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ISSN 2041 - 9090
Crossing Conceptual Boundaries VIII
School of Social Sciences
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University of East London
Docklands Campus
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London E16 2RD
Crossing Conceptual Boundaries
PhD Annual Yearbook New Series Volume VII
A peer-reviewed graduate publication,
School of Social Sciences, UEL, UK
Cover Image: ‘Crossing borders – Athena's voyage of discovery’ by Sharon Gallagher
All Yearbooks are available to download at:
https://www.uel.ac.uk/Schools/Social-Sciences/What-we-do/Research
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School of Social Sciences
Crossing Conceptual Boundaries VIII
Editorial Board:
Dr Gergana Alzeer, School of Social Sciences (UEL alumna, PhD degree awarded: 2016)
Dr Camille Barbagallo, School of Social Sciences (UEL Alumna, PhD degree awarded: 2016)
Prof Erika Cudworth, School of Social Sciences
Dr Cigdem Esin, School of Social Sciences
Dr Seyoum Hameso, School of Social Sciences (UEL alumnus, PhD degree awarded: 2015)
Mr John Haworth, School of Social Sciences (UEL, PhD candidate)
Prof Maria Tamboukou, School of Social Sciences
Dr Angie Voela, School of Social Sciences
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School of Social Sciences
Crossing Conceptual Boundaries VIII
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5
Articles
Elena Fejdiova:
We were like sisters: Collective beauty rituals and fictitious sisterhood
Latefa Guemar:
Women of the 1990s Algerian Diaspora: Transnational Belonging, Resilience and Political Engagement
Sharon Gallacher:
Inscribing Selves: Discursive, Material and Dialogic Turns for ME
Phoebe Boedell
Working the hyphens: reflections on doing psycho-social research in Bangladesh.
Review Article
Haworth, John:
Social Movements: A Critical Review of the Literature
Publications by UEL Alumnae and Alumni, 2015-2016
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7
Articles
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9
We were like sisters:
Collective beauty rituals and fictitious sisterhood
Elena Fejdiova
Abstract
In this paper I present the results of an ethnographic study of collective cosmetic rituals among
women in Slovakia. I focus on the internal relationships and dynamics that developed within
small collectives of women through shared ritualized consumption of direct sales cosmetics. The
analysis of the data is theoretically informed by sexual selection theory and Darwinian signalling
theory. On one hand the researched women used their beautification practices to be appealing to
men. On the other hand, however, when launching their cosmetic rituals women used their
beauty knowledge and cosmetic resources to form strong intimate bonds amongst each other.
Through expected sharing of intimate bodily information constructed as secret and by carefully
monitoring their ritual behaviour and commitment to the collective women showed to each other
in a reliable way their cooperative intentions. By regular participation in these rituals women
learnt what seems to be a transferable ritual template that enabled them to enter the wider
cooperative networks of women across all regions of Slovakia. Whereas some theoretical
approaches argue that women would use their attractiveness to compete with each other for men
and resources I show that in the observed cosmetic rituals women created ties of intimacy,
solidarity and cooperation through beauty that extended beyond the ritual context to other areas
of their lives. Cosmetics and its obligatory collective manipulation served as markers of their
reciprocal cooperative relations. Researched women also reversed the competitive dynamics of
the cosmetic companies that focused on highest profits and competition through beauty and
favoured the group levelling ritual processes instead.
Key words: women, cosmetics, collective rituals, solidarity, cooperation
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Introduction
The direction of this research grew out of my interest in the relationship between women,
cosmetics and beautification practices and in what became clear to me was a gap in the literature
on women and attractiveness.
When reviewing the literature on the topics I realized that many feminist and gender studies
scholars tend to see women as striving for perfect bodies with the consequence of objectifying,
sexualizing and commodifying themselves (Bordo, 2003; Grosz, 1994). Women are seen as
objects of male desire, displaying for their enjoyment and controlled by their gaze and agency
(Bartky, 1990; Bordo, 2003; Mulvey, 1989). In line with this understanding women would learn
how to be feminine through images transmitted through the mass media that tell them what
clothes, body shape, facial expression, movements and behaviours are desirable (Bordo, 2003).
The beauty ideals are seen as arbitrary and culturally constructed. These scholars further argue
that women would individualistically show-off their attractiveness to men and compete with each
other through beauty (Wolf, 1990). Accordingly, women would pursue their beautification
practices in privacy and isolation from other women which would then foster divisions amongst
them (Wolf, 1990). If beauty forms the basis of women’s identity, this makes them vulnerable not
only to the approval of men but to the critical appraisal of other women, too. However this idea
is based on theorizing representations instead of looking at everyday practices. Contrary to this
view are authors who often base their arguments on qualitative studies of concrete women. In
their view women can use their beautification practices as a way towards achieving agency,
empowerment and pleasure (Beausoleil, 1994; Davis, 1995, Gimlin, 1996; Weitz, 2001). The
findings of some of these scholars might suggest that there could be some collective aspects to
the beauty experience that are shared amongst women (Dellinger, Williams, 1997; Masi de
Casanova, 2004). Another corpus of theoretical approaches to beauty comes from the
evolutionary psychology. These authors, contrary to the feminist and gender studies theorist,
understand that although some beauty standards may indeed vary across cultures and can
therefore be culturally constructed (Jones, 1996), there are some bodily features that are
universally and cross-culturally seen as attractive and therefore cannot be an outcome of social
construction (Buss, 1989; Buss, 1994). According to evolutionary psychology, female
attractiveness is the main feature that men seek in women and women should therefore
accentuate signals such as slim waists or symmetrical features (Buss, 1989). These signals are
proxies for the future reproductive potential that men would look for in their future long-term
partners. According to this view, and consistent with the feminist argument, women would use
their attractiveness to compete with each other through enhancing their physical appearance
through cultural means such as clothing, make-up and other forms of bodily adornments (Buss,
1994; Etcoff, Stock, Haley, Vickery, House, 2011; Low, 1979, 2001). If the competition through
beauty argument is correct we would expect individualistic use of cosmetics by single, isolated
women. Women would also hide their beautification knowledge and cosmetic resources from
each other in order to gain advantage over other women.
But when we look at concrete descriptions found in the anthropological literature on the use of
cosmetics in ritual contexts it is surprising how these differ from the above mentioned theorizing
about women and pursuing their beautification practices in isolation. Women anthropologists in
particular refer to collectives of women who were involved in the beautification of initiated girls.
This collective use of cosmetics amongst women in ritual contexts is often interpreted as marking
off reciprocal cooperative networks of affiliation of their users. For example, among the African
Ndembu during the female initiation ritual Edith Turner points out that a collective of women
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were involved in decorating the girl’s body and hair with red ochre. She comments on the ‘strong
camaraderie’ that developed behind the scenes among the women who beautified the initiated girl
(Turner, 1987). Another example comes from among the African Bemba where ‘a form of beauty
magic’ a purification ritual called whitening magic was held at the end of menstruation of the
initiated girls. With the presence of women from the village, the girls were washed, dried and
whitewash was applied all over their bodies and faces to make them beautiful (Richards, 1956).
Among the Muslim Hausa there exists a special institution of bond friendship kawaye among the
young girls that was initiated and confirmed by the exchange of oil and henna. One of the girl
friends provided oil, perfume and henna and brought it to the other, so she could dress her hair
(Smith, 1954). Amongst the women under colonial rule in Mozambique tattoos provided access
to networks of reciprocal alliances among the tattooed women that were used as resources in
times of need. The desire to be attractive to men certainly mattered but the tattooed women
represented it as a side effect. As women moved across the country tattoos were a way to create
new networks of female ´fellowship´ (Gengenbach, 2003).
The above mentioned girls’ initiation rituals were costly, lengthy and often traumatic. They
were crucial in mate choice: the girls who failed to undergo initiation were seen as
unmarriageable. But much of the cosmetic display occurred in secrecy and could not be directly
seen neither by the members of the opposite sex nor by the members of the same sex who were
the possible competitors (Power, 1999). So what was actually being advertised in these rituals and
to whom?
My own observations of everyday practices centring on direct sales cosmetics amongst my female
family members and girl friends suggested too sharing and commitment to the collective within
small circles of women rather than beauty rites carried out in isolation by individual women
competing with each other through beauty. I became intrigued to investigate this contradiction
between theoretical understanding of relationships between women, beautification and cosmetics
and the actual everyday practices that reflect this relationship. I wanted to understand the
processes that were at play amongst the women who shared the beauty experience together.
What was going on amongst them and why did they share it?
This article presents the interpretation of some of the key findings of my PhD research.
It shows that the ritualized consumption of cosmetics encouraged bonding and solidarity among
the participating women as a result of taking part in the collective cosmetic rituals. To interpret
the data I use an alternative Darwinian model of female cosmetic coalitions (Power, 1999, 2009)
that while acknowledging Darwinian female-female competition stresses female strategies of
using cosmetics with ritual intent to create cooperating alliances and coalitions.
My analysis is based on ethnographic research of small collectives of women in urban
environment of Slovakia’s capital who were selling, buying and using Avon and Oriflame direct
sales cosmetics. My focus was on sales representatives and their buyers. I worked with 42 women
from 15 different small collectives aged 18 to 60. I conducted the research mainly at the work
places of the researched women. At times I worked with the research participants in cafes or at
their homes. The professions of the researched women varied from primary and secondary
school teachers, headmasters, administrative workers, public services workers, researchers,
waitresses, a journalist, to Civil Service employees and sale executives. Out of 42 studied women
16 were representatives of one of the researched cosmetic company and the other 26 women
were their customers. For the period of research I myself became an Oriflame seller and through
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this a member of such a collective. I conducted an ethnographic study using Spradley’s
ethnographic method (Spradley, 1979, 1980).
Unlike in the UK where the Avon cosmetics is sold through Avon parties organized from above
by the cosmetic company itself, in Slovakia the shopping procedure as encouraged by both
studied cosmetic companies is a one-to-one encounter between a company representative and her
client. Both companies recommend to their representatives to go through the catalogue with her
client who would ask questions about cosmetics. Then the catalogue would be left with the client
and collected ideally the next day together with the order. On the agreed date the representative
would bring in the ordered cosmetics, give it to her client and collect the money. The client
would inspect the cosmetics to check its quality such as packaging or colour and possibly address
questions to her representative. Then the selling procedure and distribution of cosmetics would
be considered completed. The aim of these optimized and instrumental selling and buying
behaviours is to make the highest profit possible and to make the best (often by both parties
represented as the best bargain) buy possible. Such behaviour demands and encourages
competition between representatives who should aim at the highest achievable profit. It also
fosters competition between the clients through the best individual buys.
But these formally optimized profit and advantage generating selling procedures represented the
opposite of the observed spontaneous non-instrumental ways women themselves organized
around the cosmetic practices into small bonded collectives. The shopping events I observed
were collective gatherings of several women (usually three to four but at times five to six or
more) where the representative could but did not have to be present. The collective decisions of
all the participating women often led to overspending for the clients and loss of profit for the
representative. She sold cosmetics to the researched women for the cost price effectively giving
up the override that would represent her gain. The observed collective practices that generated
ritualized female sociality, bonding and commitment to the group had strong preference and
precedence subverting the cosmetic companies’ interests in maximising profit.
Attractiveness
On one hand, women I worked with were all very aware of the fact that men pay attention to
female attractiveness and they enhanced it through cosmetics. In both following examples they
acknowledge the advantages they could potentially or actually gain from their enhanced
appearance that was aimed at men in general such as better work position or tips from male
clients:
“(...) So every one of us presents herself (...), she wants to look well, well groomed. Especially male clients very
much take on board how one looks (...). So maybe each of us will buy it [cosmetics] because she has a feeling that it
will make her look more attractive (…)“ (Research participant Nr.5, age 22, coffee shop team manager and
university student)
“At my previous jobs the more attractive she looked the better position she had (…) really, the more attractive the
better position she had.” (Research participant Nr.12. age 26, team coordinator)
But there seems to be collective as well as cooperative dimensions to such beauty enhancement.
In the following description of the later situation from above the researched women incite each
other to engage with beautification at work place:
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“(…) [in my previous job] one of [my colleagues wore make up] and we drew the other in to make her wear it, too.
We, actually, we used to have our hair done up every day, we used to be nicely made up. Yes, all kinds of eye
shadows, four colours I used to wear. (…) we were close to each other (…) we were a good team, and each of us
came in made up, one prettier than the other, that’s how it worked there.” (Research participant Nr.13, 26, team
coordinator)
Here, the collective of women is marked through wearing make-up and to join in equals to start
wearing it. But despite the fact that the result of wearing make up is the boost in attractiveness of
the participating women so that ‘one was prettier than the other´ they are still ‘close to each other´ and ´a
good team´. This closeness and ability to create and maintain good team relations can be
interpreted as manifestation of the cooperative internal relations of the researched women that
developed and are maintained amongst them through shared and collectivized wearing of
cosmetics. In this female collective the incentive for using make-up to enhance one’s
attractiveness is strong. The women encourage each other to put on make-up to achieve the best
results, to be as attractive as possible. The strength and cohesion amongst them can be seen in
the power they have to ´draw the other in to make her wear [make up] ´ and through this make her part
of their collective.
On the other hand the women I worked with wanted to be attractive for their current sexual
partners: “... they want to make themselves up, to be more attractive for their boyfriends, and for example, [I’m
thinking] when my boyfriend will smell this on me, he will surely like it, or when he will notice this, I want to
know his view on it.“ (Research participant Nr.6, age 21, Oriflame representative, coffee shop waitress and
university student)
The sensual experience of their partners is important for my research participants. Smell, colour,
touch and texture are all used to engage their boyfriends in noticing and acknowledging their
attractiveness. So the women often choose cosmetics with regard to their partners: “[my mum]
asks my father for his opinion about what colour a lipstick she should get or what fragrance, because she wants
that he will like it, because he will be smelling it.“ (Research participant Nr.21, age 21, Oriflame representative,
university student)
An important part of engaging their current sexual partners in noticing their attractiveness was
the regular display of the direct sales cosmetics bought with their girl-friends:
“(…) I show it to my boyfriend. ‘See what a beautiful woman you’ve got?!’ And I spread it all out on the kitchen
table, everything.” (Research participant Nr.13, 26, team coordinator)
“It’s not something [cosmetics] that you buy [in a store] and chuck it in your bag but it’s something that ´look
what I’ve ordered´ and you can show off with it. You come home and you can show what you have ordered. At
least I always do it. I show it to my boyfriend.” (Research participant Nr.5, age 22, coffee shop manager and
university student)
Here ‘look what I’ve ordered’ translates ‘look what I’ve ordered with my girl-friends’ and
functions as a reliable signal of my research participant’s attractiveness. This attractiveness does
not come just from the beauty knowledge and cosmetic resources she can employ to enhance it.
Because there is a collective dimension to it, namely the coalition of women with whom she
shares the cosmetic experience, the attractiveness equally stems from being part of such a bonded
female collective.
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Ritualized consumption
But being appealing to men was not the only reason the researched women would get together to
share the direct sales cosmetics experience. An essential component of these practices was setting
up a safe space where they created specific form of female sociality that centred on mutual trust,
closeness and bonding. An inevitable condition for such sociality to evolve and thrive was the
establishing, marking and confirmation of reciprocal cooperative relationships within the
researched circles of women through collective ritual practices.
I studied two different types of ritual practices centring on sales and purchases of cosmetics in
the researched direct sales companies settings. On one hand, there were big formal institutional
rituals of ´recognition´ called ´conferences´ organized at the national level for the sales representatives.
Only representatives who have made a profit high enough could attend such events. The
guidelines for the height of profits were set beforehand in the companies´ newsletters. These
´conferences´ were organized and orchestrated by the cosmetic companies themselves and stressed
not only the hierarchies within the company itself but among the representatives as well. At these
events the best selling representatives called ´leaders´ were publicly ´recognized´. They were
rewarded for their sales achievements by being called up on the stage, applauded by the audience,
at times with standing ovations, and they received achievements awards from the company
leaders. These awards were represented by various certificates, by ´winning´ the right to attend the
next year ´conference´, ´winning´ the family holiday or ´winning´ the right to use the company car for
the next year. The competitiveness and the hierarchical organization of the companies and of the
whole selling process were clearly discernible in these rituals. The whole institutional ritual
centred on ´winning´ awards for the best selling representatives. It also aimed at motivating the
´conference´ participants to the highest profits achievable. These ‘recognition’ rituals had a very clear
formalized structure. The participants sometimes experienced heightened emotional states that
were manifest during applauses, through exclamations in the audience or tears on the stage when
moved representatives shared their success stories.
On the other hand and in stark contrast to these big highly formalized events, were the group
levelling collective rituals organized from below by the researched women themselves. These
group levelling rituals usually took place at work places, cafes or at the research participants’
homes. They were small scale including up to five or six women. With comparison to the above
described highly formalized corporate ceremonies, these rituals lacked an elaborate formal
structure and were often improvised. During these rituals the work hierarchies were relaxed and
the participating women became one collective. The observed ritual behaviours were often
temporally restricted and lasted between ten to thirty minutes. However, I also observed cosmetic
rituals that lasted as long as two hours. Essential components of these rituals were collective
emotional high created by the ritual participants, collective assertive loudness, uproarious laughter
and exaggerated feminine behaviour (Sanders, 2000):
“(…) one [of the women] was sitting and browsing it [the catalogue] and three others were
standing above her, sometimes four, depending on whether there was someone with the
authority to dissipate them or not (laughs). (...) And it worked like this, the person [a female
colleague] came to work and maybe it was strait at the first morning coffee or after the
lunch break, that she took it [the catalogue] out and “oh, I have a new Avon catalogue!”
and now they all swarmed together (laughs) and “Show me, show me!” and they started to
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leaf through it and now, I don’t know, “oh, what a lipstick!”, “Look, this would suit me!”,
“oh no, it wouldn’t suit you” and a similar hen gabble (laugh).“(Research participant Nr. 9,
age 35, sales executive)
The cosmetic ritual starts with the recognized shibboleth ‘I have a new Avon catalogue!’ followed by
all the present women dashing towards the woman who pronounced it. One of them is sitting
and turning the pages the others are looking at them while standing above her talking and
shouting often at the same time. This is all happening without the presence of the companies’
representative. It is launched entirely by the women themselves. All the women are expected to
join in, and they do. The emotional input of the participating women is strong. They all shout
and laugh loudly. They are all energized and they show it to each other through their bodily
engagement in exalted, exaggerated movements. During such performance purchasing is decided
collectively: ‘One persuades the others and then we just all agree on who will order what.’ As a
result women often overspend because they feel obliged to buy cosmetics recommended by their
girl-friends or they all buy the same cosmetics, e.g. same fragrances, lipsticks, nail varnishes etc.
Women taking part in such rituals endure costs of time and energy in engaging in collective
emotional high and of the money spent on cosmetics (Zahavi, Zahavi, 1997). Shared and
reciprocal circulation of beauty knowledge forms an obligatory part of these rituals. Women refer
to it as ‘giving advice’ that often follows the act of revealing of beauty flaws. Such disclosure is
expected by all the women taking part in the ritual despite the fact that it is seen by them as
potentially risky:
There must be a certain degree of trust. It´s as if you confined it to someone, that even
though it´s just cosmetics, it´s something intimate. And I wouldn´t want to risk, that
someone would judge me, to tell the truth. [It´s intimate] in that it´s essentially about the
body. You know, as if you confessed to someone, that you beautify yourself, that in reality
you´re not that beautiful, but that you beautify yourself to be it, maybe that´s it. Such a
confession (...) maybe because it´s about the body and (...) because that´s mine, it´s closely
interrelated with my person. (...) To those other women I usually don´t talk about
cosmetics, so I tell them, I don´t know, that ´you look good´ but I don´t ask them any
further ´what do you use´ or so. As if I distinguished between people, it´s not about that I
wouldn´t want to know, but it´s something intimate. I´d probably have a feeling that they
would expect from me, that, I don´t know. I wouldn´t ask a person I don´t trust. (...) I
associate the world of cosmetics with people who are closest to me, because it´s about
beauty, that´s closest to my person and maybe if I were a top model who looks great, then
maybe I wouldn´t have problems to talk about it, the more because I have complexes or I
can see my imperfections that I´m aware of, the more I´m sensitive about what concerns
myself as much as cosmetics. That´s why I talk about it only with certain people (...).
(Research participant Nr.2, age 26, admin manager).
In the above statement the research participant stresses that for her to disclose the information
concerning her attractiveness to the other women the essential condition of trust must be met.
She understands cosmetics as an intimate matter concerning her body. To reveal this kind of
information to someone else represents a risky confession that shows that she actually might not
´be as beautiful´. So even though it is ´just cosmetics´ her description gives evidence about
something very important concerning the relevance of beauty and its enhancement. Her
´imperfections´ make her vulnerable to others. They are therefore understood as secrets and
revealing them is done only to the women she trusts. The ´world of cosmetics´ is kept exclusively
for those people who ´are closest´ to her. By this she means her girl-friends with whom she shares
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the same direct sales cosmetics. Cosmetics are seen by this woman as the most intimate concern.
They literary touch the body proper, something that she inherently sees as hers. When she speaks
about her flaws she is sharing information that could be manipulated by other women. Sharing
such information carries with it potential risk because it can harm her reputation (Buss, 1994;
Hess, Hagen, 2002) where attractiveness is understood as one of its most important components
(Rucas et al., 2006). Therefore a misuse of such information can put a woman into a
disadvantaged position in relation to other women with whom she would possibly compete. For
the disclosure to occur there must be real trust amongst the women who share it. Under the
circumstances of female competitiveness (Buss, 1994; Campbell, 2004) women would not talk
about it outside the bonded and trusted circle of their girl-friends. Thus for the ´other women´
she only reserves the type of conversations that do not require any exposing and sharing of such
intimate information. If the disclosure of beauty flaws occurs it is expected from the present
women to reciprocate with the best advice possible. Because of the implied vulnerability of
reputation of the disclosing women such intimate bodily knowledge, flaws and advice alike, is
amongst the researched female collectives constructed as secret. It is reserved only for the closed
circle of the trusted group of fellow-women. By exposing one´s vulnerability to the group and by
giving the best advice they could the women in the coalition send a reliable message to each other
that among themselves it is safe to do so.
The outcomes of the collective cosmetic ritual performance shared within the trusted circle of
women is felt as intimate closeness and bonding that some of the women I worked with
compared to sisterhood:
(...) and then I felt we were on the same wave length, that doesn’t have to happen at each
gathering, when we meet up like this [to hand out cosmetics], but then I really had the
feeling that we were as if sisters or something like that, you know (...). That was great,
when the woman left, then Anika had for us those small samples and it all gathered around
the bed and we were either sitting on the bed or kneeling around it as if around a fire pit.
And that was great and I remember such an emotion that we all smelled each others´
perfumes and it was very spontaneous and pretty mad. (...) And we were so happy about it
that, what a fragrance and what a sample. That was great. I really enjoyed it very much.
