Paige Sweet Week 12 Hanhardt

In her book, Safe Space, Christina Hanhardt investigates the relationship between gay antiviolence movements and urban politics/change over the course of 40+ years, using primarily archival methods. What struck me most about the way Hanhardt told her story was her “case study,” chronological narrative. I actually had a hard time following her arguments and the themes of the book precisely because they were organized along a chronological rather than thematic or theoretical schema. At the same time, the wide array of social movements she draws from is impressive, and speaks to the way she understands these political and social actions as contradictory and uneven. In other words, she does not try to “flatten” the political story she tells (p. 33). On the one hand, her “case study” approach to executing her research question (about the relationship between gay antiviolence activism and urban politics/space) is useful because it can account for the multiple sites of knowledge production and social change involved in the relationship between her variables. On the other hand, when this “case study” approach is narrativized in the book, it comes across a bit tedious, event-driven, and unclear. If the purpose of gathering knowledge from this many sources is (at least in part) to demonstrate the multiplicity and contradictory nature of gay/urban politics, I do not feel it is successful. Rather, I came away feeling that the catalogue of events did not contain enough analysis to demonstrate the multi-sited and conflicting nature of politics and knowledge production.

Despite the patchy narrative style, Hanhardt’s extensive use of broad-ranging archives is helpful in thinking about my own project. Because Hanhardt is interested in telling this story from “unofficial” or nontraditional sources, such as small and intermittently active social movements, her archive is necessarily a bit scattered. My research focuses on antiviolence politics, making Hanhardt’s use of archives a useful model. Because certain kinds of archives only visibilize “official” antiviolence politics (e.g. national, rather than local, projects), this will only give me a very partial and distorted view into the history of antiviolence organizing. Hanhardt’s work has made me realize that I will need to travel to resource centers and other “small” spaces in order to understand the on-the-ground and non-normative organizing that was going on in particular historical periods. This will also help me fulfill my methodological motivations of telling a story about the medicalization of antiviolence politics from various sites and through various different types of narratives, reflecting the multiple types of knowledge that inform this field. My question for group discussion is similar to a question I posed last week, but which we did not have time to discuss – if we are using multiple methods, multiple archives, and/or multiple subjects’ perspectives in our research design, how can we produce a narrative that flows? How can we produce a coherent narrative, one that is enjoyable to read and does justice to the responses of our participants, without suggesting that we are telling a unified story about whole truths?