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).