It’s difficult to find provocative topics to write about each week when I am drowning in dissertation work. Right now I’m working on my literature review, which though often a throwaway chapter, is crucial to my argument. The lack of overlap between important fields, and the ways I suggest we intersect them, is at the heart of what I’m up to in this project. So, I thought what would be helpful for me, and hopefully interesting for you readers, is to share some of the resources I’ve been working collecting. My literature review touches in some way on the following fields: feminist research methodology, video game studies, rhetoric, general new media theory, workplace research, professional writing, technology theory, and feminism. So for the next few weeks, I’m going to talk about the different sources I’m using to explore each of these topics, and I’m going to talk about 1. why I believe it’s important to cross them with video game studies and 2. what we can do with them to improve the video game environment for women.
So first up is feminist research methodology. This is my far the biggest section of my literature review so I have split it up into two parts. First, there is the meta-discussion of feminist research methodology through work by Patricia Sullivan, Joseph Rouse, Fonow and Cook, Guillemin and Gillam, Royster and Kirsch, and Hesse-Biber. The second is an exploration of other figures who may not be thought of or think of themselves as feminist research methodologists. However, for different reason, I believe FRM can be enhanced greatly by an examination of their work: Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Jane Bennet, Susan Hekman, Anne Balsamo, and McDonald and Dvosky.
On deck this week: Sullivan, Royster and Kirsch, and Barad. If you are reading this and thinking that I’m leaving out important figures, please comment. This is very much a work in progress and my writing is exploratory (meaning that the authors I am using are not set in stone).
Sullivan
As an emergent field, feminist research methodology has few books and articles that overview the field. Many of the central texts were written before feminist research methodology was a defined term and were mostly written for different purposes. In Opening Spaces, Patricia Sullivan writes that “all methodology is rhetorical, an explicit or implicit theory of human relations which guides the operation of methods” (11). This is how I am thinking about methodology. When I suggest we define and perhaps change our methodology in game studies, I’m not talk about explicit, definable things that can be checked off of a checklist. Rather, I’m talking about the more subtle things that ground our work. I’m talking about the things that guide us to ask the questions we ask, to value the things we value, and write the things we write.
What is groundbreaking in Sullivan’s work is the exploration of just how much our research is shaped by our own beliefs. She writes, “We see critical actions taken by researchers, then, as manifestations of the ability to act in the production of knowledge at the same time as they are vigilant about the ways in which our circumstances, abilities, values, and beliefs encourage us to act in certain ways”(16). As far as I can tell, this view of methodology, this revelation, has not been acknowledged by those doing game studies. Rather, games studies scholarship has been mostly situated in either philosophy or computational study. The former does not interrogate researcher bias because—and this is an overly general statement that will be interrogated in depth later on—the philosophers in game studies have to some extent conducted their research with 1. The belief in researcher objectivity and seperateness from the research and 2. The belief in the possibility of finding abstract universals that are context independent.
For example, game scholars have been all but obsessed with finding a transcendent definition of play. Sullivan, using feminist research methodology, would say that finding that transcendent definition is impossible (and perhaps even worthless). What’s more important is mapping the situation at hand. Using postmodern mapping, Sullivan argues that researchers should look at themselves and their research through the lens of ideology, practice, and method. A research using feminist research methodology, then, would be constantly reflective about why s/he talked about particular things, why s/he asks particular questions, how s/he asks those questions, and so on. It is my belief, and of crucial importance to this project, that good researchers must do this. It is also my belief that video game scholars have not, with some exceptions, done this.
Royster and Kirsch
In their recent book, Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch propose a new (or, rather, defined) theory called Feminist Rhetorical Practices (slightly different that Sullivan’s feminist research methodology, but with some same aims). This is the culmination of a “search for a more generative paradigm for research and practice began with the recognition that broadening the scope of our scholarly agenda, by whatever dimensions, requires the frameworks that support those agendas to be dynamic rather than static and versatile enough to accommodate vibrancy and expansion” (Kindle Locations 217-218). Through Feminist Rhetorical Practices, Royster and Kirsch hope to redefine how we do rhetorical inquiry, resituating ourselves on the disciplinary landscape. They attempt to move beyond what they call the basic approaches to feminist intervention in rhetoric such as revising the major narrative of the field to include women. Their work focuses on looking at the more implicit and subtle changes to language, knowledge-making practices, and inquiry frameworks as a result.