And it was fun (...) like Anika was giving away those things [cosmetics] and we were
squealing and I think we all knew, that, wow, what are we doing, you know, but we really
enjoyed it very much. It was a very liberating feeling that maybe the world looks at women
stereotypically, that a woman and cosmetics that’s like, but there we could really express it
because we were among us and all of us knew that is was important for us. Thus I wasn’t
scared to do ´uaaa, what a fragrance!´ and open it straight away and ´smell it!´ and ´what
cream is this?!´ and so on. It was very familial and so maybe bonding. Also that we were
joking together and that we were laughing together. Well, during that evening that group,
who we were there, was very bonded, I think. (Research participant Nr. 2, age 26, admin
manager)
When the ritual starts women mutually attune and synchronize their emotions to the point that
they feel it as ´being on the same wave length´. Through the shared emotions they create a space
where they can experience fictitious sisterhood. Here they are ´as if sisters´. Around the double
bed in the middle of the room they form an “all-embracing circle” that does not allow any
hierarchy nor external control. It creates its own internally referential space where the ritual
participants address to themselves, not to the external audience (James, 2003: 83). The bed is
their focal point, their ´fire pit´ around which they sit or kneel with their own representative, who
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is one of them. With her they start to play a ´throw and catch´ game: she is throwing cosmetics at
the women and they are snatching it with squeals. In their own emotionally centralizing space
created by themselves for themselves they go ´pretty mad´. It is this madness that sets the whole
event apart from everyday ordinary behaviour. Here behaving ´pretty mad´ means to be loud,
unbound, wild and free because they know they can feel equal and therefore they can dare to
´behave badly´ and they enjoy it. These women stop being cautious about how they are seen by
others because they know they are safe amongst each other and what they do is important to all
of them. Then they can ´really express´ all the joy and have fun. They are squealing, yelling,
shouting, laughing and joking in the familiarity of the close and known bodies that are moving in
synchrony around the imaginary but felt ´fire pit´. Women themselves reflect that what they are
doing is not ordinary behaviour. They all know that ´wow, what are we doing´ but they keep
doing it and they ´really enjoy it very much´. With exaggerated gestures accompanied by
amplified communication of screams and squeals women grab the thrown cosmetics, open them,
smell them and try them on, even mutually: one smears the other. They all make sure, however,
that all of them are in the circle and all of them do the same. They smell each others´ samples
and they snatch them from each others´ hands. ´What a fragrance!´ they scream. They open it
straight away and they yell again at each other ´Smell it!´ and they do. Although ´it doesn’t have
to happen at each gathering´ during that evening as an outcome of such collectively performed
joy the group is ´very bonded´.
The observed cosmetic rituals followed their own order which was similar in all the observed
groups. Its elements were collective browsing through catalogues, use of specific coded language
referring to cosmetics and beautification, collective decisions what to order, accentuated sensory
experiences centring on the body such as mutual touching, smelling of cosmetics and putting it
on, and exalted emotional states of the participating women. These structural elements showed a
tendency towards stylization, repetition, redundancy and stereotyping, all obvious aspects of ritual
(Rappaport, 1999). The cosmetic rituals usually took place in spaces where the participating
women felt they would not be disturbed, such as the back office of the coffee shop or in
teachers´ room. The women I studied referred to these places as ´our office´ or ´our lobby´. The
rituals were launched at fixed times usually every three weeks with each new catalogue and under
special circumstances, for example, when the boss was not present. These gatherings had marked
beginnings and endings, often starting with the formula ´I’ve got the new catalogue!´ or ´Have
you got the new catalogue?´ or ´I’ve got the cosmetics´ and finishing with the closing of the
catalogue or putting the new cosmetics aside. All the women present in such a space were
expected to join in the collective behaviour. The observed women engaging in cosmetic rituals
performed for each other. With the exclusion of men they signalled their cooperative intentions
and trustworthiness to each other in a costly and therefore reliable way. In ´their lobby´ or in ´the
back room´ the cosmetic ritual was seized by the women only. The competitive gender relations
between women remained on the other side of the closed door.
The observed collective gatherings varied in their length, size and intensity but their content and
form were identical across Slovakia. By regular participation in these rituals women learnt what
seems to be a transferable ritual template that, similarly to the ethnographic examples mentioned
above, enabled them to enter the wider cooperative networks of women across all regions of
Slovakia that formed in the context of direct sales cosmetics. These networks provided their
female members with benefits that extended beyond the actual ritual context. The research
women supported each other at work, often through spreading important information amongst
them or covering up for each other as well as in their personal lives, in their relationships with
their current sexual partners, sometimes even helping out with childcare.
18
Monitoring behaviour
An intrinsic part of the observed cosmetic rituals was careful monitoring of the behaviour of the
participating women. On one hand, women were extremely interested in the other women’s
purchases: “We always look at each other’s purchased cosmetics. We are curious. (…) and we
peek into the others´ bags, to see what the others got, because then you’re very interested in that.
(...) it’s about watching.” The result of such careful and repeated ‘watching’ was detailed
knowledge about who ordered what cosmetics amongst the participating women effectively
tracking down the commitment to the collective that was manifest through regular purchasing of
the respective direct sales cosmetics. It was expected that women will allow others to look at the
bought cosmetics and, reciprocally, that they themselves will show off with what they purchased.
These women regularly displayed the ordered cosmetics to each other. But only the direct sales
cosmetics that was bought together with the other fellow-women was seen as clearly demarcating
the extent of the female bonded collective: “Only if I have cosmetics, that also the other women
ordered from Avon, just then we show it to each other, but otherwise, that I bought another
brand of cosmetics and would come to work and say, I bought this, I don’t do that.” (Informant
Nr.26, age 34, Avon representative, Civil Service employee)
Not only women watched the purchases made by others, they assessed themselves within their
collective, too. They made sure their orders were high enough to match up to the commitment to
the group but not too high in order not to be seen as overdoing it or showing off: “When I got
the ordered cosmetic I checked who ordered what among the other girls and whether I’m in the
upper or the lower line [in terms of amount of ordered products].” (Research participant Nr.19,
age 22, university student)
Women I worked with regularly assessed each others attractiveness, too. But again, there were
collective as well as cooperative aspects to it. This assessing of beauty was expressed in the act of
´noticing´ the way women within a respective collective looked and again it was linked to the use
of the collectively purchased direct sales cosmetics. Women expected it and encouraged it: “ (…)
when I come to work and I stop here [at the counter], they are very attentive so they’ll notice for
sure, for example, I had new eye shadows, and they went ´show us, which ones you’ve got?´ so
I would close my eyes to let them see them and they look at them immediately and then they
talked about it, how long they last, what are they like, whether the colour suits me or not, so. It’s
always like that here.” (Research participant Nr.7, age 23, waitress)
The same situation from above is in the following statement described by another coalition
member: “(...) one of our colleagues had a new eye liner, she bought it in Oriflame and she came
in the morning and we noticed it instantly, that she had something new and that it suited her. So
we complimented her and she was pleased and maybe it persuaded her to use it and, we notice,
we notice such details, those, you do notice, (…) and the other colleague tells her ´cool, it suits
you, you look different´ and she will continue using it. And on the contrary, if someone comes in
and we’ll say ´oh, not this´ then she won’t use it.“ (Research participant Nr.5, age 22, coffee shop
team manager and university student)
On one hand, this ‘noticing´ fulfilled the function of displaying the use of the collectively bought
cosmetics. As seen in the second example, it was always accompanied by giving honest advice
about the observed looks leading to the improvement of looks of the displaying women. On the
19
other hand, it levelled the attractiveness distinctions within the observed female collectives. Here,
it was expected that the information about the desired feminine looks would be shared and
reciprocated.
An inseparable component of the observed ritualized cosmetic purchases was the use of
formalized coded language that represented yet another form of testing for group membership.
These were obligatory linguistic formulae expected at both ritual occasions of catalogue browsing
as well as distribution of cosmetics. They came in a matching question and answer (call and
response) format and they were taught and used in the collective cosmetic rituals and only the
insiders knew how and when to use them. They effectively represented the secret knowledge that
belonged to the bonded and trusted female collective. The researched women carefully listened
for these formulae and always responded with matching questions or answers. There are
ethnographic parallels of use of secret language in ritual contexts of girls’ initiations such as
chisungu among Bemba and vusha/domba cycles among Venda (Blacking, 1961; Power, 2000;
Richards, 1956). In the initiation rituals the girls learnt a secret language of rhymes and riddles,
that served as proof of passing the rite and opened up the entry into the female reciprocity
networks. The use of secret language demonstrated and maintained the boundaries of a ritually
established trusting „gossiping community“ (Power, 2000). Similarly, the use of the formalized
coded language amongst the studied women clearly demarcated and sustained the trusted circle
of girl-friends. The researched women knew exactly who was taking part in the collective
cosmetic rituals by listening for these obligatory formulae:
(...) the one who doesn’t order [cosmetics] (...) she doesn’t ask for my opinion, ´tell me,
what does it smell like?´, right, or ´what’s it like?´, ´for how many uses?´ or so, she only
goes through it [the catalogue] and nothing. The one who does buy it and spots, I don’t
know, something new in the catalogue, she asks me straight away ´what’s it like?´ (...) so
that’s the difference (...) the one who buys it always asks for my opinion, or what it’s like or
whether I liked it or whether I have tried it on, so. (Research participant Nr.6, age 21,
Oriflame representative, waitress and university student)
Against the everyday habitus
James points out that ritual derives its power “partly from speaking against and ironically with
´ordinary´ habitus” (James, 2003: 79). During the ritual performance the studied women
established a temporal counter-culture of opposition to and exaggeration of the expectations of
everyday femininity. Collectively they created a form of hyper-femininity - a type of femininity
that inflated and exaggerated the components of the expected normative everyday practice
associated with work environment and personal gender relations with men and they opposed it.
When engaging in mutual grooming women’s gestures were exaggerated, their talk and laughter
were amplified, often assuming forms of squealing. ´They were like crows´ swooping down on
the cosmetics. When talking about their behaviour in these rituals women themselves pointed out
that they pushed their behaviour from ordinary to exaggerated: ´it was pretty mad´ and ´we all
knew, that, wow, what are we doing!´. Grabbing cosmetics, snatching it from each other and
starting it putting on straight away, smelling it and squealing, using exalted gestures and amplified
sounds were all types of behaviour intended for this ritual time.
But this femininity incorporated in itself elements of masculine assertiveness. These masculine
elements were discernible in the throw and catch games women played when throwing cosmetics
20
at each other, in the drinking of beer because “that’s what men drink while they watch football”
and in the often femininely unflattering positions they assumed while smelling and trying on
cosmetics and browsing the catalogues. Because hyper-femininity combined both, feminine as
well as masculine aspects, it was no more gender specific but ritual specific with gender
ambivalent characteristics – it came to existence only within the ritualized time and space (Power
and Watts, 1999). When the ritual ended, the gender returned back to its polarized un-ambiguous
norm. But as long as the cosmetic ritual lasted the gendered signal became so expanded, so
amplified and it carried with it potential for so much collective agency that it took on another
meaning – there was a power in it - that of a bonded group of women who shared their fantasy
together. Yet this extravaganza was fragile, and could be easily eradicated by just one person
present and not engaging in it. It was also temporal - it only lasted the time when the ritual took
place.
These collective ritual practices carried in themselves the potency of reversal. The heightened
emotional states, catching exaggerated laughter, following Bakhtin (1984), permitted the
relaxation of authority and social hierarchy in favour of the emergence of a temporal collective
counter-culture. Whereas the behaviour desired at work often took the forms of seriousness,
modesty, silence, individualism, achievements, competition and showing of respect towards
existing work hierarchies, the actual observed behaviour during the ritual time was distinguished
by playfulness, jokes, immodesty, loudness, sharing, showing off commitment to the group, noncompetition and levelling of work hierarchies. When in the ritual mode the participating women
effectively reversed the mode of everyday working routine. Regardless of their status they
engaged in playful behaviours centred on manipulation of cosmetics and of bodily appearance
that was intertwined with humour and jokes followed by waves of shared uproarious laughter.
They focused on their bodies and on the aesthetic elaborations upon them (Gordon, 2003). They
employed their bodily senses in exploring the cosmetics just distributed. During these acts of
exploration and enjoyment women often behaved frivolously. Through their shared bodily
experience expressed in often mutual grooming aimed at maximum beautification of all the
participating women, the studied women created a form of exaggerated femininity where the loud
amplified assertive communication, including uproarious laughter, joking relationship and mutual
grooming were used as mechanisms through which a levelling space was achieved where the
female collective became prominent.
Through the collective cosmetic rituals the researched women were transformed into an
empowered group of supportive allies. When the rituals stopped they carried in themselves the
memory of their mutual support and collective ritual agency. When they congregated again they
re-kindled that spirit. As one of my research participant said, each time after the cosmetic ritual in
sauna with her friends she was ´leaving in high spirits´ full of confidence because she had the
support of her girl-friends. In an image of her walking home she did not only hear her own
footsteps but she could hear the steps of her girl-friends as if walking alongside with her.
Conclusion
In this article I explored the female sociality that unfolded amongst the researched Slovak women
through the collective cosmetic rituals launched in the context of shopping for direct sales
cosmetics. This sociality was characterized by sharing of beautification practices within the
bonded collectives of women. The researched relationships of closeness were based on
cooperation through beauty. Women regularly displayed to each other their cooperative
21
intentions through a series of practices related to cosmetic resources, their purchase and use as
well as to circulation of beauty knowledge. The willingness to cooperate within the bonded
collective of women was regularly monitored through series of displays that enabled the women
to gain reliable information about who was committing to the group. This reliability was
guaranteed by costs of time, energy, money and of giving up individual advantage through beauty
that the participating women imposed on themselves. Sharing of beauty secrets, using of coded
language, displaying and manipulating the collectively bought cosmetics, showing and noticing
the attractiveness and levelling it within the bonded collectives were all practices applied by the
researched women to track down the extend and strength of their cooperating cosmetic coalition.
Not only did women displayed to each other. Through regular showing off of the collectively
purchased direct sales cosmetics they showed to their current sexual partners that they were
embedded within a bonded collective of women. I interpreted the observed phenomena in line
with the assumption that women cooperate through collective sharing of beautification resources
and information about attractiveness when they are part of boded reciprocating coalition. This
assumption is in contrast with the idea that beauty is the main aspect of female intrasexual
competition predicted by sexual selection theory and argued in many feminist writings.
The institutional structure that preceded and facilitated the emergence of the researched ritual
situations was provided by the way the direct sales cosmetic companies operate. In this
environment the business practices are accomplished through the pre-existing social relations and
networks. It is expected that representatives will exploit their personal networks and that due to
such exploitation financial distance will replace former closeness of personal relationships
(Biggart, 1989). The whole structure and ideology of the researched cosmetic companies as well
as the promoted practices of their representatives are aimed at encouraging profit. The selling
strategy the representatives are encouraged to follow is designed as a one-to-one interaction
between the representative and her customer. The representative is assisted to support the
shopping with the intention of making a gain. But the collected empirical data show behaviour
that contradicts these institutionalized expectations. Half of the representatives in my sample did
not make any profit at all selling cosmetics to the collectives of women for the cost price. The
other half of the representatives kept their profits permanently low through several counterstrategies. Far from fostering competitiveness among women through pursuing the highest
possible profits and through aiming at the exclusivity of the best possible purchase effectuated by
single women the observed beautification practices intensified the relationships among the
researched women. In the studied cultural setting the collective appropriation and sharing of
these practices became a priority. The observed prioritizing of the collective and of committing
to it represented the non-institutionalized counter-culture of opposition to and reversal of the
competitive individualistic gender practices incorporated in the institutionalized cultures of both
cosmetic companies. Once the shopping procedure became the property of the collectives of
women it assumed entirely different functions where displaying and monitoring of the group
commitment became prominent. Women in the researched coalitions instead of competing with
each other through attractiveness and beautification practices cooperated with each other
through collective rituals of reversal. By pooling the beauty knowledge they equalized their
chances to arrive at comparable levels of attractiveness within their bonded collective. Whereas
the institutional expectations of the researched cosmetic companies foster division and
competition among women the behaviour that emerged among the researched women
transgressed these institutional norms, rendering the observed ritual practices anti-normative. The
studied women collectively created a resistance culture to the competitive ideology of the
researched cosmetic companies. This resistance culture was conditional and episodic originating
in the ritual performance. It was not institutional and normative. It transgressed the norms of the
22
cosmetic companies and it only came together at those sites and in those instances where women
felt equal. This counter-culture was clearly observable in the ritual situations in which sharing,
bonding and becoming part of the collective were prominent and manifest among the
participating women. In these situations the status differences among the present women were
effaced, the elation, excitement and joy underpinned the collective dimension of the event. In
these ´moments out of time´ the instants of communitas (Turner, 1969) among the participating
women came to existence. At these particular moments the collectives of researched women,
bonded and intimately close, got in a position where it was impossible to refuse to share.
Research of the reciprocal cooperative relations within women’s coalitions is a new challenging
area that can yield interesting insights into female – female cooperation to inform both theory
and practice. Focusing on everyday aspects of collectivized female sociality centred on
beautification practices and their sharing can help us further understand deep social processes of
gender relations.
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Elena Fejdiova is a doctoral candidate at the School of Social Sciences, University of East
London. Her research focuses on the conditions and mechanism for cooperation amongst
women. She in particular investigates the female collective rituals that involve manipulation of
cosmetics and shared bodily practices. Further she interrogates the aspects of transgression and
reversal expressed in such rituals. Elena holds and MA in Ethnology and MA in German and
Italian languages from Comenius University Bratislava, Slovakia. Before she studied anthropology
Elena worked as a translator for the European Parliament.
Vontact details: Elena Fejdiova, School of Social Sciences, University of East London 4-6
University way, London E16 2RD
e-mail: [email protected]
26
Women of the 1990s Algerian Diaspora:
Transnational Belonging, Resilience and Political Engagement
Latefa Guemar
Abstract
This research explores the role of gender in shaping diasporas, not as a consequence of
migration, but rather as a complex process by which migrant women articulate new identities and
new social and political meanings about their relationship to one another, to co-nationals living
elsewhere and to an imagined ‘homeland’. The contemporary era of global transformations has
re-oriented academic debates on the construction of ethnic and racial boundaries, with an
emphasis on the growth of non-nation-based solidarities. This debate has helped to identify the
economic and political removal of national borders, as well as the growth of transnational cultural
constructions. However, despite this, social constructionists suggest that the concept of diaspora
continues to privilege the notion of ethnicity or nationality as the point of origin in the
construction of migrant solidarity; they argue that this perspective fails to explain trans-ethnic
commonalities and overlooks the differences of social class and gender. This research
interrogates this contention by investigating the motivation behind the emigration of highly
skilled Algerian women during the 1990s, taking into account the increased levels of violence in
Algeria at the time. It looks at the agendas and expectations of this particular set of migrants, and
the extent to which they feel they belong to a diaspora. Their political engagement takes a variety
of specific forms, but certain modes of discourse and manifestations of a diasporic social
consciousness are common to the self-presentation of the women concerned. In order to
investigate the networks of these highly skilled Algerian women living abroad I used Social
Networking Websites Analysis, mainly analysing their Facebook discourse; Respondent-Driven
Sampling (RDS) to sample and recruit participants; and narrative in-depth interviews to better
understand the participants’ connections and sense of solidarity with each other and with other
Algerian diasporic networks.
Key words: Diasporas, Gender, Identity, Algeria
27
I-Introduction
According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), by 2015 the number of
displaced people worldwide had reached 244 million, which equates to approximately three
percent of the world’s population (IOM, 2015). In addition, there are an estimated 19 million
refugees, and 25 million people around the world who have been internally displaced, mainly as a
result of conflict. Around 50 percent of these are women and children (UNHCR, 2016). The
phenomenon of migration, therefore, not only concerns every country it touches, but also
challenges the very notion of the nation-state and its constructed borders, as shown by the recent
‘refugee crisis’ at the European Union’s external border, for example in the migrant camps in
Calais and Lesbos. Indeed, between January and May 2016, an estimated 2,443 migrants have
drowned in the Mediterranean in the attempt to reach what has become known as ‘Fortress
Europe’ (IOM, 2016).
Although the recent attention focused on migration gives it the appearance of a specifically
modern phenomenon, it has always been a feature of the world stage, a manifestation of wide
disparities in socio-economic circumstances, and has long been regarded as a potential means of
improving life or human security. However, during the post-Cold War and post-9/11 periods,
and more recently, the Syrian civil war, migration has assumed new dimensions and patterns.
Analysts and academics from different disciplines suggest that various contemporary changes
have caused the mass exodus of populations, re-shaping patterns of population movements (Van
Hear, 1998). Technological transformations and the emergence of ethnic, religious and nationalist
conflicts have resulted in national and worldwide instabilities, particularly in the Global South,
furthering population displacement (Human Development Report, 2009). Recently, another force
– global warming – has generated a new wave of forcibly displaced populations. Added to this,
the globalisation of the world market has cemented pathways that encourage the movement of
skilled workers and professionals from developing countries to fill gaps in the labour markets of
more developed countries (Castles and Miller, 2009). Despite the intentions of policy-makers in
the receiving countries, a large proportion of these ‘guest-workers’ do not return after ending
their work contracts, even if their overstay is deemed illegal, placing them in a state of economic
insecurity and social discrimination. Children, who have either arrived as dependents or are born
in the receiving country, are often cast into a confusing situation: even though they may feel
more at home there, they frequently continue to experience the same discrimination as their
parents (Weiner, 1996).
On the one hand, globalisation creates the idea that people will gain from migrating to richer and
more secure countries, increasing the pressures to do so, while on the other it propagates
negative perceptions and fears in the receiving countries concerning the political, social and
security consequences of migration (Bakewell, 2008). The dominant political and media
discourses on migration, and hence public opinion, in the receiving countries are increasingly
subject to political manipulation, particularly around fears such as loss of national identity
(Papademetriou, 2012). Despite the declaration by the US, the dominant global power at the end
of the Cold War, of a ‘new world order’ promising peace and plenty, it displayed extreme
incompetence in managing the social issues that resulted from the re-composition of new states,
the creation of new borders and the redefinition of people’s identities (Chomsky, 2001). Noam
Chomsky argues that the problems of identity recognition and negotiation in this new global
context increased ethnocentrism and racism in most western countries, and this has been
reinforced by the rise of Islamophobia after 9/11 (Carr, 2016). The practices of contemporary
28
globalisation have thus encouraged the rise of racism alongside an increase in the claims of
indigenous ethnicities (Castles and Miller, 2009; Salomos and Wrench, 1993). Translated into
policies and social practices, these claims not only result in keeping people excluded in the Global
South, but also deepen the disparities suffered by minorities living in western countries (or the
Global North). The rise in nationalism and hostility towards migrants has fuelled the popularity
of right-wing ideologues within many European societies (Skenderovic, 2007). According to
James Carr (2016, p.2), the so-called ‘war on terror’ initiated after 9/11 has created an ‘antiMuslim racism’ that has exacerbated an “Islamophobia in western public opinion that spans
centuries”. Endowed with multiple commitments to various places, without being totally
disconnected from their homelands, the emergence of these transnational populations attracted
academic and policy interest during the last quarter of the 20th century, emphasizing the
development of what is called a “diasporic consciousness” (Van Hear, 1998: 4). Cohen has put
forward seven criteria or attributes which identify a group as a Diaspora: The action of dispersal
and scattering; the collective trauma behind the scattering; the group’s cultural flowering within a
new environment; the difficulty of integration in this environment; the feeling of belonging to a
particular community; the transcendence of national borders; and finally the cultivation of the
idea of return. More recently, Peggy Levitt and Nadya Jaworsky (2007) have tracked the changes
in the scholarly study of migration which ultimately show that contemporary migrants, supported
by new technologies and social networking websites, always maintain some kind of relationship
with their country of birth. As a result, new kinds of migrants are appearing, comprising those
whose networks, activities and patterns of life encompass both their host societies and their
countries of origin. Unexpectedly, this research has shifted towards Algeria, not only as a
geographical place from which the participants mentioned in this article migrated following a
contemporary conflict, but also as a “locus of identification that is broken, war-torn, unfamiliar
and irrevocably lost”. This has been particularly so for women, as Hiddleston (2006: p.1)
describes in Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria. Diaspora is per se political, a network of solidarities
formed between groups of migrants to keep the memory of “home” alive. As a consequence,
Diaspora has become, de facto, gendered.
