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PREAMBLEArtefact choices/rationale

My epistemology has determined my:

research methodology; feminist postmodernism

choice of a hybrid artefact; faction

chosen artefact themes; relational and interpersonal

selection of protagonists, women

choice of genre; popular novel rather than literary

authorial voice; situated and mediated via the text

novels structure; women’s life stages

use of first, second or third person narration

integration and reconfiguration of epistological writing

with traditional narrative discourse,

my target readership; women

My exegesis will examine these key questions and research parameters:

1.What indeed are my guiding epistemologies?

2.How does feminist methodology allow for debate between

‘positivist’ models of research and ‘holistic’ models of

research?

3.Why is the feminist descriptor necessary at all?

4.How will my research contribute to the building and

construction of new knowledge within our discipline?

5.What is the actual inter-relationship between the exegetical

component and the artefact?3

Efforts of subversion…are conceived within culture, within the languages which speak us, which we must turn to our own purposes.

— (Du Bois, 1988)

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Thus I remain positioned within the intellectual binary as ‘other’, the site where ‘the Yartz’ attempts to seek academic validity within the mainstream dominant higher education paradigm, which still replicates the discredited model of the Cartesian split of the C19th; the split between humankind’s quest for ontological meaning ( the science of being) and the epistemological meaning (the science of knowledge).

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When “The Repressed” of their culture and their society come back, it is an explosive return, which is absolutely shattering, staggering, overturning, with a force never let loose before.

—(Cixous & Clément, 1996)

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It is my contention that my research is situated within feminist and postmodernist paradigms despite both being viewed by scholars as out of date, in this the beginning C21st, in the post-modern and post-feminist eras of the Information Age.

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For feminist scholars postmodernism can be powerful in collapsing binaries, such as “the sacred and profane, spiritual and secular, male and female, high art and popular culture”.

—(Creed, 2004)

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As a feminist it is problematic to rely theoretically on the binaries of masculine and feminine. Early feminist scholarship (and indeed feminist theories, such as feminist standpoint theory) is reliant on “culturally and historically specific notions of femininity and masculinity, particularly how they have come to be and who is served by these dominant and taken-for-granted understandings of gender.”

— (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2007)

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Thus criticism of postmodernism has arisen within feminist debates as well as more broadly in the academy. “In this vein, postmodern feminism posits a ‘false divide’ between feminist empiricism and standpoint, both of which have failed to end women’s oppression and both of which rely on the same essentialism, which has caused the oppression feminists seek to do away with.”

— (Cosgrave, 2002)

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Critics of feminist postmodernism state “that the implicit assumptions made about gender, experience, and identity — do not allow for an analysis of the complexity of power relations of which gender, identity, and experience are embedded .” — (Cosgrave, 2003)

I am not convinced of this argument. Despite, what Alcoff (1997) claims to be a “fractured term” (p.6) postmodernist theory does call into question taken-for-granted and privileged paradigms. (Pujal, 1998).

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Michel Foucault was principally interested in the complex ‘web of power-knowledge relations’ (Foucault, 1978) and researchers over the latter part of the 20th century used Foucault’s theorizing, called discourse analysis, to examine cultural texts (novels, films, popular culture, etc) to discover the power relations that produced such texts. By doing this researchers exposed the ‘world view embedded within the text as well as the silences’. — (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2007)

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For Foucault, discourse analysis looks at more than just language. It examines “ ideas, ideology and referants, that systematically construct both the subjects and objects of which they speak, and thus discourses are integral to the construction of social reality.” —(Foucault, 1978; Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2007)

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Luce Irigaray suggests that by exposing the hegemonic relations and exclusions within society, postmodern discourse analysis and deconstruction (Derrida, 1966), allows “French Feminist Postmodernism”, as a way of “jamming the theoretical machinery”. — (Irigaray, 1985)

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Creed summarizes the usefulness of gynesis in pointing out that it is a reactionary or radical repositioning, reconfiguring, and valorizing “of the feminine or woman as intrinsic to the development of new postmodern modes of speaking and writing.” — (Creed, 2004)

