Feminist Instructions

“It wasn’t a match, I say. It was a lesson”  Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Greywolf: 2014)

In her introduction to Living a Feminist Life, scholar and activist Sara Ahmed adopts bell hooks’ definition of feminist work: “the movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation and sexual oppression”(hooks, 2000, cited in Ahmed, 2016).  I in turn take Ahmed’s description of “a scene of feminist instruction” as a starting point for an imagined feminist text analysis. Ahmed writes,

we hear histories in words; we reassemble histories by putting them into words . . . . attending to the same words across different contexts, allowing them to create ripples or new patterns like texture on a ground. I make arguments by listening for resonances . . . . The repetition is the scene of a feminist instruction.

Hence, Text Analysis with its focus on repeated words as quantifiable data points that reveal the workings of text or texts by its very nature would seem to be feminist. 

And yet, as Koen Loers and Sayan Bhattacharyya demonstrate, it’s not at all that simple.

In “Text Analysis for Thought in the Black Atlantic,” Sayan Bhattacharyya points out that “many methods of text analysis prove problematic, because they make an unwarranted assumption about the stability and constancy of the relation between words and their meanings across time.” Proposing Glissant’s notion of “archipelagic thinking in space (and its counterpart in time)” as a way of “pay[ing] attention to variation within, as well as to the specificity of, word-concepts” (Bhattacharyya, 80), Bhattacharyya traces a geneaology of Glissant’s metaphor back through the writings of Aimé Césaire and C. L. R. James, and thus suggests that the Digital Black Atlantic as “the body of interdisciplinary scholarship that examines connections between African diasporic communities and technology” (Introduction, Risam and Baker Josephs),  can, like Paul Gilroy’s eponymous challenge to Eurocentric white supremacist studies, “perform a similar decentering of the epistemological assumptions that underlie digital humanities in general by problematizing its tools” (Bhattacharyya 82).  In particular, “[b]y taking the relationships between words (expressed as co-occurrences of words), rather than the words themselves, as the basic unit of representation” (Bhattacharyya 81), word vectors “are not only a convenient technology to capture semantic relationships but also are . . . productive for problematizing concepts in the text and even for raising epistemological questions about the status of concepts themselves in relation to the text” (Bhattacharyya 81).

Likewise, in “Feminist Data Studies: Using Digital Methods for Ethical, Reflexive and Situated Socio-Cultural Research, Koen Loers points out that “Digital data is performative and context-specific” (Loers, 143); as a result a would-be feminist data researcher needs to “consider . . . text, users and materiality from a relational perspective” (Loers 133).  Asking, “[h]ow can we draw on user-generated data to understand agency vis-a`-vis structures of individuality and collectives across intersecting axes of difference?” as well as “[h]ow can we strategically mobilise digital methods in a non-exploitative way to illuminate everyday power struggles, agency and meaning-making?” (Loers 133), Loers offers a case-study and “road map” for the self-interrogating, “research participant-centered” (132), “alternative data-analysis practice” (139) that might better align with feminist and post-colonial ethics. 

While Loers himself demonstrates how Facebook TouchGraph’s visualizations of users’ relationships, even when jointly created, can generate alienation, hostility, and confusion in participants, necessitating adaptive understandings of data and collaboration, my presentation will focus in particular on his section entitled “Dependencies and relationalities” to explore whether what I tentatively term “relational textual analysis” might afford an epistemological as well as material model for a feminist textual analytic practice.

Ahmed, Sara, Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2016. Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/69122.

Bhattacharyya, Sayan, “Text Analysis for Thought in the Black Atlantic” in The Digital Black Atlantic, Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs eds, pp. 77-83.

Koen Leurs, “feminist data studies: using digital methods for ethical, reflexive and situated socio-cultural research” (130–154) 2017 The Feminist Review Collective. 0141-7789/17