, "It feels right to me," acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding.
—Audre Lorde, "The Uses of the Erotic," Sister Outsider, 1984
The materialism in this book lives in the flesh of these women's lives: the exhaustion we feel in our bones at the end of the day, the fire we feel in our hearts when we are insulted, the knife we feel in our backs when we are betrayed, the nausea we feel in our bellies when we are afraid, even the hunger we feel between our hips when we long to be touched.
—Cherríe Moraga, "La Jornada, Preface, 1981" This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 1981
"We write—think and feel—(with) our entire bodies rather than only (with) our minds or hearts . . . thought is as much a product of the eye, the finger, or the foot as it is of the brain.
—Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman/Native/Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, 1989
invocations
As a field of inquiry and activism, feminist studies has always prided itself on its interdisciplinarity. Unlike more traditional academic formations such as history, literature, anthropology, or psychology, feminist work is not defined by its topics, sources, or its methods; it has thus flourished [End Page 287]
books discussed in this essay
Experiments in Joy. Gabrielle Civil. Fairfax, VA: Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2019.
Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity. Dorinne Kondo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Natalie Loveless. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Jenny Odell. Brooklyn, NY, and London: Melville House, 2019.
in all of these fields and beyond. This is its great strength: feminist spaces foster a mode of engagement in which eclectic, hybrid work might flourish. Forced to be neither this nor that, feminist scholars and artists are free to challenge and upend expectations.
The lack of a unifying object or methodology is also a stumbling block, however, particularly when feminist production becomes an explicit site of pedagogy. How does one know when they are doing feminist work? And what about teaching something like "feminist methods"? As anyone who has tried to create a seminar in feminist research methodologies will attest, this is not a question for which there is a ready-made corpus. Many would probably agree that feminism is a mode of (positive) critique as well as a life project,1 and feminist work a necessary collage of archival analysis, ethnography, textual criticism, and even artistic or poetic production: pick the right tool for the job. But the selection of a methodological toolkit more often than not pushes scholarship and creative work back into the arms of a discipline that will take for granted the "how to" of knowledge production in problematic ways that made many practitioners flee disciplinary conventions to begin with. [End Page 288]
Complicating the methodological picture even more, doing feminist studies—including in this very journal—means valuing "other" ways of knowing and creating that may not reproduce the forms and interests of traditional scholarship. In fact, many would argue that feminist work should not reproduce those forms or interests. From influential collections such as This Bridge Called My Back to the pages of Feminist Studies today, which includes color-print artwork, poetry, and fiction, "feminist studies" has always included projects and problematics that are equally art and scholarship. It could perhaps not be otherwise—outsider knowledge is by definition often not recognizable as such. As Ruth Behar says of This Bridge Called My Back and the work it birthed, feminist cultural production by those despised by and excluded from the western male canon were never going to create knowledge in one approved modality for one idealized academic audience. The creative and the critical would never be separate but would live together to "challenge the distancing and alienating forms of...