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Sandra Harding claims as feminist researcher I must begin by starting of my thinking, and writing “ about any particular phenomenon, from outside the dominant conceptual framework.” — (Harding, 1992)

My protagonists do not live the traditional woman’s role. They each strive for career fulfilment and take full advantage of the freedoms the sexual revolution of the ‘70s. Throughout the ‘80s they experience the societal push to ‘have it all’, family and career. The novel ends in the ‘90s when men and women are all reflecting on the coming new Century and the opportunities and problems caused under the governance of the androcentric “Baby Boomer” authorities and legislatures. (Chaudhuri, 2007)

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I am still in the process of deconstructing the power-relations that are found within the commercial publishing industry in Australia (Davis, 2007), as well as scrutinising the dominant paradigm behind the ‘great Australian literary novel’. (Croker, 2008a; Dixon, 2007).

A further area of ongoing investigation is discovering how women read popular novels (Radway, 1991), to explain why there appears to be a resurgence of the traditional romance mythology within young women’s commercial popular fiction, or ‘Chick Lit’. (Croker 2007)

As part of my literature survey, I have been seeking a feminine literary discourse which positions women’s sexuality and experiences as central, definitive and embedded within the language of the text itself

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The Feminine has not yet deployed its morphology. Yoked to the maternal, reduced to the womb or to seductive adornment, the feminine has been used only for conception, growth, birth and rebirth of the forms of the other. (Irigaray, 1987)

My current research revolves around developing a written and textual position that challenges phallocentricism as the dominant and embedded gaze . (Mulvey, 1985)

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“Sexual difference remains an assumed categorical foundation even though gender may no longer be privileged as the single lens for reading…Consequently, reading the subjectivities within a text involves tracing the mediated link between the multiply situated, historically specific producer and product, writer and text, scriptor and narrative voice.”

―(Friedman, 1996)

These deliberations are determining my characterizations within my novel. How are my protagonists going to allow the reader a ‘gynocentric’ gaze and sensibility?

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If I succeed in reconfiguring this space or silence, will the reader be uncomfortable by rendering subjectivity and objectivity problematic, and thus make my novel ‘unmarketable’, ‘unpublishable’ commercially?

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This leads back to the necessity to collapse the boundaries between commercial (read popular) fiction and literary fiction. As I discovered last year Neilson BookScan include ‘Erotic Fiction’ under the somewhat arbitrary classification of literary fiction, whereas women’s popular fiction (Chick Lit, Family Sagas, Romance Novels etc) are located within the classification general fiction. Nowhere in the BookScan material is there a description of how this classification is decided upon, or by whom, it is a ‘taken-for-granted’ given. (Croker, 2007a)

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It remains my goal for my writing to problematises heteronormativity and allow for freeplay of sexuality and sexual fantasy across gendered positions illuminating the dichotomy of subject and object. As a writer this must be achieved through the written word and the point-of-view mobilized within the narrative.

What becomes apparent when we analyse the expressions of subject in language, representations, art, legends and myths is that sex [sexe] is a primal and irreducible dimension of subjective structure. We are sexuate and we produce sexuate forms…Hence the need for investigation.

Its project to reveal who is speaking, to whom, about what, with what means. In technical terms, this means that it is a matter of uncovering the dynamics of the utterance [énonciation] underlying the statements [énoncés] produced.(Irigaray, 1987)

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It is my contention that there is a tradition in narratives, especially popular fiction, for the woman to be the subject of the male sexual gaze in the same way she is framed in the cinema by the scopophilic gaze.

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THE NEXT EIGHTEEN MONTHS

As well as continuing the journey of creation through my written artefact (the next 60,000 words or so), I will keep locating my writing within the parameters of ‘publishable’ text. This involves researching the market and readership for my novel and the genres that appeal to the female readership, my target readership. Part of this research involves identifying what ‘styles’, ‘genres’ and ‘narratives’ have appeal to contemporary Australian women readers. It is apparent that by doing this research, I cannot ignore the explosion of “Chick Lit” titles, categories and subcategories crowding the shelves of the commercial bookstores. (Ferris, 2006) By utilizing a feminist content analysis I expect to uncover the rationale for their production at this time, the beginning of the ‘post-postfeminist’ era.