I-1 Significance, motivation and aims of the research
The importance of this research rests on two facts. Firstly, female migrants have frequently been
neglected by researchers and policy-makers, or have been represented in a stereotypical manner
as passive dependents, and as “victims and needy” (Morokvasic, 1984). Secondly, although there
is a substantial body of literature on Algerian migrants in France due to the importance of the
Maghrebi/North African migration there in terms of its size and social significance (Sayad,
2007), there has been very little research into the category of Algerian women who migrated to
countries other than France during the internal conflict of the 1990s. For example, Collyer
(2004, 2006, 2008) is one of the few researchers to have carried out significant research on
Algerians in the UK. Thus, by placing Algerian women who fled the traumatic internal conflict of
the 1990s at the centre of an investigation into diasporic consciousness, this research breaks new
ground.
It has been argued that feelings of belonging to a cohesive diaspora are relatively weak among
Algerian migrants because of the significant political, linguistic and other differences within the
Algerian community, especially between those who migrated (specifically to France) during the
1960s and 1970s and those who arrived in the 1990s (Sayad, 2004; Begag, 2002). The highly
skilled and generally politically involved Algerians forced out of the country during the 1990s
29
contrasted greatly with the rural or low-skilled men and their spouses, daughters or dependents
associated with earlier migration flows (Collyer, 2006). It could be argued, however, that in fact
several Algerian diasporic networks have been created in different times and spaces, and under
different circumstances. Also, as Collyer (2008, p.694) points out, “[t]he Algerian diaspora has
always been a focal point for political innovation and contestation. For the first years of Algerian
independence, the ruling regime therefore paid great attention to developments in France and
developed sophisticated surveillance methods” to track its nationals living abroad.
However, it is true that the experience of women who migrated during and after the 1990s differs
from that of previous waves of Algerian migration, and as a consequence it has often been
associated with forms of resistance and solidarity. This can be illustrated by the case of Fatiha and
Maamoura, two survivors of the so-called ‘Hassi Messouad event’. On 13 July 2001 at Hassi
Messaoud, a southern Algerian city centred around the production of oil, a group of local men
attacked, abused and raped more than a hundred women (Kaci, 2010). They were incited by a
local imam, who issued a call to ‘cleanse’ the city of ‘impure women’ (Lezzar, 2006). The majority
of these women were divorced, widowed or single mothers who had been internally displaced
from other parts of Algeria and had come to the city to look for work and to escape the harsh
patriarchal rules they were forced to submit to in their own communities due to their social status
(Lamarene-Djerbal, 2006). In the eyes of their aggressors, however, they were all ‘prostitutes’ and
a threat to the community (Kaci, 2010). Although the majority of these women were silenced and
constrained from speaking out, Fatiha and Maamoura managed to leave the country. Once in
France they met Nadia Kaci, an Algerian artist and writer who had left Algeria in the 1990s. Kaci
recorded their testimonies and published a book, Left for Dead: The Lynching of Women in Hassi
Messaoud (Kaci, 2010). This gives a detailed account of the horrors that occurred during the night
of the attack, and also describes the juridical and social context of the event, including an
exposition of the status of women in Algeria (Lezzar, 2006).
II-Beyond ethnicity: Diaspora as a gendered device and political engagement
Looking beyond its particular emphasis on Algerian women, but central to it, this article also aims
to discuss the proposition that “diasporic experiences are always gendered” (Clifford, 1994: 313).
Indeed, the etymology of the word “Diaspora” always refers to the migrant's social condition,
which is constructed from multifaceted identities, relating their past, to their current
circumstances, as well as to their future (Brah, 1996; Anthias, 1998; Soysal, 2000). I know from
my own experience that migration is a non-linear journey, which is always marked by the
migrant’s resistance to the process of forgetting “home” when negotiating his or her belonging to
the new host societies. This process is not without experiencing an on-going duality between
“self” and others’ perception of “self”. The importance of gender in this process has been fully
acknowledged by feminist scholars such as Yuval-Davis (2000), who points out that women in
general are given the role of transmitting and reproducing the community by assuring the
continuity of its traditions and languages. This “burden of ethno-cultural continuity” (YuvalDavis, 1999: p.196) dictates women’s behaviour since they are the makers of their communities
(Timmerman 2000). In order to link this argument with the establishment of a Diaspora
consciousness among migrants in multicultural and multi-ethnic societies, it is crucial to revisit
Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), which Anthias (1998) presents as one of the turning
points in the theoretical arguments highlighting the importance of Diaspora as a social condition.
Gilroy paved the way for other writers on transnational migration, displacement and re30
settlement to consider diaspora as a heuristic device to better understand migrants’ relationship to
“others”, to their host country and to their homeland (cf. Vertovec, 1996). Prior to Gilroy, Stuart
Hall’s work, by emphasizing the importance of adjusting the approach to race and cultural
identity, also had a significant influence on diaspora studies (Hall, 1990). Hall’s work was a
significant improvement on the traditional approach to ethnic and national boundaries, which
placed the first within fixed territorial borders and the second within political limits. According to
Anthias (1998), his influence helped to open up the concept of Diaspora to other groups, and
forged a pathway for constructionist critics of the classic notion of Diaspora, permitting the
addition of social class and gender as essential features.
The foremost argument this article investigates is that feelings of belonging to a cohesive
Algerian Diaspora are relatively weak because of the significant political, linguistic and other
differences within the Algerian community abroad, but mainly among those who migrated to
France before or during the 1970s (Begag, 2002). The highly skilled and generally politically
involved Algerians forced out of the country during the 1990s, not necessarily to France,
contrasted greatly with the rural, mainly low-skilled male migrants and their spouses and
dependants associated with earlier migration flows (Collyer, 2006). Algerians in France, including
the Pieds-Noirs, the Jews and the Harkis, who left Algeria in 1962 at the time of independence,
tended to portray themselves as exiled individuals rather than as belonging to a cohesive Algerian
Diaspora. It is important to stress the fact that both exile and diaspora involve the displacement
of people who are struggling to proclaim their identity with their original environment (Sullivan,
2001). The difference between the diasporic condition and exile is that the concept of exile
assumes coherent and well-defined certainties about the host countries and original homelands,
whereas the concept of Diaspora often suggests a challenge to the notions of home, borders and
nation-states. Safran (2005) suggests that the continued commitment to “home” through the
development of a Diaspora consciousness and the idea of restitution of what has been lost only
occurs as a result of the violence and cruelty that forced the displacement of a particular group.
Drawing on these arguments regarding the Algerian diaspora, as well as on the debate around the
different definitions cited earlier as part of the social constructionist discourse on Diaspora, this
study intentionally attempts to work out a definition of Diaspora that will best reflect the
experience of the particular set of migrants under investigation. Regardless of where they now
reside or their legal status in their host countries, Algerian women who left the country due to the
increase in violence during the 1990s, struggle with the feeling of not being accepted within their
new societies, including professionally, and share a common, strong sense of a desired Algeria,
with or without a wish to return to it as a particular physical place
Conventional definitions of feminism often state that the term “woman” is, in itself, a necessary
and valid category as all women – by virtue of their gender – share the same set of experiences,
regardless of their status as migrants. It is further argued that these similar experiences are not
only based on women’s common biological traits, but also on the social and political oppression
they suffer, making “woman” a socially and politically constructed category. Nevertheless, saying
that all women experience social and political oppression does not mean that all women share the
same experience of oppression. The notion of sisterhood, of women coming together, therefore,
should take the form of political solidarity in the fight against oppression and discrimination.
However, as hooks (1986: p.127) explains, “some feminists now seem to feel that unity between
women is impossible given our differences”. The social contexts in which women live and
struggle differ widely from one society to another across the world. Djebar (2012, 2002) recounts
that, under the French occupation, Algerian women created networks of solidarity, despite their
31
differences. At the time, Algerian women had to fight two distinct enemies, the colonizer and the
indigenous patriarchy, and in the process they created two distinct strategies of resistance and
forms of solidarity. Later, during the Black Decade, women were faced not only with patriarchal
rules but also with radical political Islam, which is nothing less than an even more extreme form
of patriarchy. Highly skilled Algerian women who were forced into exile during this period
consequently developed a sense of self-awareness that has enabled them to create an efficient
network in order to overcome their divisions and thus ease the pain of exile. This research,
therefore, helps verify feminist and social constructionist arguments by exploring these networks
and the experiences of highly skilled (as a social class) Algerian women (as a gender) who
migrated following the traumatic Black Decade.
III- Violence against women and the feminization of Algerian migration during the 1990s
It often seems that not only are women required to bear the burden of representing their own
communities’ cultural and religious values, they are also expected to act as the embodied carriers
of the traditions and symbols of the community as a whole, specifically by accepting patriarchal
laws and practices (Yuval-Davis, 1997). Women who dare to challenge or violate the codes of
conduct imposed by the patriarchal authority can be subjected to retaliatory abuse, ongoing ill
treatment, and are often ostracized (Yuval-Davis, 1997). Restrictions on women are often
dictated by family codes which reflect the assumption that giving “too much” freedom to women
– for example, by allowing their direct involvement in the public sphere – will eventually lead to
disorder, threatening social stability and cultural cohesion, as well as undermining the family.
Moghadam (1994a: p.14), in her investigation into the gender dynamics of political movements in
different countries, explains that religiosity, “revolution and nationalism” are all “gendered
processes”, and that in the ideology of nationalism in the Third World, the woman becomes a
symbol of collective liberation and a role model for the new nationalist patriarchal community.
For example, Mahfoudh Benoune (1999: p.23) considers the participation of Algerian women in
the armed liberation struggle, following which, despite their full participation, their status was
quickly reshaped “by the urgent needs of the male to restore Islam as the religion of the state,
Arabic as the unique language and themselves as sovereigns of the family”. Women who
opposed this restoration were accused of being disloyal to the nation and to Islam, and were
“sent back to their private spheres” (Hajdukowski-Ahmed, 2008: p.42). During the political and
economic crisis of the 1980s that led to the rise of Islamic movements, unveiled women and
their access to the public sphere were blamed for the situation (Benoune 1999). In 1990,
following the victory of the Algerian Islamist Party (FIS) in local elections, women suffered
verbal intimidation, harassment and often physical attacks in the street – acid was thrown at the
legs of women who were accused of dressing “indecently” (Salhi 2004).
According to Karima Bennoun (2013), up to 71,500 university graduates, men and women, fled
Algeria between 1992 and 1996 alone, a brain-drain with significant consequences. Alaoui (2011)
indicates that Algeria may have lost considerable economic wealth during the conflict; a
significant portion of this loss was the result of the assassination and forced dispersal of such a
large number of highly qualified men and women, intellectuals and professionals who constituted
the majority of the Algerian – mainly left-wing – middle class. The Algerian official press and
NGOs claim that, between 1997 and 2005, more than 2,000 women were kidnapped, violated
and, in the majority of cases, assassinated by terrorists. Nevertheless, the true number of women
32
victims on both sides greatly exceeds these official figures (Elkarama, 2008), which may not
include all the gender-based violence committed by groups other than the Islamic Salvation Army
(AIS) or Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA). Women were victims of the harassment,
physical violence and repression carried out not only by various radical Islamist groups, but also
by different state security bodies, including police and gendarmes. Although rape, violence and
the assassination of women committed by the Islamist armed groups have been widely
acknowledged by several NGOs and well documented in the work of Bennoun (2013) (Your
Fatwa Does not Apply Here), there has been little investigation into the experiences of women who
suffered at the hands of gendarmes and other state officials in 1990s Algeria (Souadia 2008).
Women, then, faced several disparate enemies against whom they had to develop strategies of
resistance.
To put this in context, the victory of the Algerian Islamic Party (FIS) in the first round of the
general elections in December 1991 was perceived as a threat against democracy, and before the
second round took place on 11 January 1992, the Algerian regime decided to cancel the
democratic process and declared a state of emergency. Opinions among the Algerian elite was
divided between “eradicators”, those who called for the cancellation of the elections and the
protection of the army, and the “dialoguistes”, who were in favour of continuing the democratic
process and engaging in a dialogue with the Islamic party, predicting the violence that followed
the cancellation of the elections (Souadia, 2008: p.271). It is important to mention that a great
number of Algerian women were not necessarily supportive of the cancellation and were in
favour of the continuation of the democratic process, which they believed might implement a
state governed by the rule of law and thus give women a better opportunity to fully exercise their
citizenship rights (Moghadam, 1994a). They believed that the call to discontinue the democratic
process was perhaps more to do with the desire to ensure the continuity of the traditional
structures of power that enforced the establishment of the discriminatory Family Code. The
conflict ended in a decade of horror, commonly known as the “Black Decade” or the “Algerian
Dirty War” (Chomsky, 1999).
Alaoui (2011) points out that the rise in violence, which continued in post-conflict Algeria,
increased the rate of the feminization of migration from about 36 percent in 1982 to 51 percent
today (NAQD 2011). These women fled the persecution of fundamentalists, their own families
and communities, and in some cases, the Algerian security services. According to Ait Zai (2011:
p10), “[t]he family law inspired [by] pure Islamic tradition is the main obstacle to the
emancipation of women. It even generates violence towards women as men’s and women’s
relationships are based on subordination and submission”, and she claims“[o]ver 10,000 women
have been raped and killed during the black decade”Consequently, women completely lost any
hope of change, since the Algerian authorities were unable to protect them. Worse still, after the
bloody conflict, the amnesty laws and the Law of Rahma (clemency law) were negotiated with the
former terrorists. So more and more educated women became convinced that the situation was
reverting and that, once again, they would have to pay the price, particularly as it became clear
that the amnesties would be negotiated at their expense. The law of reconciliation rehabilitated
the terrorists, who agreed to lay down their arms, without giving their victims justice, including
their many women victims. In addition, although in 1996, at the peak of the conflict, the Algerian
government ratified the international Convention on Elimination of Discrimination against
Women (CEDAW), it tabled significant reservations to some of the clauses. As one participant to
this study claimed: “The promises made to women have not been kept. We have been betrayed. We lost”. As a
result, many of educated women became increasingly aware that the Algerian government had
33
sacrificed women in order to pacify the Islamic fundamentalist opposition, and they began to see
no other option than to leave the country for a safer harbor.
If the main assumption of this study is the non-existence of solidarity among Algerians, I would
like to present one of the many counter-examples of Algerian women acting in solidarity. On 13
July 2001 in Hassi Messoud, south Algeria, more than 100 women were attacked and physically
abused by a group of men. These attacks were motivated by the call from a fundamentalist imam
to “clean” the city of “impure women” (Lezzar, 2006). Two women managed to flee the horror.
These women met up with Nadia Kaci, an Algerian artist and writer who had herself left Algeria
for France in the 1990s. Kaci recorded their testimonies, and in February 2010, published a book,
Left for Dead: The Lynching of Women in Hassi Messaoud (Kaci 2010).
IV-Methodology
My initial concern when designing this research was to offer evidence of the high numbers of
highly skilled, professional women who fled Algeria during the Black Decade – a female brain
drain that was ignored and even denied by the Algerian rulers. Based on my observations and
experience, there appeared to be a surprising lack of solidarity and cohesion amongst these
women, who were now living abroad. Nevertheless, I was motivated to explore whether the
networks these women engage in act, or could act, as agents of women’s development in both
home and receiving countries, and the political and policy implications of such activities. In order
for this to be the case, the women involved in these networks need to be motivated by a sense of
solidarity and political mobilisation; above all, they need to display a diasporic consciousness.
This raised questions concerning the women’s wellbeing and adaptation to their new
environments, whether they nurtured the idea of returning home, and their contribution to the
debate around national reconciliation and how to rebuild society in a post-conflict situation. The
literature on transnationalism and diaspora contends that the dream of return is nearly always just
that, a dream, and it rarely occurs in practice. Nevertheless, as this ‘myth of return’ still retains a
strong emotional attraction and generates a sense of nostalgia among many Algerian migrants, I
was motivated to discover whether, and how, these women mobilise and engage with each other
as a group in order to create positive changes both for themselves in their new environments and
for their peers in Algeria. This motivation is essentially what gives this research its feminist
underpinning. Consequently, the methodology is informed by the body of feminist theoretical
literature on research into women’s narratives, lives and experiences (Maynard and Purvis, 1994;
Ramazanoglu, 1992; Hemmings, 2011; Hesse-Biber, 2013).
V-Methods of sampling the network
Feminist research in general should be conducted by and for women, and has always been related
to women’s struggles against oppression and violence against women. I argue that feminist
research should also aim to enhance women’s wellbeing and happiness in the society where they
have chosen to live. As Hesse-Biber (2013) shows, feminist values and beliefs, as well as critiques
of the positivist concepts and methodologies that have previously overlooked gender, are the
foundation of any research framed by feminist theories. Feminist research focuses on the
meanings that women give to their lives and the world around them; this is particularly important
to bear in mind when choosing participants and analysing the data collected during fieldwork.
34
Feminist research, moreover, is characterised by its interdisciplinary nature and this gives it the
freedom to use different methods of interpreting data, methods that must be constantly redefined in light of the researcher’s concern to provide solutions to the problems posed by the
main questions. This has meant that I have been able to explore different ideas and choose the
tools that will best help me to answer my initial questions on whether, and how, the group of
women I have been investigating create transnational networks, mobilise themselves collectively
and thus develop a diasporic consciousness. Overall, the main argument of feminist researchers is
that the experience of women is ontologically fractured and complex as they do not all share one
unique and substantial experience during their life journey.
There is an equal concern that universalising analyses risk presenting women’s oppression as the
sole definition of womanhood. According to such a viewpoint, migrant women are generally
deemed to lack power or agency. This is particularly the case with women who migrate from
South to North, or who come from the so-called ‘patriarchal belt’ (Caldwell, 1982) – as do the
subjects of this research. By contrast, drawing on the work of Wise and Stanley (1983), this
investigation is based on the premise that oppression should be seen as an extremely complex
process, but one in which women are not totally powerless; they often use their strength and
internal resources to resist injustice and inequality. Feminist refugee scholars have shifted the
discourse from “traumatised and needy women” to women who are also “resilient and
resourceful” (Loughry, 2008, p.167). This literature, however, is often ignored, and the discourse
on exiled women as traumatised, needy and lacking agency is often the predominant one,
particularly when it comes to informing international humanitarian programmes. Maryanne
Loughry (2008, p.169) argues that although the literature exists, the resilience narrative is not
predominant because research is conducted by scholars who come from a “variety of areas and
academic disciplines that often do not communicate easily with each other”.
Scientific knowledge is traditionally defined by the fact that evidence must be both truthful and
credible. Objectivity, therefore, remains the core tenet of the dominant scientific model, which is
“mainly based upon the empiricist approach known as ‘positivism’” (Bryman, 1988; Phillips,
1977). However, this epistemology depends on the position of the social scientist within the
research itself and within the group under investigation. The positivists believe that there is a
‘reality’ out there that the investigator has to discover by developing techniques and statistical
instruments that will gradually uncover it. The concept of objectivity is itself grounded on two
principal criteria: first, any knowledge claim must also be proven by others in the field, using
established and observable facts; secondly, a social scientist’s values, emotions and political
beliefs should not influence the knowledge claims he/she makes. In other words, to ensure
objectivity when testing a hypothesis, the researcher must systematically follow a common
method in order to exclude bias and ensure the neutrality of the research process and data
analysis.
However, it is well established that there is no such thing as neutrality in life. So, in contrast to
the objectivist and positivist arguments, feminist researchers encourage the development of a
wide range of innovative methodological approaches, such as personal observation, discussions
with individuals, and attending gatherings and other unplanned events – in a word, taking an
35
‘emic approach’.1 For example, feminist researchers do not necessarily encourage the use of
coding to break down data into different sections and themes (Hesser-Biber, 2013). The reason is
that if the researcher is required to fit the data into given themes it inhibits the emergence of
valuable questions that were not foreseen in the initial theoretical outline of the research. This
research has proven the value of this argument.
This approach is not exclusively feminist and “there are other intellectual trends in social sciences
that have stimulated this interest” such as those promoted by the social constructionists and
post-modernists (Hesser-Biber, 2013). Their work has helped reveal the white, male bias of many
of the dominant scientific explanations of social life, proposing instead that human behaviour is
socially constructed and that reality is fashioned in interaction (Campbell, 1994; Harding, 1993).
This bias indicates that political ideology has indeed influenced research findings, despite the
claims to objectivity. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that the hypothesis-testing method
is not and cannot be ‘value-free’, and so cannot be ‘objective’ in the strict empirical sense. Several
philosophers of science – such as Kuhn (1977) and Winch (2007) – have also argued that
observation is always mediated by a prior understanding of how the world interconnects. The
formulation of any research question, as well as the process of research itself, including the
method of empirical observation, takes place within an overall theoretical framework. It is not
possible for it to be otherwise, because this is what gives meanings to the process:
We do not deploy seeing in the activities of observation with a mind purged of all
its contents; just the opposite is true, we need to know what sort of thing we are
looking for before we can find anything to which we could give a name. We
come, in fact, to the activities of observation with minds crammed full of ideas.
(Steedman 1992, p.54)
Which particular models for understanding and interpreting data are dominant at any given time
is determined by what theories are available and, crucially, which of these theories is preferred
above others. In this sense, the process of empirical observation cannot be neutral as it is
inevitably affected by the researcher’s theoretical choices and personal commitments, which in
turn are influenced by the commitments of the wider scientific community in which they are
situated. Political ideas may be an important factor in determining which theories are preferred in
the scientific community, and may play a role in shaping the research process (Ramazanoglu,
1992; Herman, 1992).
It is important to note, however, that emotions can provide a valuable source of knowledge. The
analysis of emotional response affecting the researcher during both fieldwork and data analysis
often generates important insights into the dynamics of the group under investigation (Kleinman
and Copp, 1993; Kirkwood, 1993). Whether these emotions are acknowledged and analysed or
not, all researchers are affected by them at some time in the course of their studies. Historically,
the notion of empiricist objectivity, so fundamental to the positivist approach, has been highly
influential in the development of ideas in the field of the social sciences.
1
The ‘emic approach’ investigates how people think and perceive the world, and their rules of behaviour, as
opposed to the ‘etic (scientist-oriented) approach’, which shifts the focus from local observations and interpretations
to the observations of the ‘impartial’ anthropologist.
36
V-1 Sampling the network
To say that feminist researchers use specific methods to conduct research is incorrect: although
feminist theorists initially criticised quantitative methods, particularly surveys and questionnaires,
considering them to be ‘masculinist’, they later recognised the necessity to adapt whichever
existing research tools would most benefit their investigation. If I was to reveal the existence of a
network of Algerian highly skilled women migrants, my first challenge was to discover where
exactly they had fled during and in the aftermath of the Black Decade. As there is no known
methodology to study diaspora, I decided to experiment with Douglas Heckathorn’s (1997, 2011)
innovative research method, Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS), which he used to study the
spread of HIV within a specific group of people. I found the method particularly interesting, and
after exchanging emails with Professor Heckathorn regarding the possibility of adapting his
method to investigate the existence of an Algerian women’s diaspora, I resolved to use it to at
least sample my network.