By establishing feminist research methods as essential to the study of rhetoric, Royster and Kirsch accomplishing something similar to my goal with this project: to make feminist research methodology (or a variation of it, as they are using) central to how we do rhetoric. In a sense, Royster and Kirsch are not positing a “feminist” way of doing research. Rather, they are proposing a way everyone should be approaching research that is based on feminist principles. Doing this in theory would ensure that all research practices are ethical, reflective, self-interrogating, and ethical (if we believe that feminist research methodology holds these values). The authors write, “Imbedded in these suppositions are values, with a key value being the importance of paying attention to the ethical self in the texts we study, the texts we produce, and the pedagogical frames that we use to instruct and train our students” (Kindle Locations 301-303). It may seem obvious to always consider oneself (the researcher) as ethically relevant to the study. However, because of the myth of the “objective” researcher, the researcher’s ethical role in the study has been unfortunately understated. One of the primary tenets of feminist research methodology is to always consider the researcher, and her ethics, as part of the findings.
Karan Barad
Karen Barad holds a PhD in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Thus, she may seem like an unlikely candidate to be heading up a movement among feminist epistemologists, scientists, and social scientists that redefine many of the ways we think about the world. Her theory, Agential Realism, is
an epistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices, thereby moving such considerations beyond the well-worn debates that pit constructivism against realism, agency against structure, and idealism against materialism. Indeed, the new philosophical framework that I propose entails a rethinking of fundamental concepts that support such binary thinking, including the notions of matter, discourse, causality, agency, power, identity, embodiment, objectivity, space, and time (Barad, Meeting, 2007).
In other words, her work calls into question the assumptions on which much of science is based. But her theories, or more specifically her approach to research is very much in the vein of feminist research methodologists.
While Barad’s work is focused on the scientific community, work like Sullivan’s is focused on getting a wide range of researchers to rethink their practices. Even so, their approaches are based on many of the same ideas. Barad writes, “our ability to understand the world hinges on our taking account of the fact that our knowledge-making practices are social-material enactments that contribute to, and are a part of, the phenomena we describe” (Barad, Meeting, 2007). Through the juxtaposition of these foundational thinkers, we can see how there is a growing uneasiness with the legacy left by modernist (and some postmodernist) thinkers across both the sciences and the humanities. While there may be a wide range and many differing factors that led to this kind of questioning, the move is clear: we are moving away from static, definitional, and objective ways of thinking and are beginning to acknowledge how knowledge is contextual and emergent.
A manifestation of feminist research methodology is the shift away from description to practice. Barad writes, “The move toward performative alternatives to representationalism shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality (e.g., do they mirror nature or culture?) to matters of practices/ doings/actions” ( “Posthuman,” 802). This is different from a social constructivist standpoint, as Barad says, because while social constructivists are interested in how things are reflected in each other, she is interested in how things are diffracted in each other. Diffraction focuses on materiality, science, and the social and the ways that each illuminate the others in different ways. Thus the terms are never defined, the meanings are never static, and nothing is reflected “as is.”
Barad’s critiques of representationalism call into question much of the ontological basis of video game scholarship. She writes, “That is, there are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities—representations and entities to be represented… When this happens it becomes clear that representations serve a mediating function between independently existing entities. This taken-for-granted ontological gap generates questions of the accuracy of representations” (Barad, “Posthuman,” 804). As will be seen shortly, ethics in game research, procedural rhetoric, and most other theories of video games are dependent on this separation of representations and entities to be represented. What this means is that the theories we use are based on the false assumption that the way we represent something is static and correlative to how it “really” is. In other words, we are wasting are time trying to create the most accurate representations possible (or representing games and meaning as accurately as possible).
Citations:
Barad, Karen. “A Feminist Approach to Teaching Quantum Physics.” Teaching the Majority: Breaking the Gender Barrier in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering. Ed. Sue V. Rosser. New York: Teachers College Press, 1995. 43-78. Print.
–. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. USA: Duke University Press, 2007. Print.
–. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 28.3 (2003): 801-831. Print.
–. “Re(con)figuring Space, Time, and Matter.” Feminist Locations. Ed. By Marianne DeKoven. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Print.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. and Gesa Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 2012. Print.
Sullivan, Patricia and James Porter. Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices. USA: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1997. Print.