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It seems only natural for Australians to want their literature to reflect their daily lives and preoccupations. I suspect also that all these elements combine to re-position Australia’s spiritual heartland in the cityscape and suburbs, where we actually live. The Australian cityscape of the 21st century shares many things in common with larger metropolises around the globe.

Thus my novel is set in the (sub)urbanized Australia of the late 20th Century. My protagonists lives can illuminate the sociological and ideological changes experienced the culture in the lead up to the new century. The remaining issue to be addressed is at the end of my novel, are my protagonists bitter and let down by the second-wave feminists or liberated and embarking on a third wave of change?

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Overview of Progress at August 2008 Artefact and Exegesis

Format: NOVEL

Title: Walking With Madness

Aim: 80 -100,000 words

Current: 35,000 words

Theme: Creativity and Madness

Genre: HYBRID: fiction/faction

Readership: Women <50 years

Protagonists:

Dina (Edina), dancer/artist

Sarah, singer/actor

Julia, photographic model

Time span: 17yrs -50 years

Title: Writing the Author into fiction/faction: A feminist analysis of voice and character.

Rationale: The popularity of the memoir genre, and the construction of reality of or the ‘hyper-reality’ Melbourne, Australia.

Research question: What is the place of the author within and outside the construction of the two texts, and does this impact upon notions of believability and ‘truth’ for the reader.

Common thematic linkage: With the analysis of the creative journey, the revelation of the space between generativity and madness as demonstrated through women’s lived experience in the late C20th.

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From the preceding diagram or concept map it is obvious that the links between the artefact and exegetical analysis is primarily thematic. My novel deals with the life of a 50 year old Melbourne woman. The author/scholar is a 50 year old Melbourne woman. The central protagonist is me, yet at the same time is not me.  In order to allow for the dialectic between the two different texts the mobilising of discourse analysis lays bare the notion of fiction and indeed faction, as constructed literary paradigms.(Croker, 2008c)

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The novel is just that, a novel; a construction of reality, a remembered Melbourne, with all the colorations that memory and emotions can provide yet it is not a memoir as it does not purport to re-tell ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ both highly contested notions. The events are not factual yet derived from events that occurred to me, my friends and to others I observed around me at the time, or those I have selected to locate in this time and place.

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The characters are not real people, they too are constructed. They are amalgams of people I have known, read about or even seen in movies and documentaries, and even those who speak to me from inside my creative mind. 

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The guiding theme is the ‘hoary old chestnut’ of women’s emotions, hysteria and in fact how these can be seen on a continuum between sanity and madness. What it is to be seen as mad, outsider, other. Through this ‘ positionality’ of the protagonists constructed as other/outsider/stranger, the reader is lead to question the construction of ‘normal womanhood’ or indeed general notions of ‘normalcy’ in C20th society?

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In the same way, my exegesis looks at how I respond as an outsider, an older woman within the academy.(Croker, 2007b, 2008b) It also looks at what is normal, what is a ‘normal PhD journey’ and what is not. (Croker, 2007) By attempting to deconstruct the polarities between normal and not normal, traditional and revolutionary, I intend to document and articulate what emotions and mental states come into the actual process of creativity throughout the state of being an creative artist. (Brink, 2001; Charyton & Snelbecker, 2007; Kaufmann, 2003; Richards, 2000)

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Is there actually creative liberation to be found of the realm of the ‘mad’; the nexus between intense stress, anxiety, fear and self-doubt? Must there be a moment of crisis for the writer, as proposed by Hecq (Hecq, 2005a) before emotionally repositioning oneself as creative which in turn drives generativity?

If so, then I must in the coming months through the use of my journal and exegesis visit my own ‘madness’ in the quest for a stable identity as writer. (Croker, 2008d)