RDS is a method that combines ‘egocentric’ and ‘snowball’ sampling techniques based on referral
from individuals to other people they are connected to (Heckathorn 2007). These individuals in
turn refer more people. The first points of the network – in this case, myself and other persons I
am well connected to – are called ‘seeds’. These seeds are dispersed geographically, thus
resembling the original Greek meaning of the word ‘diaspora’ – the dispersion or scattering of
seeds. Seeds then recruit ‘nodes’, to whom they are connected by ‘ties’, a relationship defined by
specific criteria. As part of the initial network, I web-recruited six seeds (two male and four
female) through Facebook, blogs and other personal networks, who were geographically
dispersed in Algeria, France, Canada, the UK, Spain and the US. The seeds were selected to
reflect the geographical dispersal of Algerians during the 1990s. These seeds went on to recruit
nodes using a web-based process, sending a survey to at least one other person (three or more is
the ideal).
This recruitment should be repeated six times or more – this is called the “six waves of
recruitment”; regardless of whether or not the global size of the network is known,
mathematicians consider reaching six waves reasonably representative of a network (Heckathorn,
1997). The second observation upon which RDS is based is that information gathered during the
sampling process, using a questionnaire, can provide the means for making extrapolations about
the underlying network structure (Bearman et al., 2004). It was at this point that my input as a
feminist researcher was crucial, as the sampling process is usually driven by the assumption that
surveys and questionnaires are tools with which to measure objective social facts through a
supposedly detached and value-free form of data collection (Maynard 1994). To remedy this bias,
I designed the survey based on a semi-structured questionnaire, which I explain later in this
section.
The first page of the survey sent to the respondents gave a brief description of myself, my
personal status and my professional and academic background, as well as the aims of the
research. It also explained the process of recruitment and assured the participants of the strict
confidentiality of the process. The survey was accessible online for nine months, starting from
spring 2013. The basic element of analysis for RDS-SN was the first ‘recruitment’. Each
participant recruited had to have the same characteristic of being an Algerian professional woman
who had migrated from Algeria during the 1990s. While the recruitment of ‘strangers’ is possible
37
and often inevitable, respondents were encouraged to recruit friends, current or former
colleagues, or members of their professional associations.
Survey and questionnaire design
The survey’s design was based on a semi-structured, open-ended questionnaire, available in three
languages, English, French and Arabic, with 43 questions. Together with the interview questions,
the questionnaire was framed to explore the definition of what constitutes a diaspora, based on
the findings of the literature review conducted at the outset of the research . It included the
circumstances of the participant’s departure from Algeria, their life abroad, whether or not they
belong to an Algerian network, and whether or not they intend to return to Algeria. There was
also a set of questions on participants’ use of the internet to connect with each other and with
Algeria, and to remain informed on Algerian affairs. The majority of the questions gave
participants the option to choose more than one answer and the space to add comments. The in
VI-Data analysis
The purpose of this section is to present and analyze the data from the survey, supported by
quotations from the interviews. The analysis is broken down into five subsections: the
characteristics of the participants; the circumstances under which they left Algeria; their life
experience(s) abroad; their negotiation of new identities and their perceptions of belonging to a
female Algerian Diaspora; and the barriers women face to returning to Algeria.
VI.1 Characteristics of the participants
Nearly half (45 percent) of the research participants left Algeria between the ages of 25 and 35,
constituting the majority of the research participants, with a further 35 percent under 25. Those
aged between 36 and 40 constituted only 13 percent. Five respondents were aged over 45, one of
whom was in her sixties. Around a third (42 percent) left Algeria as university students (first or
second degrees), meaning they had student visas. Only 12 percent said they left as labour
migrants, nine percent as refugees, three percent as undocumented migrants, and a further nine
percent who did not wish to say.
It has been argued that the feminization of highly skilled Algerian women only increased after
1999, a fact that was well illustrated in the survey. Indeed, more than a half (53 percent) of the
respondents left after 2000. Around a third (38 percent) left between 1996 and 2000, and only 18
percent left between 1990 and 1995. Nine of the participants declared they left before 1990 but
could not go back to Algeria because of the instability and violence.
The women who participated in the research held a variety of qualifications from educational
institutions ranging from universities to national high schools. Around a third left Algeria holding
a first degree or a Masters in humanities, 18 percent held Masters degrees in science and
technology, and nearly seven percent had a PhD in science and technology. Five percent were
medical practitioners, two percent of whom left as specialist doctors who had been working in
teaching hospitals in Algiers. Nearly half (43 percent) were willing to give more details about their
38
qualifications and professions, which varied from journalism, law and architecture to private
medicine, dentistry and pharmacy.
The participants had migrated to a wide range of countries. The largest group, nearly a third, had
settled in France, 20 percent in the UK, 21 percent in Canada, 18 percent in Spain and seven
percent in the US. Four participants responded from Belgium, two each from Dubai, Italy and
Switzerland, and one each from Australia, Qatar, Germany, Turkey and Tunisia. This shows the
efficiency of the RDS method in reaching those who are geographically isolated but still
connected to friends or perhaps former colleagues. Two said that their first destination was
France, but they then moved to the US and Qatar, respectively; one first left for Dubai then went
to the US; one migrated to East Africa, then moved to Canada; and one left for the Canary Isles
and then went on to Spain. Two left for France but had returned to Algeria at the time of
completing the survey. In addition, only two participants revealed they wear the hijab, and only
one revealed her sexual orientation as a lesbian.
VI.2 Circumstances of leaving Algeria
Different circumstances forced Algerian women to take the decision to migrate during the 1990s,
although these circumstances did not make all of them refugees in their host countries, as
understood by the 1951 Refugee Convention and its protocols:
Let me make it clear to you. When I left Algeria in June 1994, I was in a bad relationship
with [my husband]. At a party attended by family and friends a few months ago, he
announced that he wanted to repudiate [divorce] me; it was such a humiliation for me. I
went to seek help everywhere, visited all our friends and his family, but they all took his
side. When we received a death threat in a letter from the GIA, and because I am halfAlgerian, half-French, I went to the French consulate to organize our departure. He
refused to leave with us. I took my children [to France] and left him in Algiers; he was
assassinated five months later.
Maya, who worked as a sub-editor for the same newspaper as her murdered husband, explicitly
stated that her decision to leave was based first on the shock and humiliation she felt when her
husband declared publicly that he wanted to divorce her without informing her first. Under the
Algerian Family Code, Maya would have to stay in the family home until the divorce process
ended, and this could take between three months and two years. But, in any case, Maya, as many
Algerian women in her situation, had nowhere else to go. In Algerian culture, it is very common
for family house to be registered in the name of the husband, even though both husband and
wife may have contributed towards buying it. Maya explained in the interview that when she went
to SOS Women in Distress to seek help, she was told that as she was half-French, she was better
off leaving the country, especially as terrorism was at its peak at the time. At this point, Maya was
looking for feminist solidarity as a woman who was experiencing discrimination as a result of the
Family Code, which was strongly condemned both by SOS Women in Distress itself and by the
left-wing milieu she and her husband frequented. Judging from her quotation, she was
disappointed by this lack of solidarity and believed that the cause was the fact that she was seen
as a ”foreigner”, rather than a woman, who could use the opportunity of holding a French
passport to leave the country.
39
When the GIA sent the death threat to her and her husband, Maya even expressed solidarity with
him and offered him the chance to leave the country with her. During the interview, Maya
expressed sadness that her husband considered her solidarity as an offence to his Algerian male
pride. After he repudiated her, he was too proud to accept her offer and was assassinated six
months after she and their children left. As she explained, in tears, ‘we never divorced in the end,
but he is not here any more’.
Maya’s story exposes the extent to which the decision to leave a country in a time of war and
conflict is gendered. This particular story also reveals the relationship between Algerian feminism,
culture and the experiences of women such as Maya, who happen to be from a minority group.
The following quotation is from an interview conducted with Louisa who now lives in the US:
For us it was going or dying. You go, you don’t know where; you meet other people,
different people. And at some point, you lose your self, you don’t know where you are
anymore. It is a symbolic death, because you are out of your realm. Call it hell or heaven,
but for me, it was the after-death.
Louisa and her husband were both journalists in Algeria. Louisa explained how difficult it was to
obtain visas from any Western country. Algeria was indeed isolated in its war against terrorism.
When an opportunity to leave the country was presented to Louisa’s husband, even their
combined salary was not enough to afford the flights Louisa sold all her jewellery to buy her
husband a ticket and to enable him “to find a decent place to stay there”, while she remained in
Algeria with her baby for a further few months. In the meantime, she continued to work and
provide for herself and her child despite being personally persecuted by the GIA. Terrorism in
Algeria at the time was another opportunity to express violence and hatred towards, and exert
more control over, women.
It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss all the participants’ experiences, which are unique
in content but similar in context: moving between their struggle in the private and the public
sphere in 1990s Algeria. It is undeniable that the participants in this study all revealed a certain
degree of post-traumatic stress due to the context in which their departure occurred, which first
and foremost involved the loss of a sense of “home”. Here, as suggested by the psycho-social
scholar Peter Papadopoulos (2006), loss of “home” is a metaphor that not only refers to the loss
of a physical space, but also to the loss of continuity in the respondents’ relationship with the
external world. Papadopoulos explains that loss of home also involves the loss of a locus of
identity that could enable the individual to value him/herself in exile.
In the following sections, this article illustrates how the process of regaining a sense of “home”
by reconstructing new identities is gendered, and how recovery of a complex sense of self has
“opened up a space for developing agency” from which “transforming opportunities [can]
emerge” (Hajdukowski-Ahmed, 2008: p.41).
VI.3 Life-experiences abroad
Although many faced obstacles to re-building their lives and careers, more than two-thirds of the
participants (78.5 percent) have now entered the labour market in their host countries. For many
40
of them, it was necessary to re-establish their academic or high-profile careers, not only to give
something back to their adoptive countries but also to regain their lost identity. The survey
revealed that more than a half (65 percent) had to re-qualify in order to enter the labour market
in their host countries. If, for some, the main reason was to improve job opportunities, for
others, it was to perfect their knowledge or even to change careers or enter the networks of
professional bodies. As one of the participants explained: “I wanted to deepen my knowledge, not only
[in order] to work, but also for my personal development.” Those who live in the US, Canada and the UK
explained that their Algerian diplomas were not recognized. As a result, many had to start their
higher education from zero or re-qualify in another field. This was particularly the case for
architects and medical doctors. Indeed, this study revealed that several doctors who migrated to
countries other than France faced difficulties in pursuing their medical careers. As one
participant, who now works as a counter assistant in a pharmacy in the UK, said: ‘Algeria spent
much money on educating us up to this level, but lost us. Unfortunately, with the nonrecognition of our diplomas, our host countries also lose us, and God knows, they need doctors
here.’
Women also needed to retrieve the standard of living they lost during their journey into exile:
My degree was insufficient to find a good job with a good salary, so it was necessary to
enrol for a Masters when I arrived. However, regarding my PhD, I found it unnecessary,
and would not advise any women to go for it if she does not intend to work in academia
again. It was a five-year waste of my life, but it was imposed by my family, which I had to
obey, unfortunately.
This quotation intimates that undertaking further studies may have been a condition for this
participant in obtaining permission from her parents to prolong her stay in her host country. In
some cases, Algerian parents are held accountable by other members of the extended family for
their daughter’s “conduct”, and it is often considered unacceptable for a young woman to travel
or to stay abroad if not for the purposes of further education or marriage.
Other participants explained that obtaining an extension to their visa was the only motive for
undertaking further education. Around one third (31.33 percent) of participants declared they had
been discriminated against because of their Algerian nationality, but only seven percent said they
experienced gender discrimination when applying for jobs or training. Ten percent said that their
administrative status was often a barrier to accessing courses, funding and the labour market in
general.
VI-4 Identity, identification and belonging
The survey revealed that half (53 percent) of the participants considered themselves to belong to
an Algerian network, although it meant little for two-thirds of them other than a means of
meeting other Algerian women and sharing their experiences. Among other things, participants
mentioned lack of time as one reason for not networking or attending gatherings. Often isolated
from family and friends, mothers – particularly single mothers – struggle with childcare costs.
Added to which, rebuilding professional lives in a new, often hostile environment is timeconsuming and very demanding. Interviewees gave their answers greater depth by mentioning
other barriers to networking:
41
Those illiterate [women] who came to the US with green cards have no jobs, live in bad
areas and spend their time in Pakistani or Saudi Arabian mosques – that’s what you find
most in the US. They have nothing to do with our Maghrebi sense of Islam. The wives
wear the hijab, and the worst is that they influence the highly skilled women here. I’m sorry
but I don’t feel any [sense of] belonging to this hypocrisy. I don’t trust an Islamist whatever
[their] level of education. I don’t get together with anyone. I have so many friends in the
grave today and [undertook] that entire, cruel journey into exile because of ‘them’. So I
prefer to keep away from ‘them’.
Louisa’s quotation reminds us of the current urgent debate on political Islam and its effects on
Muslim communities in the West, particularly when terrorist acts occur in the name of political
Islam. Although Louisa was one of the few who mentioned this issue, members of the Algerian
Women Diaspora Facebook network discuss it on a daily basis. Following the terrorist attacks in
Paris, Algerian women, at least those who consider themselves as secular, were put in the difficult
position of having to dissociate themselves from their communities, members of whom were
often wrongly stereotyped as radical Muslims. The subjectivity of this process can make it
problematic to negotiate belonging to a host society that does not see any difference between
secular and non-secular Muslims, considering all Muslims to be a threat to their indigenous
identity and internal security.
Maya, mentioned above, lives in France but appeared more concerned about the way the
phenomenon of regionalism creates a further barrier to establishing a network:
I am connected to a group of Algerian women intellectuals who fled here. We meet
sometimes, but regionalism remains the main issue, as it was in Algeria. I remember once I
invited the group for an afternoon coffee. The discussion was around whose cake tastes
better – the usual Blida versus Algiers [contest] – then whose dresses are the most
beautiful, whose accent is classier, etc. The discussion quickly turned to [the question of]
which region’s women participated most during the war [against France], and suddenly it all
became political, [revolving] around the Black Decade. In the end, no one agreed on
anything. I became sickened [by it] and just do my own work [now]. I may publish a book
soon.
Maya’s example shows that she was interested in organising a network of intellectual women who
fled to France. She intimated during the interview that not all who attended this afternoon
gathering knew each other from Algeria. Regionalism is both a well-established way of
networking and a scourge in Algeria, and is grounded in the country’s system of post-liberation
governance. Which network an individual belongs to is believed to be the main criterion for
nomination to a high-ranking position in the government. It also gets translated into Algerians’
ordinary social and domestic lives. The quotation above suggests regionalism even continues to
affect the establishment of networks of solidarity between Algerian women abroad, at least in the
French context.
During my fieldwork, I also asked my interviewees about their perception of the existence of an
Algerian Diaspora. The majority of participants, although they believe an Algerian Diaspora does
not exist, agreed there is an urgent need to establish one. What follows is an interesting comment
from Faroudja, who now lives in France:
42
No, there is none. However, there is a will to establish a diaspora, there is a will to do
something for Algeria, but there is always something there to obstruct the transmission of
solidarity mechanisms for women. The Algerian regime manages this division wherever
Algerians are, through consulates, embassies, fake diasporic organizations, etc.
This suggests that the Algerian regime considers Diaspora networks a threat. Feroudja explained
that, after all, the idea of an Algerian nation was born in France within an Algerian patriotic
network and that is possibly, why any initiatives to establish a network is met with suspicion: “It
saddens and angers me: everyone is suspicious of everyone; it’s draining. We are the new Greeks, a people that
thrive on drama.” For Fatiha, a secondary-school teacher in the UK, suspicion and lack of trust
were the main obstacles to establishing a network of solidarity between Algerian women in her
surrounding area. She also claimed that in the UK “most of the other Algerians” are “illegal”, not
highly educated and tend to be “radical Islamists”.
VI-5 the question of returning to Algeria
More than a half of the participants believed they had integrated well into their host societies. At
the same time, however, up to 95 percent used the internet, mainly Face book, to remain
informed about Algerian news, two-thirds used Skype to communicate with family and friends in
Algeria, and nearly half subscribed to international professional e-mail lists that included former
colleagues from Algeria. This shows the role of online resources in helping in the struggle not to
forget “home”. More than half-consulted Facebook many times a day and shared information
related to women’s human rights in Algeria and elsewhere.
When questioned if they missed Algeria, up to 82 percent of participants said yes, but only a third
considered an eventual “return”, while two-thirds said there were too many barriers in place. The
main barriers invoked were social, political, economic and domestic. More than two-thirds (78.16
percent) said of all the barriers they faced to returning, the first was social:
Algeria is a country [that is] hard to live in now. When on holiday, I get frustrated with
almost everything – the unfriendly shopkeepers, the lack of customer services, horrible
staff at every [level of] public administration, mountains of stupid paperwork, no facilities
for children, no parks, a poor education system, no health and safety, no good hospitals.
And most dramatic is the Islamization of society – it is a very poor understanding of the
religion and the expansion of a very poor and twisted form of Islam, focused on women’s
outfits . Ah, and the lack of libraries and cinemas... The list is long and I can top it with the
fact that I am in a mixed marriage now. It is impossible for my Western husband to live
happily in Algeria.
Nadia is a former lawyer who lives in Canada where she works for a humanitarian NGO. Many
other participants agreed with Nadia on the fact that public services have dramatically
deteriorated in post-Black Decade Algeria. In relation to the state of Algerian hospitals today,
four participants evoked chronic illness as the main barrier to their return.
The new amendments of the Family Code are supposed to have given more freedom to women;
however, there is a lack of awareness or understanding of the context within which these
amendments have been made. Hence, participants expressed concern about the lack of
information and communication from Algerian consulates about the amendments and their
43
impact on women’s rights, particularly regarding those married to non-Algerians. The reality is
that, in practice, Algerian civil servants remain deeply influenced by patriarchal ideology and do
not translate this new legislation in a way that enhances the position of Algerian women living
abroad. As a result, women may be reluctant to physically return to Algeria, as consulates are the
first contact point between a country and its community living abroad. In addition, participants
frequently mentioned the Amnesty Law, implemented in 2005, which is often held responsible
for driving Algerian society into the arms of a more radical kind of fundamentalism, as a barrier
to their return.
It is clear that the women who participated in this research evolved in contexts that facilitated the
reconstruction of their identities, both personally and professionally. Host societies in which
gender equality is mainstream in policy-making encourage the process of re-selving and the
development of women’s agency. In some cases, though, participants revealed that they felt they
were perceived as “other” due to the fact that they are women of color and Muslim, and were, de
facto, stereotyped. It remains the case, however, that their identity as intellectuals and
professionals helped them challenge this traditional form of identification and enabled them to
adopt multiple identities in order to promote their adaptation to their host societies, regardless of
where they lived. In this context, it is interesting to recall that Algeria has historically been a
meeting point of diverse cultures and civilizations (Evans, 2012). This has enriched the Algerian
personality, including that of women, who remain the essential transmitter of this diversity. I
would therefore argue that the participants in this research, despite the plight of their exile,
developed an inner strength in adopting positions that reflect both an Algerian originality and a
transnational identity, and this eased the process of melding into their host societies. They
showed an attachment to an “imagined Algeria”, which they identified with – an Algeria that
women of their generation fought for and dreamed of plural, tolerant, just and economically
prosperous. It is this Imagined Algeria that they carried into exile and to which many of the
women I met dream of returning.
However, the cyber facilities and online social networks that allow frequent virtual returns to
Algeria, sometimes several times a day, as well as women’s physical visits to the country, whether
on vacation or business trips, make it obvious that the dreamed-of that Algeria no longer exists
and is, in fact, lost forever. That said this is not unique to Algeria but could be applied to any
other society that has emerged out of the collective trauma and economic disaster caused by war
and internal conflict. Consequently, a mutant Algerian society has emerged, facing great
challenges to the reconstruction of its economy and identity, particularly given the current
geopolitical atmosphere in the region. The transitional governance of Algeria may have achieved
more-or-less good results, but it appears to remain a country that is now “alien” to those women
who do not live there anymore.
VII-Conclusion
This research sought to investigate the extent to which the lack of freedom of thought, the
restrictions associated with the Algerian Family Code, and the increased levels of violence against
women prompted these highly skilled women to flee the country. It was also motivated,
therefore, by the ambition to provide recommendations to those organisations that influence
policies aimed at addressing the barriers such women face in rebuilding their lives in the countries
to which they have migrated, as well as examining the barriers they face if they decide to return to
44
Algeria. This raised the question of whether or not such networks could act as a diaspora. For
this reason, the chapter revisits the decision to use the term, particularly in light of the debate
between traditional scholars of diaspora and the social constructionists’ understanding of the
concept as a social condition as well as a heuristic tool with which to explore and better
understand the interactions between a group of migrants, its new environment and its country of
origin. Here, the term was used not simply in a descriptive sense but as a concept permitting the
study of the social interactions, identity reconstruction, sense of belonging and mobilisation of
this particular group which is now located in transnational space outside Algeria.
The decision to use the concept of diaspora to explore the lives of this particular group of
Algerian migrants was twofold. First, the highly skilled Algerian women I met, including online,
often expressed the urgent need to create an Algerian diaspora. What they meant by ‘diaspora’
was a network of Algerians who live outside the country but are still attached to and interested in
its political, economic and social affairs. They believed such a network should also be a space in
which the solidarity between its members would help them to adjust to and integrate into their
host societies. The second reason was the assumption that there is no solidarity between
Algerians living abroad, regardless of their gender or level of education. This assumption has
been supported by a number of researchers who have concluded that an Algerian diaspora does
not exist. Research on Algerian migrants has mainly been conducted in France; however, as this
study points out, the post-Cold War situation and the eruption of new conflicts around the
world, the emergence of new technologies of communication and the spread of the global market
has both encouraged and facilitated a surge of population movement, and this means there is
now enough evidence to show that migrants no longer necessarily seek out countries where they
have cultural and post-colonial ties or existing personal or family networks. Hence, it is necessary
to study Algerian migrants in countries other than the traditional locus of Algerian exile, France,
and in this specific case the research has yielded some interesting results that do not fully accord
with the previous consensus.
The violence increased the rate of feminisation of migration amongst intellectuals and highly
skilled Algerians, which was particularly noticeable from the beginning of the 2000s onwards.
There were several coercive reasons behind the research participants’ displacement, ranging from
the general climate of fear and insecurity, or persecution specifically directed against them or their
immediate families, to social and familial repression. Some participants who had initially moved
abroad with the aim of enhancing their skills, to take advantage of job opportunities or to pursue
further education were unable to return due to the prevailing terrorism and insecurity. Thus, the
fact that their decision to depart (or not to return) took place in an atmosphere of conflict and
terror meant that the participants’ experience of exile often displayed a traumatic character. This
was illustrated by the interviews conducted for this study.
The interviews further revealed the trauma related to the specific oppression and sexual
harassment of women which increased during the Black Decade. Moreover, both when fleeing
the country and on arrival in the receiving country, participants faced the barriers of restrictive
asylum and immigration policies. The general flouting of the international law protecting women
who suffer gender-based violence, as well as the stigma attached to all newcomers from Algeria
who are frequently regarded as potential terrorists, made it particularly difficult for women to
obtain visas or to be recognised as political refugees once in the country of asylum. The
experience of the international gender-blind asylum process is a traumatic event in its own right.
