Paige Sweet

The works of Abu-Lughod (1991), Hall (1990), and Bhabha (1997) all point to the importance of disrupting the lies of “essence” or “inner truth,” both in terms of identity and at a larger, cultural level. In particular, Stuart Hall’s notion of identity as a “production” constituted within practices of representation is useful in thinking through some of my own theoretical and empirical interests. This question also links back to our in-class discussion last week in which we laid out frameworks for doing poststructuralist feminist research. One of my concerns in approaching my dissertation work is how to write about subjectivity without striving for “authenticity,” without assuming coherence and unity. In part, this is what Abu-Lughod gives us instructions for when she asks us to “write against culture;” that is, to do ethnographies of the particular, resisting the urge to generalize and make universalizing claims. For me, this reads as a suggestion to write about a subject, or perhaps a mode of subjectivity, rather than writing about subjectivity in general. In my work, for example, can I access and make meaning out of the specific challenges and traumas that domestic violence victims have faced without constructing an image or a depiction of a “true” victim, an authentic subject of these various discourses and violences?

Homi Bhabha’s dealings with the lies of essence and inner truth lead me to wonder more about identifying resistance in the narratives and actions of research participants. For Bhabha, when colonized subjects are forced to act out their selves in the image of the colonizer, this mimicry transforms into a “menace” that threatens to expose the lie of colonial authority. This is a necessarily subtle type of subversion, one that does not reveal itself easily. The challenge for a scholar working with empirical puzzles is to be able to identify these subtle forms of subversion, to understand the difference between compliance in the name of survival, and mimicry/mockery in the efforts of survival/resistance. (Or, perhaps it doesn’t follow that these would necessarily be separate or identifiable – does compliance for survival’s sake always contain a critique of hegemony?) The corollary challenge for the researcher, according to all of the theorists we’ve read this week, is to identify these subversions, identities, and cultural formations for their discursive constructions and ongoing productions, rather than pinpointing an “authentic” subjectivity amongst our research participants. This is perhaps the most difficult when some participants appear to be reproducing dominant narratives, while others are clearly confronting and disrupting them. Bhabha’s work gives us pause to rethink our assumptions about the reproduction of dominant narratives, attending to the nearly invisible and ongoing slippages between power and performance.