While reading Erik McDuffie’s Sojourning for Freedom, I felt that the theoretical motivations
underlying his methods were centered on a process of recovery. McDuffie sets
out to uncover marginalized stories, ones that have been left out of social
movement history or brushed aside in racist activist canons. Combining archival
research with oral history interviews, McDuffie does not simply apply a new
theoretical lens to existing data, but he actually recovers lost stories, integrating them into
their sociopolitical contexts. This process reminds of Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, such that
“recovery” is an essential tool for groups whose histories have been colonized,
their knowledge production and collective self-making ignored and denied.
Because McDuffie’s activists are at the axes of several controversial political
groups, – Marxists, black women feminists, black political activists – their
stories are particularly vulnerable to being white-washed away. This “recovery”
process is important for my project, too, as long as these recovered stories are
connected to their structural contexts; McDuffie does a good job of this type
of historical contextualization, refusing to abstract or romanticize the
activists’ stories. Because I will be looking at the history of the
psy-sciences construction of trauma through a feminist lens, my project will
also, in some sense, be a recovery project – a recovery of a particular kind of
history about scientific knowledge, one that is attentive to gender.
While there were moments during McDuffie’s narrative where I
felt that he began to tell too rosy a picture about his activist subjects, he
also resisted making their stories hang too neatly together. For example,
McDuffie writes, “Indeed, there was no monolithic black Communist woman’s
experience. Rather, there were many. It was this tension between common and
individual experiences with the Communist Left that helps explain both the
dynamism of black left feminism and its contradictions” (17). I appreciate this
perspective, especially because historical accounts often gloss over
contradictions and multiplicities in order to narrativize a cohesive story.
Keeping this tension in play between collective histories (e.g. the production
of scientific knowledge about trauma) and individual stories (e.g. domestic
violence victims’ experiences of accessing trauma services) will certainly be a
challenging task in my project. On the one hand, this is a struggle between
micro and macro perspectives. However, McDuffie’s writing has shown me that
this is also a struggle between collective knowledge production (in my project,
“science”) and individual/interpersonal experiences. How can I sync these
stories in a meaningful way, attending to “dynamism” and “contradictions,” as
McDuffie suggests? It seems that one of the best ways to approach this task
will be tell the story of institutionalized knowledge through victim’s
narratives, always grounding stories of scientific knowledge production in its
impact on people.
One of my McDuffie’s larger projects in the book is to
“expand the boundaries of what is commonly understood as black feminism” (9).
In this sense, McDuffie uses his “recovery” methodology to unhinge accepted
notions of how “black” and “feminism” operate together in the activist and
political sphere. Again, this is useful for my project – I hope that examining
the history of the feminist anti-violence movement in conjunction with the
history of trauma will expand the boundaries of what we think of as
“second-wave” or “third-wave” feminism. Indeed, we often think of feminism as
detached from antagonistic to biomedicine/psy-sciences, especially because of
the massive impact of the women’s health movement on “feminism,” broadly
conceived. However, I believe it will become clear through these intersecting
histories (trauma and anti-violence work) that feminist discourses have long
been influences by the psychiatric knowledge and the way it constructs “the
self.” From this perspective, I hope to expand two histories at once: on the
one hand, I hope to make the history of trauma more attentive to impact of
feminist knowledge and its insistence on publicly narrativizing violence; on
the other hand, I hope to provide acknowledgement of the way psychiatric
knowledge gets institutionalized through feminism “self-help” services such as
domestic violence shelters and support groups. McDuffie’s writing provides a
useful example of such work – weaving women’s stories through existing
knowledge about a social movement while also using those stories to push the
borders of taken-for-granted knowledge about a set of historical moments.
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