The lack of administrative status for those who decided not to claim asylum was no less
traumatic.
45
Once they were living in their countries of migration, participants deplored the lack of
recognition of their Algerian diplomas as well as of their efforts to adjust, re-invent new identities
and build new lives. This lack of recognition often fed a sense of being unwelcome in their new
societies. Although participants showed some degree of resilience and even obstinacy when it
came to rebuilding their lives, particularly their professional lives, it was not without facing a high
level of discrimination. The study revealed that women who grow up and live under harsh
patriarchal rules bring resilience to any new struggle they face, if only by virtue of their gender. As
they experience more personal freedom in the countries they migrate to, their struggle moves
from their private to their public lives. The participants were all agreed that they now enjoyed
more rights as women, and although the adjustment to their new countries differed from one
woman to another, the majority appeared to now enjoy financial independence and have either
widened their knowledge in the field in which they studied and worked in Algeria or requalified in
another. It also appeared that due to their settlement in multiple locations, the nurturing of an
idea of a ‘homeland’ is now negotiated in a transnational space, often virtually in cyberspace.
Social networking sites such as Facebook are used to exchange ideas of resistance, scientific
knowledge, music and recipes from Algeria, as well as information on political and social
developments in the country. Participants also showed the desire to fully belong to the societies
in which they now live.
Furthermore, the research has shown the complexity of the relationships of the participants with
present-day Algeria and with their peers still living there, whom they often appeared to believe to
be either incompetent and corrupt or too traditional and overtly religious. It seems that the
participants individually attributed to themselves the imaginary Algerian identity – democratic,
liberated, secular – that they dreamed of possessing before being forced to flee. It therefore
appears that, for the most part, they can only foresee the implementation of women’s rights and
gender equality in Algeria if the country pursues a policy of secularism. I would argue, however,
that this is not necessarily what the majority of women living in Algeria aspire to. Hence,
educational levels, age and political beliefs certainly add to this complexity of imagining an
Algeria that never existed and perhaps never will.
When compared with other diasporic groups who have successfully managed to mobilise and
transfer knowledge and technology to their countries of origin, and make positive social and
economic changes there, Algerians appear to have lacked the initiative to do so. However, the
participants in this research readily shared ideas on how they think the situation could be fixed
‘back home’. They put forward many ideas on how the nation can be helped to recover from its
trauma. Indeed, the lack of social cohesion and the crisis of identity in Algeria, including the
language crisis and the entrenched regionalism inherited from the colonial era, need to be
urgently addressed in consultation with an organised civil society that involves Algerian women
living abroad. For this to happen, it is increasingly important to find ways of mobilising the
existing networks revealed in this research. Regarding the role of officials, women in particular
will have to exert more effort to overcome the patriarchal attitudes seemingly embedded in
Algerian consulates and diplomatic offices. For example, many of the women I met during the
course of this study reported incidents that revealed the lack of knowledge and will on the part of
Algerian officials when it comes to implementing new amendments to the Family Code in favour
of women’s rights. Consulates could become more open to enabling a process of reform by
providing the space for meetings and perhaps other kinds of logistical support to all those
concerned with capacity building amongst Algerian women living abroad.
46
For all this to happen, however, the Algerian regime needs to first acknowledge the potential
existence of a diaspora that is prepared to engage in working for the benefit of the country.
Algerian policy-makers need to engage with highly skilled women living abroad by improving
services at consulates, reducing bureaucracy and fighting corruption in the administration, which
are often perceived as barriers to returning home. It is also important to build partnerships
between Algeria and the receiving countries in order to facilitate social enterprises and the
transfer of goods and services. The fundamental requirement, however, as far as this research is
concerned, is to ensure the effective implementation of existing laws and to design new policies
and guidelines that will assist women and protect them from the violence and discrimination they
still experience in their daily lives in Algeria, particularly as these factors have been identified as
one of the main barriers that the participants face to returning to the country from which they
fled.
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Wejnert, C. (2009). ‘An empirical test of respondent-driven sampling: point estimates, variance,
measures of degree, and out-of-equilibrium data’, Sociological Methodology, (39), pp. 73-116.
Wejnert, C. (2009). ‘Social Network analysis with respondent-driven sampling data: a study of
racial integration on campus’. Sociological Methodology, 32(2), May 2010, pp. 112-124.
White, R. G. et al (2011). ‘Respondent driven sampling – where we are and where should we be
going?’ Editorial based on presentations at the 19th Biennial International Society for STD
Research conference in Quebec, Canada, July 2011.
Winch, P. (2007). The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (3rd edn). London and New
York: Routledge.
Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender & Nation. London: Sage.
Yuval-Davis, N. & Anthias, F. (1989). ‘Introduction’, in Yuval-Davis, N. & Anthias, F. (ed.)
Woman-Nation-State. New York: St Martins, pp. 2-15.
Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). ‘Intersectionality and feminist politics’. European Journal of Women’s Studies
13(3), pp. 193-209.
Yuval, N., Gross, R. and Marshall, R.D. (2006). ‘Mental health in the wake of terrorism: making
sense of mass casualty trauma’, in Yuval, N., Gross, R., Marshall, R.D. and Susser, E.S. (eds).
9/11: Mental Health in the Wake of Terrorist Attacks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 314.
57
Latefa Guemar is a Post-graduate student a the School of Sciences, UEL and has recently
submitted her PhD thesis on Women of the New Algerian Diaspora: Online Discourse, Social
Consciousness and Political Engagement. Having received refugee status in the UK in 2004,
Latefa has had to re-orient her study and has undertaken an MSc on Population Movement and
Policy at Swansea University. Latefa has made an important contribution to the 2011 review of
gender / women's issues in Country of Origin information for making decision on asylum
applications in the UK; Latefa has also undertaken research on the conduct of asylum interviews
at UKBA looking at the range of issues , including gender, sexuality, religion, and age, which
might impact upon the ability of asylum applicants to discuss their experiences; On the impact of
forced migration on women's mental health; On the decision making of asylum seekers to come
in the UK. Latefa is also accredited OISC Level 1&2 immigration advisor and has extensive
experience supporting women in their asylum applications. Latefa has a particular interest in
gender issues in forced migration, Diasporas and identities. She was a research associate for the
Centre of Migration Policy Research at Swansea University between 2009 and 2015 and a visiting
Fellow at the LSE, Gender Institute between 2012 and 2014.
Contact details: Latefa Guemar, School of Social Sciences, University of East London 4-6
University way, London E16 2RD
e-mail: [email protected]
58
Inscribing Selves: Discursive, Material and Dialogic Turns for ME
Sharon Gallagher
Abstract
In this paper, I demonstrate how my kaleidoscope view is employed to the problematics of living
with what can be described, as a ‘contested’ and experienced as a ‘severe’ chronic illness.
Specifically the paper refers to the illness, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) (also known as
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). This is a chronic illness that has multivariate symptoms and remains
shrouded in medical contention and social scepticism. This has produced dilemmas and
challenges for those diagnosed with ME and/or CFS. The kaleidoscopic view reflects on
Foucauldian, Deleuze & Guattari and Bakhtinian concepts in relation to power, desire and the
importance of context for ‘doing’ and ‘being’ ill. I propose the metaphor of a kaleidoscope offers
a useful visual illustration to understand the complexities of living with an illness of this nature.
The problematics can then be explored by theorising the dominant discursive controls on naming
and framing chronic illness, the material embodied experiences of living with a chronic illness
and to the socio-cultural contexts for constituting ways to fulfil healthy/unhealthy identities. My
particular readings on Foucault’s governmentality, heterotopia are employed to theorise the act of
power and attend to the languages of ritualised spaces that are challenged when
house/bedbound. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome for situating multiplicities of desire which
continuously destabilise the definable and can intensely disrupt the material production of
possibilities for living with a chronic illness. The inclusion of Bakhtin draws on the importance of
context and the chronotope to conceptualise the connectedness between temporal and spatial
relations in narrating a life affected by chronic illness. My insights are motivated by a
transdisciplinary approach, where like Foucault and Deleuze, I concur that a methodological
toolbox establishes the importance of theory as a practical tool, not to be confined by, but to
appropriate particular concepts to offer a depth or alternative meaning. I have conceptualised
the challenges and struggles of a chronic illness by exploring the acts of ‘doing’ and the
experiences of ‘being’ ill and argue that this theorisation as enhanced understanding for what it
means to negotiate a chronic illness of this nature.
59
Introduction
This paper is concerned with theorising the topic of chronic illness, specifically that of Myalgic
Encephalomyelitis. As a controversial disease in terms of its causation and treatment the illness
continues to be shrouded in medical and social debate. Social and psychological studies tend to
focus on the issues of living with a contested illness. However, little attention has been given to
those who live with severe ME which causes those who suffer to remain house and/or bedbound
for long periods.
Medical research has interrogated the risk factors (Pheby and Saffron 2009), effects of treatment
programmes and the management of stress to decrease the burden of severe ME/CFS (Cox and
Findley 2000; Lattie, Antoni et al. 2013). Medical and social researchers have explored issues
associated with uncertainty and controversy for ME sufferers and/or medical professionals
(Cooper 1997; Guise, Widdicombe et al. 2007). However, there has been little or no specific
reference to those who experience severe ME, which exacerbates the lack of understanding
within medical and social research and beyond. My doctoral research departed from previous
research by recruiting participants who had been formally diagnosed with ME and/or Chronic
Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and at least four of the participants had been diagnosed with severe
ME/CFS. At present the umbrella term of ME/CFS is the most widely used term. My method of
investigation was both life stories and photo-elicited-diaries, both of which revealed the processes
and practices that underpin negotiations of the illness experience.
My research aimed to elicit an active conceptualisation for understanding ‘doing’ and ‘being’
chronically ill. As a person who lives with the illness under investigation, I agree with ‘the
theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own
behalf’ (Deleuze cited in Bouchard 1977:209). The present paper focuses on some of the key
theoretical concepts which informed my transdisciplinary research to theoretically ask: How can
we understand ME/CFS as a disease of 1,000 names, which espouses culturally derogatory
responses such as, ‘it’s all in the mind’, ‘yuppie flu’ and a ‘malingers’ disease’?2 If ME/CFS defies
medical theories of containment, how is it possible to gain a conceptual understanding of both
the issues of contestation associated with a diagnosis and the subjective experiences of living with
severe illness symptoms?
In order to respond to these questions, I developed a ‘kaleidoscopic view’ to account for the
discursive, material and contextual aspects of living with chronic illness. It is this kaleidoscope
that I wish to recompose in this paper. The ‘kaleidoscope’ has been employed previously as a
conceptual metaphor to analyse gender (Spade and Valentine 2007), and to demonstrate the
multiplicities of life within biographical methods (Stanley 1987). My employment of this
metaphorical device is to demonstrate how each part holds multiple reflections that work
References: Chronic Fatigue Immune Disease [CFID] A Disease of a 1,000 names (Pollard, 1988) and media coverage
most recently condemning and countering the term past media phrase of ‘all in the mind’ in the article by Jenny
Hope [accessed 10/11/2015] for the Daily Mail ME Patients are told: it’s all not all in the mind’. Finally Tucker (2015)
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Wrong name, real illness [Medscape Rheumatology 8/01/2015] [Accessed 10/11/2015]
2
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together and can be read differently, depending on the viewer, subject and intention. The parts
are set out into three sections and conclude with a diagram that represents each view to unravel,
the reflective acts of power, desire and productions of context, via a particular reading of
Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and finally Bakhtin.
Foucault’s genealogical perspective offers a means to understand the historical and discursive
impasses and iterations which perpetuate the uncertainties associated with contested illnesses.
Deleuze and Guattari offer the means to critically account for the intensities of pain and suffering
which alters life trajectories and acts of becoming. This may be particularly relevant to those
living with an illness like severe ME, which requires continuous work in the making and remaking
of self. Bakhtin reveals the act of narrating as relational, which is useful when discussing the
fragility of life in relation to chronic illness. These approaches are employed to conceptualise the
issues of contestation, subjective and material conditions by which a severe chronic illness of this
nature may be theorised and understood.
Philosophical reflections on discursive subjects
This section will explore how the power to inscribe subjects through language not only
constituting particular realities, but also the means by which we accept our material existence.
Michel Foucault’s genealogical perspective allows us to explore the emergence of particular
notions of truth in relation to knowledge and power, which helps us understand present
conditions. This sets out the ways in which it is possible to conceptualise acts of performance,
interactions with space, and unravel so called medical truths and thereby, unravel the social
constructions that belie our multiple identities which are governed by these contexts.
A genealogical perspective: the emergence of particular truths
Foucault’s critical theories were based on the premise that systems of thought were deployed and
governed by power, which produced knowledge and activated particular discourses that
constitute ‘the truth’ of existence. Foucault’s work described how asylums, clinics and schools
became exemplary sites of discipline that controlled and maintained subjects such as the
madman, the patient and the pupil. In Madness and Civilization (Foucault [1961] 2001), for instance,
Foucault used an archaeological approach to excavate the notion of madness. Although he had
not at that time explicitly developed his genealogical approach, it was the implicit application of
genealogy that allowed him to trace the emergence of a particular truth, namely the category of
‘madness’. By analysing the contingencies and events that were put in place to govern and
regulate ‘madness’, Foucault was able to argue that medical discourses and institutional practices,
such as psychiatry, used scientific neutrality to sanction a truth of existence (Foucault [1961]
2001:136). He further argued that this process produced the ‘birth of the asylum’ and led to a
plethora of social, political and ethical controls upon the body of the insane, which still exist in
psychiatry (Foucault [1961] 2001).
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In this way, the genealogical approach offered Foucault a tool to trace discursive formations and
filter historical epochs, also allowing him to cut through the disruptions and discontinuities of
knowledge that lie behind social and political change. Foucault was able to go beyond the
existence of a category, such as ‘madness’ (Foucault [1966] 2002), and analyse discursive
formulations that govern ‘practices which are apparently organised around something that is
supposed to be madness’ (Foucault [1978-79] 2008:3). He thereby traced the discursive structures
of psychiatry by unearthing and unpicking both the silences and the languages which create
knowledge and the power to control, identifying the category of ‘madness’ as political governance
and cultural practice which ‘both establishes and impugns it’, andmapping particular moments to
describe how discursive and social practices executed the social and physical exclusion of
madness (Foucault [1961] 2001:xiv). Foucault’s genealogy provides a set of strategies to consider
how the power of language disciplines the body though classification and regulation, while his
study on madness can be employed as a means to understand the emergence of the sick body.
In the Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (BoC) ( [1963] 2003), Foucault examined
the rise of socio-political interventions to counter the process of normalisation that occurs within
institutions such as medicine. Principally, the work was ‘about space, about language, and about
death; […] about the act of seeing, the gaze’ (Foucault [1963] 2003:ix). Foucault traced the history
of medical discourses to examine the dimensions of ‘disease’. in order to ‘disentangle the
conditions of its history from the density of discourse’ (Foucault [1963] 2003:xxii. He critically
explored how this power produced epistemic shifts in the organisation and management of the
sick body. By exploring how the medical institution developed, Foucault contextualised the ways
in which disciplinary systems of the body emerged. His theory of the clinic offers a way to
understand how the patient/subject is constructed and constituted through a discursive
corporeality by which language constitutes the body. This approach describes how it is possible
to question the reality of a disease that is constructed via past knowledges, an observable,
constantly shifting organism embodied and embedded within a medico-political and sociocultural context.
In BoC, Foucault charts the emergence of medical discourse via the anatomical observations of
the autopsy, whereby investigations began to invade the body and, following Cartesian dualism,
divide or split the mind and the body. Foucault argued that a medical system is derived from the
practical processes of observation combined with medical discourse where ‘diseases’ constitute a
nosology, a particular set of languages – such as the use of Latin names – that are maintained by
wardens of control or medical experts. Foucault developed the term ‘the clinical gaze’ to describe
the power of observation and language used to govern sick bodies and validate an illness
experience, as symptoms are observed and analysed within a medicalised ‘speaking eye’ to
legislate illness and sanction the truth of existence via a medico-politicised system (Osborne
1994:35).
This closed system of medical knowledge was gradually to reach a further stage (Rose 2007),
whereby the subject of illness was totally removed and technologies that determine illness were
based on a set of observable medical truths. Foucault’s approach offers a means to observe how
62
institutional power emerges not in a linear evolution but by a complex system of disciplinary
regimes (Foucault [1963] 2003). Foucault was able to deconstruct the particularities of madness
and disease and to identify the transitions that led to present day psychiatric and pathologic
realities. His approach is, therefore, helpful in revealing the events and contingencies which
brought about the emergence of present understandings of current social categories, such as that
of a contested illness.
Foucault also offers a way to expose the processes which constitute pathological realities,
revealing the bio-political gaze that normalises material bodies. In this way, he presents an
opportunity to disrupt the ideas, discourses and images of the body, and to ethically and
reflectively question the modes of power and truth that procure knowledge of self and other.
Inherently, genealogy3 sets out to map the exercises and effects of power in relation to context
and the specifics, as with socio-historical and institutional settings. With the concept of
governmentality it is about the act of power which denotes not wholly negative power but
represents how subjectivity becomes entwined within patterns of truth which as with medical
discourses produce doctors/patients that will conform to medical scrutiny and thereby normalise
the processes of illness via diagnosis, treatment and to legislate illness. Government bodies are
then internalised via particular discursive tools as with surveillance that will enforce and reinforce
subjects to conform to the status quo. This is operationalised via experts with ‘the knowledge’
that allows institutions and various disciplines to govern and control4. This art of governing is via
bio-power which establishes stable fixed categorises for subject-positions, not only via
technologies of domination, but also through discursive systems of control that govern families,
school and the workplace. Foucault’s conceptualisations of the often ambiguous and messy
processes that constitute social norms, highlights not only acts of conformity, but also how
subjugated voices may display resistance. It is important, therefore, that we question regimes of
truth and the mechanisms of control that produce discourses within a particular time and space,
such as those surrounding contested illness.
Foucault uses the term dispositif to describe an apparatus, namely ‘the system of relations’ between
a ‘heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory
decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and
philanthropic propositions’. He identifies an ‘interplay of shifts of position and modifications of
function’ between these elements and sees the apparatus as ‘responding to an urgent need’ at a
‘given historical moment’, such as the need to control madness, sexual illness and neurosis at a
time of a mercantilist economy (Foucault 1980:195). This offers a way to examine the
surveillance and policing of the sick body within an ethico-political context (Dreyfus and
Rabinow 1982:121). The sick subject is managed via systems, such as the UK’s expert patient
programme which relies on self-surveillance (Rose 2007; Nettleton 2013). The dispositif,
3 Please note when discussing genealogy this is in terms of Foucault’s take on Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy of Morals’ ([1913] 2003).
4
Foucault began to develop the concept of governmentality in his lecture series – 1977-78 Security, Territory, Population Edited by Michel
Senellart General and Editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana translated by Graham Burchell Palgrave Macmillan Basingstoke
(2007). In Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) a genealogy of the state and subject (docile bodies) is tackled and his later works History
of Sexuality (1984) via technologies of the self draws connections into how governmentality works
63
therefore, provides an analytical tool for mapping out the various epistemic power systems and
inscribe the subject into society, through language and discourse so that the subject can arguably
be seen as the residue of power relations. Resistance occurs in breaking through the walls of
language by finding the voices that are missing. This is not to suggest that Foucault had no
ontological recognition of the human conditions, but rather that his interests lay with the
structures of power and the ‘doing’ of subjectivity woven within the threads of knowledge and
discourse.
Conceptualising other spaces
As Foucault states in BoC his aim was to find out ‘how the medical gaze was institutionalised and
effectively inscribed as a social space, so that the norm of the hospital was both the effect and the
support of a new type of gaze’ (Foucault 1980:146). These specialist spaces, such as hospitals and
clinics, were governed by doctors and the political imperatives that sought to administer them
and were, in essence, managed through surveillance of space and time (Foucault 1980). For
Foucault, spaces are not real but relational, made up by the disciplines that contain them. The
systems of spaces that have been institutionalised, from the home to those of leisure and work,
contain cultural, social and moral codes of conduct and behaviour (Foucault [1984] 1998:177).
Although theses spaces are culturally communicated, it is the concept of production and the act
of producing spaces through the context of time that is of interest for long term illness (Lefebvre
[1974] 1991:15). Foucault argued these social spaces became sites of control, but he also
recognised that spaces were affected and effected sites, as well as being contested places for those
who need to resist the normative practices of institutional sites. Foucault’s genealogical approach
offers a means to focus on the relationship between space and time, as well as relations of
proximity within private and public spaces, between the family space, cultural space and useful
space, between spaces of leisure activities and the space of work. Foucault states that ‘these are
controlled by an unspoken sacralisation’ and normalised (Foucault [1984] 1998).
Cultural expectations of how spaces should function are woven into the fabric of our social
identities and are systematically part of our subjective processes. However, those who become
severely ill may be unable to fulfil the social imperatives that dictate how places should be used,
so that the physical geo-politics of the fixed states of family living and its power relations can
become unsettled. Spaces may become unworkable when severely ill bodies disrupt the ‘network
of relations’ by which the ‘semi-closed sites of rest – the house, the bedroom, the bed etcetera’
(Foucault [1967] 1984:46), opposing the social practices by which these sites are maintained.
Spaces that are opposed or alternative to so-called ‘real places’ can be read through Foucault’s
notion of the heterotopia, which is ‘fundamentally and essentially unreal’ (Foucault [1967]
1984:46). Foucault used many examples to explain the concept of heterotopia, the most common
being the analogy of the mirror. He states that ‘due to the mirror I discover myself absent from
the place where I am since I see myself over there’ (Foucault [1984] 1998:179). It has been
argued that the concept of the heterotopia can be vague and lacks consistency (Genochio
1995:37; Soja 1995:162; Johnson 2012). I agree with Johnson that, rather than a detailed
examination of spaces, the idea helps to account for how ‘spaces do not exist, except in relation
to other spaces’ (Johnson 2012).
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For Foucault, heterotopias are based on the tensions between ‘myth and the contestation of the
real’ (Foucault [1967] 1984:48). These spaces determine how it is possible to invent places for
particular types of people and behaviour. He sees crisis heterotopias as forbidden places, putting
certain people, such as menstruating women and adolescents, in isolation (Foucault [1967]
1984:47). In her genealogical examination of the historical autobiographies of women teachers
(2003), Maria Tamboukou opened up the spatial dynamics of the private and public spaces
occupied by the female educator. Talking about a set of technologies of space, she developed
Foucault’s notion of crisis heterotopias, referring to ‘spaces of transition and tension,
emplacements that gave rise to women in crisis’ (Tamboukou 2003:80).
Foucault outlines how crisis heterotopias were replaced by heterotopias of deviation; spaces for people
whose behaviour deviates from required norms, such as psychiatric hospitals and old people’s
homes (Foucault [1984] 1998:180). This is relevant to those who become severely ill and
bedridden, disrupting the institutional setting of the home and the bedroom by using the bed, not
as a place of rest, but as a place to live and survive. The concept of heterotopia offers a way to
understand how heterogeneous spaces are governed by social and systematic proprieties, by time
and context. For those who become bedridden due to serious illness, the site of the
bed/bedroom may, therefore, cause a need to transcend both real and metaphorical places.
