Fictions of...

Full disclosure: I am heavily medicated and therefore probably not making any sense, but because I have already stretched the deadline… I didn’t take much away from this week’s reading. Visweswaran keeps making the same argument about disciplinary boundaries, and how women are more likely to try and breech them, at least in anthropology, but then end up paying a high price because refusing to adhere to disciplinary boundaries means lack of respect from their male peers. So, what am I missing? Is there more? I was reminded of Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1968), which tells the story of her mother’s working-class life and her own 1950s South London childhood, revealing that existing analyses cannot account for their experiences. The result is a historical biography/autobiography “about lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central imperative devices of the culture don't quite work” (5). So yea, why shouldn’t we be able to bring our own experiences to our analysis, especially when we remain underrepresented within our disciplines?