Abstracts of 2005 Award Winners' Papers:

Methodological Reflections on Researching Embodied Experience with Women Activists

Masum Momaya, MEd
Harvard University

It is both a theoretical and methodological conundrum that embodiment, or the relationship between body and self, exists simultaneously in the realm of the felt and the realm of the socially constructed. In other words, or bodies are neither unfailingly encased in sensation nor simply texts that can be written upon, read, and analyzed. Rather there is a constant, entangled interplay between sensations and the meanings we attach to them through words, whether these words are found in metaphor, biomedical discourses, or some other proximal descriptors. Such words are confounded by the self's oscillating equating with and disassociations with the body. How is one to do research at the intersection of the material and the discursive, especially in regards to understanding sense of self?

This paper will present reflections on using a hybrid research method designed to temporarily suspend the discursive in favor of the felt and then focus on the process of coming into words about embodied experience. Methods were drawn from a previous research study (Momaya, 2004) examining healing traditions, including Ayurveda, Tibetan Medicine, and Traditional Chinese Medicine, and, in particular, how practitioners learned about, discerned, and communicated information existing outside the realm of words. This study confirmed the importance of the intersubjective researcher-researched relationship as a site of meaning-making and emphasized that some forms of knowledge, such as adeptness with inserting acupuncture needles and discernment in feeling pulses, do not find expression in words but are honed through discipline and practice over time. This study also suggest possibilities opened up by temporarily suspending the discursive and focusing on the felt, i.e. not forcing coming into words but rather witnessing the process. I combined these suggestions with existing techniques rooted in phenomenology, critical hermeneutic, and feminist narrative analysis. Specifically this hybrid method utilizes a combination of techniques including ethnographic participant observation (as shown in the healing traditions named above and discussed in Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995) narrative inquiry (Riessman, 1993), focusing (Gendlin, 1981), and relational mapping (Josselson, 1992) in the data collection process and draws data analytic strategies from the Listening Guide: Voice-Centered Relational Method (Brown & Gilligan, 1992).

Methods were used in a dissertation study comparing the embodied experiences of adult women activists in the United States and South Africa to understand how 'being in the body' was related to activism and how this comes to be expressed. Sixteen participants who had multiple years of commitment to some form of daily, somatically-based practice of 'being in the body' such as dance, yoga, or the martial arts, were selected for their likelihood of providing 'thick description' in the tradition of sensuous scholarship (Stoller, 1996). Participants were observed for several hours in various settings and interviewed in semi-structured, open-ended format for approximately three hours each on the broad themes of activism, embodiment, and sense of self. In particular, questions on embodiment asked participants to 'go into their bodies' and allowed the researcher to observe and listen to the process of coming to words. Likewise, data analysis paid close attention to the different ways in which embodied experiences, and the relationship between body and self, were invoked and elicited. Preliminary finds indicate that these activists' experiences of being in the body over time transform not only the relationship between body and self but reconfigure relationship between self and the 'other' that is invoked in determining allies and adversaries in activist engagements – empirical evidence of the transversal politics (Yuval-Davis, 1997).