Deploying a genealogical perspective
My approach to genealogy enables me to critically analyse discourse associated with past illnesses.
My study explores the medical language trapped within the scientific lens, which ignores its own
methodological flaws that constitute contested illnesses. In BoC Foucault’s interrogation of
French medicine argued that the principles of language confined the sick subject, which may be
rhetorically challenging when converting the approach to British medicine (Atkinson 1995:41).
However, others continue to use Foucauldian frameworks to generalise the employment of
medical power and knowledge and historicise the separation of the body from the mind (Lupton
1994; Armstrong 1997; Nettleton 2013).
Performative perspectives on the sick body
Foucault’s genealogical approach was employed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) and
Bodies that Matter (1993) to interrogate the reified category of the female, as a unified identity that
stands outside of other classifications, such as class and ethnicity. Butler’s theory of
performativity and the ‘doing’ of gender also used Lacanian ideas to challenge the morphological
and constitutive ideologies that constrain and maintain the body of the female within social,
political and cultural systems that function to label being female as ‘biological, linguistic and/or
cultural difference’ (Butler 1990:9). This notion of inscribing bodies was taken up by Elizabeth
Grosz in Volatile Bodies (1994) to account for corporeal space and to conceptualise the repressive
site of the female body. As with Foucault, this not only contests discourses of power but also
dislodges epistemological weapons that seek to constrain the body within particular political and
ideological truths. The regulative and normative practices that recognise and govern the body of
the female as other can be applied to the sick body. The dualistic medical approach to the body
continually outlines the need for sick bodies to either return to healthy subject positions or fulfil
65
the sick role. The presentation of the self is not only about performing an appropriate role, but
also avoiding the stigma associated with an undiagnosed and/or untreatable condition (Goffman
1963; [1959] 1969). Those who are diagnosed with a contested illness and/or a Medically
Unexplained Illness (MUI) are continually made to feel responsible, as their condition falls
outside accepted medical truths and socio-political governance that grant legitimacy (Nettleton
2006:1167).
Butler’s argument for dispelling political and social forces, which reinforce the myth of gender,
can be used to investigate the myth of the healthy subject. Like Foucault, Butler emphasises the
biopolitical regimes surrounding the body, whereby ethics of control categorise, regulate and
maintain economic and social order. Similarly, the institutional domains that categorise identity –
and thereby the sick body – are formulated by patriarchal powers. Butler’s theory offers a way to
understand how social powers operate to produce categorisations that often work to marginalise
those living with contested illnesses. This marginalisation has been identified by feminist writers
interested in disability studies. Margrit Shildrick, inspired by Foucault’s genealogy, sought to
ontologically map the web of power, which entrapped the disabled body. Her theorisations,
inspired by her work with illnesses such as ME, explored the historical and political processes by
which disability became a social entity. A number of feminist writers call for an ethics of
vulnerability to illuminate the processes and practices of contested illnesses (Price and Shildrick
1998; Moss and Dyck 2003; Gilson 2013). As Shildrick and Price (1998) argue, the ‘broken body’
of illnesses like ME/CFS, is an opportunity for us to explore the fantasies that constrain our
identities, where contested illnesses make it possible to observe the vulnerability of being outside
the binary boundaries that define the experience of illness via the power of medical discourses.
Power of medical discourses
Social medical theories investigate the structures of discourse which form clinical and political
institutions and thus inform society and culture about the meaning of illness (Mishler 1984). Paul
Atkinson (1995) argues that medical discourses are based on a language of recognition which
produces, challenges and redefines knowledge(s) to construct an accepted narrative. Medical
research thus exists by validating evidence-based research methods. These methods of inquiry are
the primary means by which illnesses such as ME/CFS are defined, labelled and become a
psychological and/or pathophysiological truism. Poststructuralist feminists such as Debra Lupton
specifically challenge how medical discourses create knowledge(s) and truths, arguing that the
subject may not be separated from the practices which position them, as the subject’s biography
becomes entwined within medical discourses (Lupton 1994:160). In effect, the patient is in a
paradox, as they experience a dependency on medicine to define the cause of illness and
disillusionment when their illness remains contested.
Following Foucault, David Armstrong (1995) investigates the discursive powers which manage
the sick and sees the rise of surveillance medicine creating a normative structure of what is meant
by health and illness. Docile bodies are moved from ‘compliance’ to ‘concordance’ as medical
logic embraces the expert patient, which leads to the question what happens to bodies which
cannot be coerced into good health, namely the long-term severely ill. Bryan Turner states that
66
human beings ‘have bodies and they are bodies’ (1996:37). This reflects the emergence of social
theories which discuss the effects of a somatic society, where the body is both an object of
enquiry and a symbol of political and social control. For Turner the body is a site of corporeal
uncertainty, where issues of ontology are mapped between the complex relationships of
discursive management and the social role of the citizen. Turner suggests that, with the decline of
morbidity rates within western society, we have seen an ageing of the nation and a prevalence of
chronic illnesses, which conflicts with society’s demands for the body to remain healthy (Turner
1996).
Medical sociologists interested in contested illnesses have challenged the medical and political
systems that discursively constitute particular illness behaviours as a social deviancy (Conrad
1992). This arguably, situates the disabled, or what may be described as a disordered body, as
passive and malleable. Post-structural theorists concerned with chronic illness suggest that
contested illnesses offer a view of what could be described as the ‘leaky body’, trapped within the
discursive practices and the material experience of illness (Shildrick 1997). The vicissitudes
associated with ME/CFS allow us to ponder the fact that all our bodies are unstable and
ultimately ‘unknowable’. In relation to her own experiences of living with ME, Price’s desire to
know and read the body as a feminist, in order to take control back from others, demanded that
the instability of the body be silenced – a fantasy that cannot be sustained when illness has taken
up residence (Price and Shildrick 1998:243). Equally, Moss and Dyck (2003) focus on the issues
of the material and discursive practices of what they term ‘radical body politics’. Their approach
takes into account Foucault’s approach, which decentralises the subject and centralises the notion
of power and knowledge. These accounts of living with a chronic illness such as ME are useful in
acknowledging the discursive disciplines that actuate how specific bodies are controlled and
managed by a play of dominations which, through processes and practices, situate self,
subjectivity and identity (Grosz 1994). As Price and Shildrick state in their moving accounts of
being disabled (living with ME) and non-disabled, ‘it becomes clear that vulnerability is not the
special case of disabled people, but the condition of all of us’ (1998:246).
This section has identified a particular discursive view which has been heavily influenced by a
particular reading of Foucauldian concepts, a useful way to conceptualise this is by portraying the
perspective via a kaleidoscopic view as follows:
Diagram 1 –
Turn
Discursive
67
This section has identified a discursive view that demonstrates how power is always circulating,
moving reflecting from outside and inside through the acts of discourse, knowledge and truth.
This calls to mind Foucault’s dispositif that accounts for the social structures which produce an
epistemological foundation for governing and constituting the subject through language.
Philosophical reflections on materiality
I will now move from Foucault’s epistemological approach to a more ontological approach that
centres on the practices of ‘being’ ill. The nature of a severe chronic illness means that it affects
the sensory modalities of human existence and can, through the reality of suffering, subordinate
the ability to describe and share the depth of pain. The physical pain displaces that which is
known, the intensities of pain and suffering causing language to maybe become momentarily lost.
How is it then possible to explain long term suffering? How is it possible to confront, live and
survive with an impaired body? While Foucault employed a genealogical lens to understand the
mechanisms of power, Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004) utilised the notion of the rhizome as a
conceptual tool through which to amalgamate the multiplicities of desire that constitute life. For
them, existence moves in and out of discourse, with no walls or divides, a flowing system.
Delving into particular aspects of Deleuzian theory helped me to understand chronic illness and
in particular ME, whereby it was possible to examine the process of becoming through
rhizomatic assemblages. These terms were employed to conceptualise the multiplicities, the
continuous flux and flow of desire. Below I will unravel particular ideas by Deleuze and later with
Guarrtari on the notion of being and becoming an unhealthy/healthy subject.
Critically mapping subjective experiences
In Difference and Repetition ([1968] 2004), Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) builds on mathematical
concepts to map out multiple capacities for the continuous process of ‘becoming’, rather than the
journey to the destination of ‘being’. For those who live with a chronic illness, change is constant
through physical suffering. ME patients face an additional problem: the capricious nature of the
illness means that diagnostic labels and symptomology are difficult to stabilise. Deleuze develops
his work on becoming, together with Felix Guattari (1930-1992) in the two volumes of
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‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, namely Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2004) and A
Thousand Plateaus ([1980] 2004). Guattari, a trained psychiatrist and radical activist, explored
mental illness and worked with Deleuze to counter psychoanalytical myths. The dense and often
difficult concepts they developed offer ways to understand the productions of desire, to make
materialist connections between identities/entities and selves/bodies, and may be employed in
the ontological abyss where actions and words are intimately related (DeLanda 2002).
Conceptualising desire
My reading of Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence sees thought as part of a force, as a flow or
movement where reality comes via an active process of becoming. Deleuze questioned Kantian
views on pure reason and argued for going beyond the epistemological basis of rational thought.
If Foucault identified the historical constructions of categories and processes through which
power exists in the present, Deleuze and Guattari explored the relational practices by which the
processes of logic produce particular realities. As with Foucault’s genealogy that mapped the
constructions of a particular phenomenon, Deleuze worked from the premise that all matter
creates difference, which leads to repetition. He applied a machinic assemblage to the flows of
energy and exposed not a passive but an active process in the continuous unfolding of life.
While Foucault’s genealogical approach is useful for tracing the emergence of a contested illness
such as ME, Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of the rhizome as an anti-genealogical
approach as ‘a map and not a tracing’ process (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004:13). The act of
mapping refers to productions rather than reproductions. Importantly for those with severe
illnesses, it could be argued that the nature of suffering is in a constant state of flux, giving rise to
different strata of multiplicities, so that rhizomes may produce different ways of surviving
embodied pain. These multiple dimensions produce codes of survival, through a process of
becoming detached, reversed, modified, torn, reworked or mounted on, by an individual or social
formation (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004:13). The uncertainties of diagnosis and suffering
which typify the disruptive nature of ME constitute multiplicities, are not only associated with the
contestation and confinement associated with ME and severe illness, but also the paradox of
accepting the physical confines of pain and escaping through the sensory world of the
imagination.
Deleuze developed the notion of multiplicities in his early Logic of Sense (1969), as energies that are
non-linear, not necessarily sequential, always workable and hold an active capacity for lines of
development to produce affects as with the management/living with a chronic illness. Deleuze
suggests that this notion of multiplicity has been used in Foucault’s work, such as Archaeology of
Knowledge, whereby the ‘discursive order of places and the position occupied by the subject’
correlates and connects to ‘the statement and the subject’, which he sees as a possible multiplicity
in action (Deleuze [1986] 2006:10). Equally, those with a contested illness such as ME, may
continually be forced to search for the discursive stability of a label/diagnosis that offers the
subject a positioned identity. He further states that the Order of Things, the processes through
which scientific structures produce the episteme enabling knowledge to constitute the conditions
of possibility, ‘represents the most decisive step yet taken in the theoretical-practice of
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multiplicities’ (Deleuze [1986] 2006:13). It then follows that any situation, event, movement is as
an assemblage of multiplicities. Foucault’s use of a dispositif [apparatus] is similar to that of
Deleuze’s notion of assemblages [arrangements] as both comprise diverse strata. Deleuze
employed his concept as a means of reference for the dynamics of desire to include the
expressive material response of life:
On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, actions and passions, an intermingling
of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation,
of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a
vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which
stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterriotrialization, which carry it away (Deleuze and Guattari
[1980] 2004:97-98).
In relation to severe illness, the bedroom, the bed and the bedridden can be seen as an
assemblage necessary for survival. However, these do not represent the totality of a life of severe
illness; these are parts, not determinants, as the capacities are always relational (DeLanda
2002:67). In other words, the capacities are always transient and in a constant the process of
being and becoming ill, requires assistance from inside the home family/carers to the
doctors/health professionals outside the space of the home. Deleuze’s idea of singularity
identifies the possible decisive points where change occurs. In relation to those with severe
illness, these singularities may be seen as the active responses to the subjective experience of pain
and fatigue. The combined singularities constitute the multiplicities of a moment, an episode of
suffering, where the sufferer is not passive but takes an active response to becoming bedridden.
This may not be directly connected to, but is affected by, the multiplicities of the social world
beyond the doors or windows of the bedroom. As Proust described bedbound it is possible one
waits remembers taste, people and listens to the world seemingly unconnected, but dependent on
the social context of time. However, for the house/bedbound there may be a serious necessity to
listen and wait for others who aid their daily survival. Actions are, therefore, relational, affected
by the perceptions, beliefs and actions of self and others. This reflects the affects and effects of
objects and subjects. So, it could be argued that, although not engaging with the social world
whist bedridden inside a bedroom, one is nonetheless affected by the social multiplicities beyond
the space of the bed as one may wait remembering the social world, outside, if totally dependent
possibly, waiting for the hours to pass for medication. So that movement is part of actual and/or
virtual multiplicities, while the intensities differ and reflect the flows and flux of energy,
constituting a particular materiality by which a life can be lived with embodied suffering.
DeLanda offers a point at which to develop a new material ontology by synthesising connections
between past and present memories, the cyclical return that binds and stabilises both traditional
ideas for the subject and the desire that metamorphoses and ruptures self (DeLanda 2002).
Where those with long term illnesses may expereince the return as memories that become
dreams, desires to be that which one was in the now.
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Employing a particular reading of the concepts of desire
The schizophrenic approach in Anti-Oedipus could be said to craft connections between what
Foucault thought of as power and Deleuze and Guattari as desire. Yet, the notion of the desiring
machine can be used to understand life with a chronic illness, as it is based on two concepts –
desiring-production and social-production. These are used conjointly in systems such as
capitalism, which encourages us to be a labouring workforce that continues to produce energy, so
that we are valued as machines through financial rewards. This sparks the psychic desire to live
outside of the body’s confines and adhere to the social norms of the work ethic. Pleasure is based
on psychic energy and demonstrates how social productions work to manifest desire, ranging
from the individual need to be healthy to work and be part of the institutions of the family, the
workplace, the hospital. The rise of TB during the 19th century and Yuppie Flu in the 20th
century demonstrates how illness affected the means of production and confounded social
norms.
As a desiring machine, a severely ill subject may not always be able to put into language the
experience of illness. The psyche and social productions can drive the body to work beyond its
capacity, as the supply of energy strives to disrupt and distribute, to work and rework ‘the
productions of consumptions’, to feed the endless demands for interrelated actions and passions
within the desiring machine (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 2004:4). Importantly, these actions
distinguish all types of energy forces whether animal, plant or the environment. This approach
takes into account the purity of life where all forms are bound by binary laws of flow-producing
forces and desiring productions. For the unhealthy ME body, energy input and output becomes
disrupted, while the inability to manifest a social self and manage the body under attack causes
the sufferer to experience a draining of their life force.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the human body has the capacity to represent all living organisms as it
can affect and be affected. Deleuze’s early reading of Antonin Artaud’s (1948) notion of a ‘Body
without Organs’ (BwO) in Logic of Sense (1969) was further developed with Guattari in terms of
the production of desire. This is not necessarily connected to an actual body, as BwO offers a
means to envisage the state of constant flux within and outside a body. It refers to organisms, an
organ which has no boundaries, which has the capacity for continuous change and the potential
to venture into spaces. In its simplest form, it is an essence of different intensities and rests on
assemblages that produce different affects within the fields of immanence and the state of
continually becoming. The BwO cannot escape the psyche; it is not about lack, as in
psychoanalysis, rather it is tied to processes of production and is the opposite of lack. Shildrick
suggests that with a disability, as with sexuality, the focus should not be on parts of bodies, or
disabled or able bodies, but rather upon ‘the process of becoming that is often an unmapped
circulation of desire’ (Shildrick 2009:135). My reading of Deleuze’s BwO is that the synthesis
constitutes a particular mode of production and requires an infinite analysis that is part of and
may be included in the body, which is always occupied and populated by intensities. Importantly,
the BwO ‘is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree’
(Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004:169). The BwO could be said to personify the desire for the
perpetual becomings that is life itself – it is the raw existence of life, the matter that rests on the
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plane of consistency. Fox (2011) takes up the BwO to account for how ill-health is an assemblage
that is attached to various networks that include biological, psychological and sociocultural
relations. He argues for biomedical approaches to move the focus from within bodies, to explore
embodiment itself, the ontological aspects that shape the ill body, not as a separate entity, but as a
living cell without boundaries, a ‘Body without Organs’ that is based on assemblages, and consistent
territorialisation (Fox 2011:359).
Fox’s (2002) notion of refracting health in terms of the body/self - examines the dynamic
tensions that exist between cultural practices and embodied subjectivity. He focused on the
effects of anorexia, which can be seen as a psychological issue that produces physical effects.
Both anorexia and ME may cause particular singularities through which to escape the imaginary
or physical confines of pain. The multiplicities of physical limitation, such as being confined to
the bed, may mean that outside stimuli will be used to deterritorialize from the incorporeity of
pain, of the shame of being bedridden. This may suggest a role for the virtual aspects of the self,
in order to excite memories that will offer a way to escape the reality of pain and open up new
possibilities for surviving life with a severe chronic illness.
Deleuze’s materialist stance creates a particular ontological reading of the relationship between
repetition and difference. Repetition of time and structure produces difference via the notion of
habit, which leads to assumptions which produce what he terms larvae selves (Deleuze [1968]
2004). In contrast with Foucault’s use of the inscribed subject, larvae selves are made up of
miniature egos that can be part of material as well as constructed notions of reality. Equally,
Freud used these excitations, or energies, in a systematised way (Freud [1912-1938] 1984). For
Deleuze, egos fragment the meanings associated between I and self (Deleuze [1968] 2004:320).
Like Proust (Proust [1913] 2014), Deleuze demonstrates how the relationship between the past
and the present reveals the cyclical nature of time. Repetitions ignite sensory evocations, where
actions or memories in the moment can produce a passion linked to the past, while a rupture that
breaks through anew produces difference within what is termed empty time (Deleuze [1968]
2004:136). A chronic illness is continually rupturing and moving, at times, in on itself, as the body
in pain may be said to exist outside the constructions of time.
Deleuze’s notion of the refrain, although often employed within music theory, may also be used
in relation to the experience of chronic illness. The concept relates not only to the socio-political
imperatives that produce the subject, but also to the ontological and aesthetic methods for
producing the beginnings of order out of the forces of chaos. The refrain can mark out a territory
such as a home, as well as suggesting lines of flight from that centre into the sphere of the
cosmos (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004:343-344). Deleuze’s notion of the refrain denotes a
relationship between the forces of chaos and the rhythm of life which is helpful in understanding
the way in which those who are bedridden plug in and plug out of their social worlds.
Foucault offers a way to understand the dynamics of power that operate to produce the subject.
Deleuze, meanwhile, allows us to explore the rhizomatic and interconnected nature of all
experiences, people, bodies, events and places. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not about the
substance of matter but the assemblages and multiplicities by which forces unfold. The line of
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flight could be said to refer to ‘the deterritorialization that carries away all of the assemblages but
also undergoes all kinds of reterritorializations’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004:98). For those
who are bedridden, the boundaries of the bed represent an imaginary circle within which they
negotiate living in an internal space, while the forces of chaos are the continual occurrences of
pain and suffering. The battle with illness takes place as those who suffer may search for lines of
flight to escape the confines of the body in pain and find a passage out of what may be
experienced as a ‘black hole’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004:344).
This section has been concerned with the material effect of illness. The following kaleidoscopic
view is employed to demonstrate the reflective power of desire from outside and inside, much as
Foucault had examined power.
Diagram 2 – A Turn to New Materialism
For Deleuze and Guarrtari the model of the rhizome demonstrates how different intensities and
multiplicities activate particular acts of becoming. This diagram could be used to demonstrate
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of an assemblage, as well as employed to understand the
epistemological and ontological dynamics that identify the process of becoming.
Bakhtinian philosophical reflections on the narrating subject
This section will look at how narrative is both a functional and communicative social tool. For
Foucault and Roland Barthes (1915-1980) language is based on a structure, a regulative device
that signifies inclusion and exclusion of the author. For Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), Foucault
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and Deleuze, language inscribes the subject through text and the dialogic apparatus of the
linguistic and the institutional power relations. This takes into consideration the context in which
one inscribes the self. Bakhtin employs particular concepts to understand the dialectic context
specifically the chronotope which is about positionality, his ideas on utterances which are seen as
always relational and his term heteroglossia which encompasses all aspects of language and
reiterates the importance of how the dialogic process is governed by the relational and contextual.
A particular reading of Bakhtinian concepts
Bakhtin’s work on the interactions between time and space, the dialectic qualities of speech and
language and how storied selves produce a social, cultural and personal context, are all relevant in
this context. Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope provides a way to understand the relationship
between time and space in narration. Bakhtin recognised the temporal and spatial relations, which
in literary novels are governed by particular genres, relating to an event or particular moment in
which a story is told. Specific to chronotope is the positionality of the narrator – who speaks and
when – and the fact that the narration is always governed by context. For Bakhtin, foremost is
the social and cultural context which governs memories, actions, speech and acts of listening and
‘characterises the chronotope’ (Bakhtin 1981:250).
Bakhtin goes on to suggest that the chronotope produces narrative events that constitute a
particular materiality. He offers specific and heterogeneous ways in which to understand places
on the journey of life, within time and space. Importantly, the chronotope is historically
contextualised as it moves from one moment to another. Bakhtin critiques the figure of the
ready-made hero in the majority of novels, suggesting that ‘the aspect of man’s essential becoming’
is often ignored as ‘events change his destiny... but he himself remains unchanged’ (Bakhtin
1986:19-20). Unlike the literary hero, in the context of ME/CFS the hero/heroine continually
changes in time and space.
Chronotopes have an interactive quality that is governed by the relationship of the reader to the
text, or the relationship between the narrator and the listener in the case of spoken narrative.
Bakhtin identified the links between language and materiality as a means by which the
chronotope is able to facilitate the interactions between real and possible worlds, as well as
mediating the relationship between self and other. For Bakhtin, the utterance is shaped by the
object of discourse (such as illness) and the listener, displaying their belief systems and how this
can be understood (Bakhtin 1986:17). An utterance is made by the subject and is produced in
social and personal contexts, in relation to the situatedness of the subject in terms of others,
objects and space. The author/narrator needs to convey to their audience the authorship of the
utterance. With a contested illness, a storyteller may be aware of both the social stigma associated
with their illness and the medical contestation affecting the presentation of their story.
Following Bury’s idea of the ‘biographical disruption’ that is associated with chronic illness
(1982), Gomersal and Madill develop the notion of chronotope disruption, which focuses on ‘the
grounding of biographical disturbance in time and space’ (2015:408). They argue that a
chronotopic analysis is useful for establishing connections and disconnections between the spatial
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and temporal situatedness of illness. The fusion that usually occurs in a chronotope is made
problematic when one is chronically ill. The chronotope, in its endeavours to include both time
and space, also takes into consideration cultural aspects not only in relation to illness but to all
the fragmentations of life.
Unlike Foucault’s genealogy which concentrated on the interaction between history and language,
Bakhtin’s use of the term heteroglossia relates to the specificity of the relationship between
utterance and context. He employs the term to account for the multiplicities of language, dialects
and the associated qualities they have with various social groups.
all languages of heteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying them and making each
unique, are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in
words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values.
