I am experiencing an academic crisis of conscience. If you are here because you appreciate my stories about falling on my ass or my inability to learn French, this post will disappoint. GET OUT NOW!
A few months ago I wrote a long rambly post about how I wanted to be able to help others share their stories. I no longer know if this is true. I want to hear as many stories and learn as many things as I can, but I’m not sure what I am supposed to do with it after that.
I am not sure because I am uncomfortable with trying to tell stories that are not mine to tell. On the one hand, I hate the number of times that I use the word “I” on this blog, or anywhere else. I would prefer to talk about other people.
But even here, when I sit down to write stories that heavily involve other people, I often resist. The fact that I am not anonymous effectively reduces or eliminates the anonymity of those in my life, as “characters” in a story. And do I really want to reduce people that I know and love to characters? That, however, seems to be all that I manage to do, because I am so ill-equipped to tread the line between what I can and cannot say about anyone else in my life.
In fact, if you have been reading this blog for a while, but do not actually know me personally, I can’t help but wonder if you’ve been able to piece together anything significant about anyone else in my life. This partially makes me sad because the people around me are essential to who I am as a person, but again: they are themselves so much more than props in the Nicole Sweeney show. The thought of reducing anyone to that makes me a little ill, so I tend to leave them out.
Somehow I started talking about what appears to be a Blogging Problem, rather than the Academic Problem that I started with. I didn’t mean to do that, but I suppose the two problems are related.
The Academic Problem is that many of the things that I would like to take up in my research make me feel wildly uncomfortable because I do not know how I can expect to speak to them with any real authority or in a way that does not strike me as inappropriate.
What I am about to share might be a bit of a breach of trust, but I tell myself that conversations between bloggers are always subject to the possibility of being shared with the rest of the internet. I recently wrote a paper for a class called Identity Formation in a Transnational World. We had to interview someone who had “migrated” internationally. (I put scare quotes on that for my own sake; I don’t feel like venturing down the rabbit hole of Why Every Word Ever Is Actually Totally Loaded.) I interviewed a fellow blogger.
First of all: this paper was a hot fucking disaster to write. It’s the first time the professor has given this assignment, and I have never felt so completely lost while writing a paper. Admittedly, I brought it on myself by procrastinating because I assumed it would be easier than it was.
One of the great things about having this interview-conversation was that when she was expressing the way she felt about certain things (as in, any time that she wasn’t being asked to recite And Then I Moved There details) I kept thinking, “THIS! SO MUCH THIS!” (Sidebar: it’s insane how thoroughly internet speech as embedded itself into my thought processes because I’m only sort of kidding when I quote my thought bubble in that way.)
She said something, though, about her work that I couldn’t shake the whole time I was writing the paper. It’s not that she said it and presented me with this new intellectual obstacle; rather, it was hearing someone else say this thing that I had been thinking. She explained the fact that in her work, she often has to speak and advocate on behalf of different marginalized populations, and that this is a rather complicated part of her own negotiations with identity. “Who am I to advocate?” she asked. “So you get to sit there, take people’s real life experiences and make them this academic, I don’t know, chatter, that I get to deliver to others.”
Oh. Right.
I wanted to write my entire paper on the fact that I could not escape the feeling that we were being asked to tell stories that weren’t ours in ways that made me wildly uncomfortable. I also feared, while writing this paper, that I was going to have to scrap the research project that I planned to do for this class, because I was going to have the exact same problem.
The short version: I have written (academically, not here; I’m fairly certain that nobody here would care) in the past about the politics of language use (particularly in literature) in post-colonial nations. What does it mean to speak and write in the language of he colonizer? The power dynamics embedded in that conversation are intense if you just stop to think about it, even without all of the “academic chatter.” I was going to take up this idea from the framework of this class. I had played with different examples, but I had ultimately decided that I was going to use a couple internet memes as a way of exploring this. (Yes, my major involves YouTube videos and memes. It’s awesome.)
BUT. This goes back to that question that I felt obnoxious as hell trying to talk about how other people talk. I don’t know how/where to situate myself in this conversation.
The case studies that I most appreciate reading are those that include some conversation about how the author is situated. This sort of thing is always tricky with academic writing because we’re supposed to pretend that the inscrutable work of academia has been almost pre-ordained, until some privileged asshole in an ivory tower committed the words to paper. It is for this exact reason that I think it is profoundly inappropriate to discuss the identity of others without contextualizing the author. Trying to veil that is an affront to the autonomy of whomever is being discussed.
Right now I am debating how much I should elaborate on all of this, because I suspect only my grad school friends are still reading at this point, so a lot of what I’m saying will have a very, “Well, obviously,” feel to it.
The counter-argument to all of this is that it is equally if not more dangerous to simply ignore these conversations. The idea, in theory, is that it is better to offer full disclosure and misrepresent than to blatantly ignore. I am actually inclined to agree with this view, for the most part.
It doesn’t keep me feeling uncomfortable, though. Nor does it keep me from feeling like a bit of an ass for obsessing over all of this in the first place, as if anybody but me gives a rat’s ass what I write in a paper, or even here on this blog.
Blah, blah, blah, #gradschoolproblems are like #firstworldproblems on steroids.
Speaking of, I have to finish packing. I am so glad spring break is here.