As such they all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one another,
contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically. (Bakhtin 1981:291-2)
In this way, heteroglossia takes into account how language does not exist in isolation but is a
product of and is constituted by context. For Bakhtin, language is always in relation to another,
even when that other is the inner voice (Bakhtin 1981:xxi). In terms of heteroglossia, it is the
layers of language, the dialogic qualities that reveal how, in the involuntary acts of language such
as laughter, the parody of life can seep through. Therefore, stories that include the events that
lead to the diagnosis and a life of chronic illness may not simply be conveyed in words, but also
through actions.
Bakhtin’s theory of language is useful in the context of my research as a tool to conceptualise the
way in which language can be understood in terms of the historical and contextual disruptive
aspects of living with chronic illness. In order to understand how heteroglossia can be used in
terms of chronic illnesses, it is useful to make connections with Hyden’s notions of illness and
narrative as a particular amalgamation between languages and a specific community of speakers.
When telling the story of illness it is often recounted through the tension between a healthy and
unhealthy subject.
Hyden states that:
Often the narrator vacillates between these two perspectives in one and the same illness
narrative. To speak in the illness voice is to depict the illness ‘from the inside’, from the
vantage point of the suffering person’s ongoing situation. To speak in the illness voice is
to identify with the illness and accompanying suffering. It is to talk like a person who is, in
fact, ‘ill’. To speak in the voice of the healthy is to talk about the illness as something
extraneous, something that has invaded one’s life from the outside; or also it is to talk
about something that has been, something that had befallen one earlier in life (Hyden
1997:62).
In this way, Hyden highlights the capacity of narrative to depict the different voices that co-exist
when conveying the unsettling experience of illness.
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Performance and narrative
Bakhtin describes the carnival in terms of its historical manifestation as an oppositional display of
medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture, whereby the performer has the opportunity to live a
kind of utopian existence for a moment when all things seem possible (Bakhtin 1984:4).
Participation offered both the actor and the spectator freedom and release in the form of
humour, akin to Bergson’s notion of the parodies of laughter (Bergson [1911] 1999). This offered
the possibility of living briefly as the other, resisting the boundaries of social and cultural
hierarchy and morality and the realities of life. Ironically, severe illness may also allow the
individual to step outside normal social roles, by presenting an opportunity to succumb to the
desire to abandon the acceptable appearance of the social self. Just like Bakhtin’s aesthetic
materiality of the grotesque, unfinished bodies reside in a non-vernacular world, where a mask
may be worn to juxtapose reality and imagery (Bakhtin 1984:40). With severe illness it could be
argued that there are long periods of a kind of grotesque realism where it may not be possible to
wash, get dressed or eat unaided. Although stories may depict this in a negative light, it could
arguably be seen as a kind of carnivalised performance. Where the lack of following the rituals of
daily life not only deviates from the norm, but exposes aspects of life that is averse to healthy
living. Whereby, those who experience severe impairments may wear the mask of health to hide
the effects of pain and suffering.
For Foucault, the constructions of subjects such as the madman, the prisoner and the patient are
regulated by exterior powers and are discursively constituted identities. In a similar way, Butler’s
notion of the female highlights the difficulties of resistance when a subject is captured and
constrained by discourse and social practice (Butler 1993:15). Just as Butler identifies how we
learn to perform normative cultural expressions of gender (Butler 1990:25), it is also possible to
identify how we perform the role of the healthy subject. In a study of male illness narratives of
living with Multiple Sclerosis, for example, Riessman demonstrates how performances of gender
and illness intersect (Riessman 2002:11). The social requirements of performing as a healthy
subject may weigh heavily on those with severe illness as they are loaded with moral and social
values which dictate ‘civilised’ ways of being. For those who feel obliged to pretend to be well,
performance can be seen in acts of monotonous role play.
For those for whom the performance of the healthy subject becomes impossible, the use of a
proxy to fulfil this role may occur. Hyden (2008) discusses the problems of having an authorial
voice in relation to people who have suffered an illness/accident. He notes the interaction
between those who have lost or have no voice and a person who works as their supporting or
‘vicarious voice’, where the production of a self is made possible through another who acts as
their storyteller. Hyden outlines how people with broken voices need a cohesive relationship with
another person to reconstitute the self into an integral whole, as responsibility is shifted to the
teller (Hyden 2008). The problems of giving a voice where one is absent must be acknowledged,
but it is also important to consider how stories are never told but shared, through a collaboration
of social and cultural knowledge.
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This section has been concerned with a particular theoretical approach to narrative and as with
other sections a kaleidoscopic view that highlights the importance of context has been created.
Diagram 3 – The Dialogic Turn
The act of storytelling represents a way to connect the discursive material and subjective contexts
of life. The above diagram identifies a dialogic approach which focuses on the importance of
context and the relationship between time and space. The dialogic relationship between self and
other, between and within things, are brought together in a socio-cultural context that can be
achieved through narration.
Conclusion
Foucault’s dispositif reveals how social systems produce layers of discursive relations.
Institutional regulative laws and moral codes form the structures of truth within which a
contested and severe illness is experienced. The mechanisms that control the body are, therefore,
seen to be discursively governed. By situating how language inflects the constructions of the
subject, the notion of ‘doing illness’ can be explored in terms of how it is possible to gain
resistance and reconstitute sickness norms. However, when looking at a long term illness that
defies medical and social understanding, it is important to not only examine language, but also
take into account the corporeal site of a sick body and the material conditions of illness. Deleuze
and Guattari’s concepts can, therefore, be used to facilitate a new materiality. Equally, theorising
narrative offers a means to highlight the contextual and relational aspects of space and time in the
storied self, which reveals how the subject is a political, social and cultural artefact made up of
different and often internalised voices.
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The metaphor of the kaleidoscope demonstrates how one slight turn can offer an alternative
viewpoint. As with mechanisms of power which control technologies of the self, the formulation
of subjectivity is rarely stationary. The complexities derived from multiple reflections show how
control of the object/subject is merely suspended in momentary episodes where technologies of
the self are woven within symmetrical socio-cultural patterns. Multiplicities of socio-cultural
forms govern within particular political resolutions of power in time and space. Each turn of the
kaleidoscope allows macroscopic and microscopic details to emerge, opening up the pathways
between knowledge, truth and power. The kaleidoscopic enquiry enables us to examine
genealogically the formations, discontinuities and complexities as multiple reflections, providing
the opportunity to take a bio-psycho-social perspective, which incorporates the interactions of
body, self and society. When taken together, the three turns of the kaleidoscope demonstrate
how the intersection of the theories help us to understand the discursive, material and dialogic
implications of living with severe ME. These aspects are embedded, embodied and inscribed in
the acts of becoming diagnosed with a contested illness and living with the severe symptoms of a
chronic illness such as ME.
This final diagram is employed as a means to bring the three sections together. This kaleidoscope
view is a way of making a particular judgement in motion; at a turn focus is made on power and
its effects likewise with desire and the importance of context. This final diagram demonstrates all
parts of reflections and effects upon the various parts, so that discourse can be viewed through
the notion of an assemblage and a chronotope into a heterotopia. The prime rationale for
employing this devise is to demonstrate how it keeps thing moving in and out of regularity just
like the body and specifically for those living with a severe chronic illness.
Diagram 4 – Kaleidoscopic View
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The above kaleidoscopic views are brought together in order to show the reflective qualities of
the conceptual theories within this paper. In particular the final diagram demonstrates the multivaried/faceted dimensions and the ever-shifting movements within and between the three
approaches under discussion. Both Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari have referred to the use of
diagrams. For Foucault the Panopticon diagram represented:
a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any
obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical
system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from
any specific use (Foucault, 1977: 205)
For Deleuze the notion of the abstract machine can be represented as diagrammatic where spaces
of energy are not physical, corporeal or semiotic, therefore not having substance, function or
form (Deleuze, 1977, 141). With isomorphic qualities which make connections to similar
behaviours, concepts can interchange and the endogenous nature can be stablised into a
particular understanding. As I have attempted to do on living with a severe chronic illness. To
follow Deleuze notion that matter, objects, subjects and therein thought-patterns ‘constructs a
real that is yet to come, a new type of reality’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977, 141-142). Deleuze
alluded to the constant change and movement of energy and form. However, Bakhtin criticised
visual forms as a means to represent concepts and ideas via schematic and symbolic forms. The
argument being that in terms of communication there are no fixed unified ‘listeners’ and
‘understanders’ as it is inherently responsive to the moment, the meaning simultaneously activates
a response (Bakhtin, 1986, 68).
The diagrams are then to be seen as only an abstract account and cannot represent the whole in
terms of the narrative. The spatial organisation of the kaleidoscope has been used as a
composition for particular concepts. This concurs with the theorists within that power/desire
matter/life relational/context is continuously unfolding.
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Sharon Gallagher has just completed her PhD titled: ‘ME and its Discontents: Life Stories and
Photo-Elicited Diaries of a severe chronic illness’ (unpublished 2016). The thesis was concerned
with the issues of living with long term impairments. In particular, her examination drew on the
aspects of ‘doing’ and ‘being’ ill by focusing on the discursive, material and contextual acts of
struggling and surviving with what has been termed a contested and can be experienced as a
severe chronic illness. Sharon has been a member of Centre of Narrative Research (CNR) at the
University of East London since 2002 and a member of the London MedSoc Group (2014). Her
‘Mentoring with (a) Difference’ group was specifically designed for disabled students to discuss
social and academic issues (2007-8). Sharon has presented widely on her thesis and on the
benefits of specialist mentoring nationally and internationally (Gallagher, 2007, Girt and
Gallagher, 2009). Her major interests are impairments, disability, narrative, visual/art and
medical sociology and making connections with Foucauldian and Deleuzian theories. She is
currently developing ideas on inclusivity for disabled students at university.
Contact details: Sharon Gallagher School of Social Sciences, University of East London 4-6
University way, London E16 2RD e-mail: [email protected]
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Working the hyphens:
reflections on doing psycho-social research in Bangladesh.
Phoebe Beedell
ABSTRACT
Postcolonial critics remind us of our privileged positions and the political and ethical
responsibilities we carry as researchers and authors. I am a white, British middle-class woman
engaged in psycho-social research with professional NGO workers and social activists in
Bangladesh. The question of how my identity and positionality plays out in the research and how
I account for it is therefore acutely relevant.
Cunliffe and Karunanayake (2013), and Fine (1994) offer the notion of hyphen-spaces to reflect
upon influences that shape our engagement, affect our progress and colour our representations
of the data, thus enabling us to recognize the taken-for granted as well the obvious forces at
work. The hyphen is still a contested semantic device in psycho-social studies (Frosh, 2014) but
‘the real issue, as it has always been, is how to produce concepts that have explanatory power’
(Jefferson, 2008). Following Jefferson, I want to use the notion of hyphen spaces in this paper to
explore the realities of doing qualitative research in a foreign country and as a framework from
which to view other conceptual possibilities. Etherington points out that reflexivity-related
dilemmas stem from our fear of being judged as narcissistic, lacking in self-awareness, or
anxieties over public exposure. This paper purposefully includes some of the most awkward,
embarrassing and emotionally demanding episodes in my research journey. Their inclusion will go
some way towards explaining the intricacies, complexities and sheer messiness of the work we do,
both emotionally and cognitively, as qualitative researchers.
The schema of hyphen spaces is a useful heuristic tool that can assist us in mapping relationships
between the researcher and the researched, but the complex realities of fieldwork and datagathering cannot always be so neatly accommodated. As Corbin Dwyer and Buckle propose, it is
not ones particular status that is the ‘core ingredient’ of a prudent researcher but the ‘ability to be
open, authentic, honest, deeply interested in the experience of ones research participants, and
committed to accurately and adequately representing their experience’ (Corbin Dwyer and
Buckle, 2009). Jessica Benjamin considers the notion of surrender ‘to the principle of reciprocal
influence in interaction which makes possible both responsible action and freely given
recognition’ (Benjamin, 2004) (p11). Whilst we may use a variety of tools in our attempts at
reflexive practice I suggest that in ‘working the hyphens’ we also need to surrender to a good deal
of discomfort and anxiety.
85
I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a
new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become
mine, my own. Re-writing you, I write myself anew. I am still
author, authority. I am still the colonizer, the speak subject, and
you are now at the centre of my talk.
hooks, b (1990, pp151-152) cited in
Fine 1994.
This declaration acts is a sharp reminder to qualitative social scientists like myself, of our
privileged position as authors and ‘authorities’, and the political and ethical ramifications of our
choices in our relationships with those who we place at the ‘centre of our talk’. – whether we
refer to them our objects or subjects, informants, respondents or participants. Twenty-five years
on from this oft-quoted reminder, and the multiple postcolonial, deconstructionist,
poststructuralist and feminist entreaties and invitations that surround it, we as researchers, are still
grappling with the implications and practical application of reflexivity to our own research
projects.
From the outset of my research journey, I have felt the words of postcolonial critics such as
hooks and Spivak ringing in my ears. An entry in my research journal during my first semester as
a PhD student reflects this sense of unease with my place in the research:
I have been rather struggling, in thoughtful moments, when I try to rationalize what a
white foreigner can possibly bring to the research encounter with developing-world
participants, and whether or not it is exploitative and neo-colonial to think I can make
pronouncements about their practices and psychic realities. (Field journal, Nov 2013)
I have, I think, foregone the rather grandiose idea of ‘making pronouncements’, but the
uncomfortable question of how identity and positionality plays out across the biography of the
research and how we account for it remains. My recent experience of a discussion on reflexivity
amongst a mixed group of sociologists at the BSA Bourdieu Study Group5 conference confirmed
this enduring anxiety with the practice of reflexivity, but I found it both reassuring to know that I
am not alone and that complacency has not (yet) set in.
Issues of identity and positionality arise immediately when I say my doctoral research is a psychosocial study of professional NGO workers and social activists in Bangladesh. I often have to
explain to interested Westerners that the ‘NGO workers’ I refer to are not the foreign expatriates
‘we’ send out to ‘do development’ in places like Bangladesh, but local, professionally-qualified
people working within a variety of organizations concerned with generating knowledge, imparting
skills, advocating and acting for social change in their own country. These polite enquiries
marked one of the first departure points on my reflexive journey as they seemed to unwittingly
expunge the ‘local’ development workers from the purview of academic research, suggesting a
5
British Sociological Association’s Bourdieu Study Group Conference, University of Bristol July 2016.
86
neo-colonial myopia at large, as if NGO were staffed only by ‘experts’ dispatched from the global
north.
My research participants (as I have chosen to call them, acknowledging the co-constructed nature
of my narrative methodology) are well-resourced, well-educated people, far from the image of the
subaltern painted by Spivak. The study is about how people involved in the development sector
negotiate the ethical, moral and social dilemmas inherent in their work. I have conducted 57
biographical narrative and other semi-structured interviews, in English, with 37 men and women
(equally), aged 25 to 65 over the course of eight months of fieldwork mostly in Dhaka,
Bangladesh. My thesis focuses on the 24 younger participants aged 25 – 45 who represent a postLiberation war generation born after 1971. My participants occupy a particular middle ground
between the top-down development initiatives of foreign aid donors and the bottom-up realities
and concerns of the poor and ultra-poor beneficiaries.
Reflexivity, as summarized by Etherington, means being aware ‘in the moment’, over time and at
both concrete and abstract levels of what is influencing our internal responses and external
actions in relation to our participants, our data and our topic. These influences shape our
engagement with theoretical, institutional, cultural and personal constructs, affect our progress
and colour our representations of the data. Being attuned to these influences means being able to
recognize the taken-for granted as well the obvious forces at work. Reflexivity certainly supports
us as we face ethical issues and attempt to address the power relationships operating within our
research. Being transparent in documenting and taking account of our responses and actions
invites audiences to make their own judgments on the validity and rigour of our findings
(Etherington, 2004). Spivak challenges us to engage with our researchers in intimate and
dialogical ways, but does not offer particularly practical advice or suggestions about how we
actually go about (Kapoor, 2004).
Cunliffe and Karunanayake following Fine (1994) offer the notion of hyphen-spaces to reflect
upon Geetha Karunanayake’s experience as an academic researcher studying the lives of tea
plantation workers in Sri Lanka, the country of her birth. While Spivak would describe this
position as ‘native informant’, the notion of hyphen-spaces is perhaps more practically useful in
helping to map our multiple identity positions and expose our subjectivity. Recognizing, and
‘working the hyphens’ as spaces of both identity convergence and divergence Fine argues, means
exploring how our presence influences others, and how their presence influences and changes us.
It means self consciously ‘unpacking notions of scientific neutrality, universal truths, and
researcher dispassion’ (Fine, 1994) (p.71), part of the ‘critical task for qualitative researchers’
which brings to the surface ‘the identity relations that may occur between ourselves and our
research participants’ (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, 2013) (p.365). It is at least a useful concept
with which to begin to chart positionality and to support reflection on the processes of research,
especially when gathering data through interviews.
In psycho-social studies, the significance of the hyphen has been keenly debated between
Lacanian-leaning psychoanalysts and more Kleinian-oriented researchers in an attempt to bring
some definition to this nascent approach to the study of social processes. The former argued that
the psychological and social are inseparable (Frosh, 2003, Frosh and Baraitser, 2008) much like a
continuous line on a Moebius strip. The latter maintain a focus on the differences between the
realms of ‘in here’ and ‘out there’(Jefferson, 2008). An alternate, relational view argues that the
hyphen indicates not a ‘splitting or integration’, but ‘what is ‘‘other than’’ both, that is, what is
different from either of the two milieus that generate it’ (Hoggett, 2008). These differing uses and
87
interpretations of the hyphen as signifying continuum, merger, junction, separator, disjunction, or
an ‘other than’ third space is relevant to how we understand our identities as researchers in
relation to our research participants. The hyphen is still a contested semantic device in psychosocial studies (Frosh, 2014) but Jefferson concluded ‘the real issue, as it has always been, is how
to produce concepts that have explanatory power at both … levels without, thereby, eliminating
the unique dimension of each level’ (Jefferson, 2008).
Following Jefferson, that the issue at stake is an explanatory one, in this paper I want to use the
notion of hyphen spaces to explore the realities of doing qualitative research in Bangladesh as a
white, British middle-class woman. In doing so I will also use it as a framework from which to
view other conceptual possibilities. Etherington points out that some of the dilemmas that arise
out of our attempts to be reflexive researchers stem from our fear of being judged as narcissistic
or lacking in self-awareness, and anxieties over public exposure and the wish to retain our
privacy. This paper purposefully includes some of the most awkward, embarrassing and
emotionally demanding episodes in my research journey, which are otherwise so easily airbrushed out of the reflexive accounting-for process. Their inclusion I believe will go some way
towards explaining the intricacies, complexities and sheer messiness of the work we do, both
emotionally and cognitively, as qualitative researchers.
Cunliffe and Karunanayake set out a number of hyphen-spaces that broadly cover variables of
location, values, subjectivities, emotionality and political engagement. These hyphen spaces are
related to identities of insider-outsider; qualities of sameness-difference; the extent of emotional
engagement-distance; and politically active-politically neutral stances. Leaving aside the last of
these purely for reasons of brevity rather than importance, I will consider how these schematic
categorizations can be ‘worked’ to illuminate my place in the research.
88
Working the hyphens
Insider-outsider
Ethnographers, anthropologists and researchers across the social sciences will be familiar with
this pre-eminent oppositional and it the subject of differing definitions over time and discipline
(Milligan, 2016). Cunliffe and Karunanayake are guided by Louis and Bartunek (1992), who
considers a researcher who is not connected the research site and often only interested in
generalizable knowledge is as having an ‘outsider’ identity, whereas a researcher with an ongoing
relationship with the research site and an interest in the practical application of the knowledge
generated is considered an ‘insider’. Banks (1998) developed further ways of thinking about the
outsider-insider dimension in terms of acceptance by the community under study through
congruence of values between researcher and researched. Researchers might be ‘indigenous’ or
‘alien’ to the context of research subjects; and either sensitive or indifferent to the values and
customs of the community of respondents. Thus the ‘indigenous insider’, Banks contends, is not
only a member of the community under study but is accepted by the research subjects because
they are perceived as sharing experiences, knowledge, customs and values. ‘Alien outsiders’ it
follows, are disconnected from the context and are perceived to have values and social customs
that are at odds with those of the researched community. Two more categories spring from
Banks’ writing: the ‘indigenous outsider’, who may share origins and cultural knowledge with the
researched but are treated with suspicion because of their acculturation with values and social
norms from outside the research site; and alien or ‘external insiders’ who originate from outside
the research location but have been accepted by the community they are studying because they
have adopted or acculturated to the same customs and values. My position within Bank’s
taxonomy was perhaps closest to ‘external-insider’, but a number of authors, including Cunliffe
and Karunanayake have sought to reconsider insider-outside-ness not as fixed but fluid, and
highly contextualized socially, politically and culturally (Arthur, 2010, Katyal & King 2011;
McNess et al 2013 as cited in Milligan).
The fluidity and contextualized nature of my insider-outsider position was apparent in my first
visits to Bangladesh in 2010. My partner at the time was managing a large ‘flagship’ project for
DfID and was a respected and popular team leader. My partner’s status, to a large extent,
provided me with easy & affordable access to the country, and a certain kudos with potential
participants who knew of this connection. By the time the fieldwork began in early 2014 I had
acquired the quasi-official, laughably gender-neutral title of ‘trailing spouse’ (Eyben, 2012). I had
access to many of the privileged ‘spaces of aid’: a clean, safe and pleasant neighbourhood to live
in, occasional transport in air-conditioned 4x4s, and access to the exclusive ‘international’ clubs
of Dhaka that serve as places of cultural practice and inscription (through alcohol consumption,
sporting and social activities) for the ‘international community’ (Smirl, 2015), and function as
both cosmopolitan and colonial ‘contact zones’ (Conway, 2011). The ‘boss’s wife’ identity in this
milieu, provided a certain amount of ‘insider’ access to the conversations of visiting experts and
technical advisers and more usefully, opportunities to visit various development projects and
meet NGO workers and social activists with a view to recruitment. Independently, I attended a
variety of other events that could also be characterized as ‘contact zone’ events: policy dialogue
seminars and workshops, presentations, including TedX Dhaka, and NGO gatherings. On these
occasions I would sometimes feel uncomfortably like an interloping head-hunter, listening and
observing carefully, before pouncing on potential participants in a rather ‘guerilla mode’ of
89
engagement that Moore-Gilbert, reviewing Spivak, notes is less easily(re)appropriated by the
dominant hegemony (as cited in Kapoor, 2004, p.640).
Altogether, these occasions not only provided me with valuable insight into the operational
politics and rituals of development aid, but allowed me to engage with local NGO workers about
their work and speak about my planned research. In the course of these conversations with
potential participants and informal gatekeepers, I often shared my experience of development
work during a ten-year sojourn in Southern Africa, which may have solidified my identity as an
external-insider: new to Bangladesh, but with an understanding of the development scene and aid
industry and a purpose which was clearly distinct from internal NGO appraisal and monitoring
processes. My interest in the lives and concerns of professional development workers was almost
always greeted with interest, respect and enthusiasm and my strategy of recruiting through
personal contacts proved very fruitful.
This external-insider position faltered seriously on only one occasion when a participant began to
criticize her manager, a sociable and out-going British man. She expressed concern that I might
be friends with this man and queried not only the confidentiality of what she was about to say,
but also, I think, whether I would take personal offence at the criticism. I reiterated the
confidentiality of the data and acknowledged that although the man was an acquaintance of mine,
he was not a personal friend. In this way, her questioning enabled her to gauge the strength and
nature of my ‘insider’ (knowledge and allegiances) and ‘external’ (professional) credentials. This
is an example of how the already nuanced hyphen space of Banks’ ‘external-insider’ may contain
further subtleties and variations that are perceived differently by each participant. The fluidity and
contextualized nature of this identity was leveraged by potential participants on one occasion in a
performative manner, beyond the research context, in a way that challenged my own sense of
identity and values and served as a stark reminder of the ways in which colonial dominance
endures and is reproduced.
Being the object of spectacle in the ‘Third World’ will be familiar to many white travellers
especially in less-visited rural areas, and development workers have the added hazard of
expectation that their presence will bring some relief or salvation to the population. While
accompanying my partner and his colleagues on working trips to regional and rural projects I
would walk with them through fields and villages, often quite literally enacting the ‘trailing
spouse’ identity. As the only white female in the party, I was always subject to the collective gaze
of ‘the other’, becoming surrounded by curious children or approached by local women wanting
to get a closer look. Through intermediaries, they would enquire about my marital and childbearing status and ask me into their houses. I began to refer to these moments, ironically, as
‘Princess Anne moments’6 since they embodied the image of the gracious white woman visiting
poor brown people. These moments occurred when the dissonance between the social positions
of ‘them’ and ‘us’ were at their most stark. No doubt my naming of these moments with a sense
of black humour helps me to contain my shame, guilt, embarrassment and sense of helplessness
at the enduring global inequalities of esteem, let alone material wealth that these moments
embody. Such moments, I would argue, are a clear example of misrecognition, in the sense of the
Princess Anne, daughter of Queen Elizabeth II, has been president and globe-trotting royal patron of Save the
Children, an international development charity, since 1970. My childhood memories are suffused by images of her
singular rich whiteness surrounded by the masses of poor brown-ness which regularly appeared on British children’s
TV in the 70’s and into the 80’s, just as the era of celebrity development ‘ambassadors’ took off.
6
90
misattribution of qualities to a person or entity (James, 2015) and were to some extent expected
and unavoidable given the geographical location.
One particular occurrence of this form of misrecognition took place in the company of two
potential research participants in Dhaka and served to inform them of my own sense of identity,
values and approach. I was invited to attend a presentation event organized by an urban NGO
working with street children accompanied by a female project officer of my own age and a young
female intern. As we crawled for an hour through the Dhaka traffic, chatting to each other and
on the phone, it became apparent that the expected ‘guest of honour’, the foreign donor’s
delegate, may not be able to attend. We arrived at the appointed venue and it was clear that I was
going to be the only foreigner, the only white person present. As we sat at the back of the room
and listened to the speeches, my younger companion kindly translated in hushed whispers. The
older woman with whom I had developed a warm and informal friendship, suddenly crossed over
to me and asked if I would step in and present awards to the street children in the absence of the
real ‘guest of honour’. In that moment, she and I both recognized the symbolic value of my
white, female body and acknowledged the currency it had within the room - far in excess of any
other attribute I might possess. With a grinding mix of self-conscious internal loathing and a
rather British compulsion to be polite, I reluctantly agreed to perform this role. I duly took my
place at the top table, delivered a three-minute impromptu speech on the value of art in society,
gave out certificates and shook hands with the silent but beaming young artists. As the car
crawled for another hour back through the traffic, my companions and I discussed the incident
and it’s implications and contradictions with good humour and frankness. A fittingly ‘Princess
Anne’ style group photo of this ritualized identity performance appeared in the English daily
newspaper the following day. The incident was minor, but for me the mixture of organizational
face-saving and the re-inscription of symbolic privilege was a strong reminder of the forces at
work in this domain.
I believe that my immediate and explicit reflexivity and discomfort with the ritualized ‘guest of
honour’ performance supported the participants’ positioning of me as someone who was aware
and affected by relations of power within the development sector and that I too was involved in
the ongoing negotiation of ethical dilemmas. I was, in hooks words, ‘still the colonizer’, still the
‘outsider’ and my skin colour was the most visible and enduring marker of differentiation in that
situation. Yet, being accepted by the potential research participants as ‘in’ on the game - accepting
the social rules and expectations of the onlookers whilst also sharing the questioning acceptance
of those customs and values with the potential participants - also marked me as a kind of
‘insider’. Both my companions subsequently introduced me to several other participants and
agreed to become research participants themselves. Later, in interviews, they were able to speak
openly and easily about the inconsistencies and challenges inherent in their development work.
This incident demonstrates how the hyphen space insider-outsider can become folded in upon
itself, stretching the limits of the dyadic metaphor to produce something that is perhaps ‘other
than’ or at least has permeable, less stable and less easily drawn boundaries (Crossley et al., 2016).
Locating one’s position in the hyphen space of insider-outsider involves acknowledging what is
shared and what is not, and in that discourse, matters of sameness and difference constitute a
further hyphen space to consider.
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Sameness-difference
In social science research contexts, sameness and difference is usually understood in terms of
demographic and identity characteristics of age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality or class; and in terms
of the extent of shared life experiences between researchers and the researched. Cunliffe and
Karunanayake (2013) insist that the task of collecting data entails the ‘ongoing negotiation of
meaning’ in relationships that are based on both sameness and difference. In this section I will
explore the hyphen space of sameness-difference through examples that relate to the medium of
communication, education and educational values and gender that are relevant to this negotiation
of meaning.
The extent and nature of my sameness or difference in relation to my participants became fully
apparent in the interview encounter which was firmly bounded by the limitations of language.
Without proficiency in Bangla I was only able to interview participants in English. This limitation
served as an imperfect but pragmatic proxy for a certain level of education and professional
status, the ‘middle-class-ness’ of the people I wanted to study. English is also the lingua-franca of
the international development sector in which the participants operate.
Recruiting through personal and social contacts and snowballing though mostly peer-level
intermediaries, my interviewees were self-selecting and almost all were confident and fluent
English speakers. Many had been educated in English-medium schools and universities, and most
were as fluent as any mother-tongue speaker, albeit speaking an indigenized version of English –
‘Banglish’ as one person joked – to which I had to become attuned. At least one participant was
more comfortable speaking in English than Bangla, and admitted her local language skills were
poor and sometimes interfered with her direct work with beneficiaries. The two or three
participants who were less fluent spoke about how their lack of confidence with English
sometimes impinged upon their work, creating anxieties in their relations with foreigners. In
interviews, I offered a translation of the key concept of ‘ethical dilemmas’ (noitik shangkot) which
yielded useful discussions and opportunities for mutual clarifications as part of the ‘ongoing
negotiation of meaning’. Therefore the ‘language issue’ became an explicit part of many of the
research conversations.
The limitations of language did impede the progress of a small number of interviews but in these
encounters the lack of shared vocabulary was tackled and usually overcome by simply allowing
extra time to negotiate and secure a sense of mutual understanding. Mixing gender pronouns was
a common and confusing error, and grammatical errors of tense sometimes hampered
communication. During these interviews, it was necessary for me to re-cap or paraphrase to
check with the participants that I had correctly grasped the material facts and meaning of what
they were describing. Occasionally, participants dried up or left sentences incomplete. As an
experienced researcher having interviewed a wide range of people in the UK I did not find these
silences and pauses intimidating, but I had to work hard, to think in the moment and judge if,
and at what point I might offer a word that seemed to me to be on the tip of their tongue. Was it
a useful interjection? Was it a word they might have used themselves? Most often, the response
to my interjections would be a gratifying ‘yes, yes’ or ‘exactly, exactly’. On the few occasions I
got it wrong, or misunderstood, we would continue the negotiation until, on most occasions, we
reached a level of communication and shared meaning that seemed satisfactory. On one occasion
when I used the word ‘cynicism’ the participant whipped out her smart phone to look up a
translation. In all these interactions, the qualities of sameness and difference were present in the
language we used, and were a constantly shifting dynamic between interviewer and interviewee.
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Some participants made use of my difference, as embodied in my language and culture, in order
to achieve a kind of sameness, echoing the convolutions present in the ‘Princess Anne moments’.
At least two of the participants acknowledged that being part of the research was a useful
opportunity to practice their English language skills and to ‘build capacity’ as one said, another
was explicit in wanting to engage in a form of intellectual discourse rarely available to him. Some,
including the latter case assumed a sameness when there was difference, and I too assumed
difference where there was sameness. I was a little surprised to find that all but one of the
participants had Masters level degrees, and two of the older cohort had PhD’s themselves. As the
life stories of the participants unfolded, it became clear not only that I shared this particular form
of cultural capital with my research subjects but it was recognized and highly valued by them.
Being attached to a London University also had some currency, lending respectability, credence,
and validity to my position as researcher and to the study. It was clear that as researcher and
researched, we shared a (more or less) common language and a common set of values in relation
to education and academia. Other aspects of our shared cultural capital and common (colonial)
histories were expressed, for instance, in references to cricket which was used more than once as
analogy by participants.
Despite these similarities, there was adequate room for difference and misrecognition to emerge,
which tended towards an over-estimation of my Westernised knowledge and, on odd occasions
an underestimation of my local knowledge. Once, I was asked by a participant if I knew anything
about the 1971 Liberation War and the birth of Bangladesh. I felt mildly affronted (as if I hadn’t
done any background research!) and suddenly an ‘outsider’ - demonstrating how positionality can
alter suddenly within a single encounter. More often, a participant made assumptions about my
knowledge of Western academic institutions, literature or culture. Being attuned to these
moments helped me understand the ways in which these forms of cultural capital are
accumulated, valued and invoked by the participants. For instance, S, one of the wealthiest
participants, who had been educated abroad, assumed I was familiar with the prestigious
university he attended, as he dropped the institution’s name into his narrative. Feeling a little
ignorant and inadequate, and because the reference was immaterial to the conversation, I said
nothing and chose to ‘pass’ (Skeggs and Loveday, 2012) as a member of the same cultural and
social class as the participant. In doing so surrendered to his positioning of me. Later, I ‘Googled’
the institution he mentioned, and discovering it’s top-class reputation I was better able to
understand the easy sense of entitlement he displayed and the distinctiveness of the identity he
projected.
I felt uneasy and embarrassed by my deception and inauthentic response to S and this may have
emboldened me in my later interactions. During my interview with participant O, he quoted
Victor Hugo and drew on the figure of Sisyphus in Greek mythology to help explain his attitude
to his work. At this point my understanding of the participant’s meaning was crucial, and I had
to admit, rather shamefully, to my ignorance of this particular mythological character, quietly
blaming my sub-standard 1970’s education. At the time, I felt I had punctured O’s image of me
as a culturally rich, well-educated sophisticate – ‘a lady of your stature’ as he put it. Later I
reflected that my failure to live up to the standard that O had ascribed to me – an idealized view
of my cultural difference in itself – may have reflected the way in which O felt socially isolated,
rather disappointed with his life and frustrated with his work. The hopes he spoke about, for a
life characterized by enlightened intellectual endeavour were disrupted in much the same way as
his attempts at having an erudite conversation with me. I felt I had let him down, but he
responded with characteristic introjection, taking this failure or rupture of sympathetic sameness
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upon himself. To his self-deprecating ‘I guess you are already bored.’ I replied with an honest
‘No, no, I am fascinated’ and there followed an exchange in which we both struggled to reestablish the stability of the relationship. I felt he was concerned with being a ‘good’ research
subject whilst I was anxiously trying to hold this most chaotic of interviews together and to fulfill
my role as a ‘good’ listener.
Performance anxiety on the part of research subjects (as well as researchers themselves) is not
uncommon in my experience of qualitative research in the UK. It is not unusual, particularly in
free ranging or open ended interviews for some participants to ask ‘Am I making sense?’ ‘Is this
useful?’ or ‘Is this what you want?’. But these sorts of comments were more widespread amongst
the Bangladeshi participants I interviewed, perhaps due to their over-estimation of my status, but
also I believe, an unfamiliarity with the nature of the interview itself. This points to another
dimension of sameness and difference that has to be negotiated in the interview setting. The
expectations of the interviewee of the interview process itself may not match the metatheoretical
approach (objectivist, subjective or intersubjective) of the interviewer. All the participants in this
study spoke about their experiences of schooling in primary, secondary and tertiary education and
described a system that leans heavily toward a didactic and objectivist approach to knowledge
production. This may explain why some participants took time to grasp the subjective and
intersubjective nature of these biographical interviews as co-created narratives, unique to the
encounter.
The sameness-difference in the way the research was perceived can be interleaved with the way
gender sameness-difference played out across the interviews. On the whole, the women gave me
far more of their time and were more forthcoming in our conversations than most of the men.
Female participants seemed generally quicker to grasp the open-ended nature of the biographical
interview and easily took up the opportunity to tell me the details of their family background,
education and career and their thoughts and feelings. My field notes after interviews with the
women are dotted with references to them as ‘definitely chatty’, ‘needing little encouragement’,
‘warm’ and ‘engaged’, ‘amiable’, ‘very expressive’ but also ‘serious and intense’, ‘tough’ and ‘a
political live-wire’. While it was initially more difficult to recruit women, and arrange interview
times, they were much more easily available for second interviews, suggesting that they had more
to say, more stories to tell and were comfortable not just with me, but with the nature of the
research.
With many of the men in the study, I often felt I had to work harder to elicit more than just a
‘told story’ – a series of verifiable facts (Wengraf and Chamberlayne, 2006) - as opposed to the
‘lived life’ of experience and feeling. By contrast, my field notes after interviews with men contain
descriptions of the encounters as ‘formal at first’, ‘slightly awkward at first’, ‘eventually relaxed
and forthcoming’, ‘didn’t expand on much’, ‘jolly but shy’. One male participant began very
formally by announcing his name, place of birth and the minutiae of his school grades. Two other
men gave me a brief summary of their whole lives and careers in under 15 minutes before coming
to a grinding halt. These kinds of interviews would tend to require more probing, more specific
but still open questions to elicit stories and clarification of my interest in thoughts and feelings as
much as facts. As a woman doing research from a qualitative feminist tradition, in a highly
patriarchal society, I anticipated that my gender would colour the way in which the data was
generated. The hesitant beginnings of the male participants meant I had to work harder to build
rapport, based on qualities of sameness across the intransient difference of gender.
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Emotional engagement-distance
Closely associated with the notion of rapport is the idea of empathy. Gair draws attention to the
links between social work practice and qualitative research methods, particularly feminist and
grounded theory approaches that regard empathy as critical to their practice. She reviews the
approaches of sociologists, philosophers, researchers and methodologists who hold empathy to
be at the root of our understandings of everyday lived experiences and who advocate it’s role in
creating the conditions in which the person or subject feels heard, accepted and understood.
Conversely, as Gair notes, authors such as Lather (2009), Watson and Shields (1996) have argued
for the de-reification of empathy and criticized the logic of sameness on which it is based. These
critiques do not so much argue against empathy but call for ‘a kind of a gap - a casting of doubt
on our ‘capacity to know’ - to enable researchers to listen without the presumption of mutuality,
or the existence of ‘common wounds’, implied by empathy.
An example of the value of traversing the hyphen of emotional engagement-distance came
through my relationship with M, with whom my sense of empathy was based on ‘knowing’ and
‘not knowing’. My empathetic response was both immediate, ‘in the moment’ and more long
lasting. I was introduced to M during a trip with my partner to the regional project office of a
sub-contracted NGO. My field notes record M as beginning our first interview quite formally,
sitting with pen and notebook on her lap as if prepared for a job interview. I noted she was
‘obliging and interested in my topic, happy to help though perhaps a bit apprehensive, perhaps
making an effort with her English pronunciation’. I felt very conscious of being the ‘big boss’s
‘wife’ in this situation and attempted to distance myself from this identity by making clear
assurances of confidentiality and anonymity. After about five minutes of recording she asked if
her ‘talking’ was ok and in response to my affirmations and encouragements began to relax. In
the course of this biographical interview, M told me a tragic story about the suicide of one of her
friends, due in part to social inequalities, which had helped propel M into her work for social
change. M became tearful at the recollection and I also began to well up, knowing the pain of
bereavement and feeling empathy with the injustice. We paused, laughed a little at our own
emotionality perhaps as an aid to recovering the ‘formality’ of the interview and continued. M
told me she was having trouble finding a suitable marriage partner and how this was troubling her
family and affecting her choices about where to work – in the NGO’s regional office where she
was doing rewarding work, or nearer her family home where she could be introduced to potential
grooms. M had confided in me about other difficult workplaces issues and I felt a keen sense of
obligation to offer her some support. I found myself thinking about her situation and her friend’s
suicide for several days and mulled over her marriage dilemma for weeks afterwards, wondering
how things would turn out. My feelings of helplessness for her manifest in private fantasies of
introducing her to one of my male participants, and it took some time to come to a more
appropriate, emotionally-distant position, accepting the ‘not knowing’ of how I might help, or
how she might feel about these familial constraints.
By this stage of the research, I had heard many stories of womens careers and personal
flourishing being circumscribed by gender norms and gendered violence. I had listened to several
accounts of personal experiences of loss, harm or discrimination that were motivating these
women to work in the development sector. Gair, (2012), in her consideration of empathy and
researcher positioning brings attention to three overlapping phases of empathetic listening as
theorized by Stein (1917/1989 cited in Gair 2012). The arc of my emotional engagement with M
and her testimony echoes these phases. Firstly the emergence of the experience though objective
and thoughtful listening and a process of ‘tuning in’ which draws on understanding and
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imagination; secondly, a deeper accommodation of the data that connects with the emotional and
subjective response of the listener; and finally, the reemergence of objective insights informed by
these subjective responses (p.139). Following this model, ‘working the hyphen’ between
emotional engagement and emotional distance became a dynamic process over time. Through
this process I came to a far deeper understanding of how, in a profoundly patriarchal society,
making a ‘good’ marriage confers on women high levels of social respectability, which then
functions to protect female development workers from social opprobrium as they work to
challenge these very gender norms, often driven by their own experience of injustice or loss.
This reflexivity helped to strengthen my understanding of the multiple ways in which gender, and
specifically gender discrimination, dominates the everyday lives of these development workers.
Conclusion
By establishing the identity of ‘researcher’, focusing on the scope and purpose of the study,
boundaries are constructed by researchers both implicitly and explicitly. But these boundaries are
subject to change and the negotiation of different positionings and the mutual influences between
researcher and participants. It is at these blurred edges that we begin to question our place and
purpose. (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, 2013) (citing Clandinin, 2006 and Mutua-Kombo, 2009).
In many ways the course of my research interleaves with the topic of the research itself. My
efforts have been directed towards exploring the participants’ reflexivity, reflexively and acting
ethically whilst researching the ethical activities of others. At the same time I am critiquing the
domination of neo-liberal ideologies and neo-colonial tendencies of the aid and development
sector whilst being closely imputed in it’s structures, power relations and practices. Writing about
others I am indeed writing myself ‘anew’. The act of doing a PhD is a process of shifting
identity: from ‘employee’ to ‘student’ to ‘Doctor’ and my progress through the arc of a PhD
programme is but one aspect of the biographical nature of my research.
The schema of hyphen spaces is a useful heuristic tool that can assist us in mapping positionality
and examining relationships between the researcher and the researched, but the complex realities
of fieldwork relationships and the processes of data-gathering cannot always be neatly
accommodated as distinct points on a spectrum or spectrums. Cunliffe and Karunanayake
emphasized the ‘fluid and agentic nature of researcher-respondent identities’ and these dynamics
operate both inside and well beyond the interview. In this study, more so than in other UK-based
research I have conducted, I was aware of how the participants were agentic in positioning me,
individually and as a whole, and how this made an impression upon the data. My initial anxieties
about exploitation and neo-colonialism quite rightly heightened my awareness of ‘self’ and ‘other’
and I believe, contributed to conditions that enabled participants to become active agents in the
telling of their stories. To study, appreciate and effectively represent the experience of research
participants, as Corbin Dwyer and Buckle propose, it is not ones particular status that is the ‘core
ingredient’ of a prudent researcher but the ‘ability to be open, authentic, honest, deeply interested
in the experience of ones research participants, and committed to accurately and adequately
representing their experience’ (Corbin Dwyer and Buckle, 2009). Jessica Benjamin in her
psychoanalytic discussion of an intersubjective view of ‘thirdness’ considers the notion of
surrender ‘to the principle of reciprocal influence in interaction which makes possible both
responsible action and freely given recognition’ (Benjamin, 2004) (p11). Whilst we may use a
variety of tools, such as the notion of hyphen spaces to assist us, I would suggest that we also
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need to surrender to a certain amount, perhaps a good deal, of discomfort and anxiety in our
attempts at reflexive practice.
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in Qualitative Research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8, 54 - 63.
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Comparative and International Education, Symposium Books.
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Ethnographic Research: Implications for Research Identities and Practices. Organisational
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DENZIN, N. K. & LINCLON, Y. S. (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand
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and Enriching Qualitative Research. Qualitative Health Research, 22, 134 - 143.
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Culture & Society 13, 379 - 384.
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educational research. Cambridge Journal of Education, 45, 97-112.
JEFFERSON, T. 2008. What is “The Psychosocial”? A Response to Frosh and Baraitser.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 13, 366 - 373.
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‘Other’, Third World Quarterly, 24, 627 - 647.
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Inquiry, 1, 101-110.
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methods and cross-cultural educational research. In: CROSSLEY, M., ARTHUR, L. &
MCNESS, E. (eds.) Revisiting Insider-Outsider Research in Comparative and International
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SMIRL, L. 2015. Spaces of Aid, How Cars, Compounds and Hotels Shape Humanitarianism, London,
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Phoebe Beedell is a PhD scholarship holder with the University of East London. She originally
trained in graphic design and spent the 1990’s living in Lesotho and Zimbabwe working in
development communications on AIDS prevention and reproductive health campaigns.
After completing a Masters in Development Studies at Bristol University, she worked as a
community engagement trainer and facilitator before joining the Centre of Psycho-Social Studies
at the University of the West of England as a researcher. Phoebe has undertaken qualitative
research on major ESRC projects including ‘Negotiating Ethical Dilemmas in Contested Communities’
and ‘Identities, Educational Choice and the White Urban Middle Class’ in the Identities and Social Action
programme; and more recently on Paired Peers, a longitudinal study on the role HE plays in social
mobility.
She has published articles on motivation, class, positionality and a book chapter on psychosocial
research methodology. Phoebe is intending to use Augusto Boals’s participatory theatre
techniques as a means of disseminating her doctoral research and engaging non-academic
audiences in further meaningful and productive dialogue.
Contact details: Phoebe Boedell, School of Social Sciences, University of East London 4-6
University way, London E16 2RD
e-mail: [email protected]
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Review Article
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Social Movements: Theories & Practices:
A Critical Review of the Literature
John Haworth
Theories: Structuralisms, Interactionisms & Globalisms.
In this paper, I shall attempt to situate my research in recent debates about social movements.
These have mainly concerned the level of the social formation and the geographical level at
which the emergence of social movements can be explained. I shall be mainly concerned with
the recent work of Tarrow (2012), the so-called insurgent encounters of Juris & Khasnabish
(2013) and the studies of the World Social Forum of Conway (2013).
Structuralisms: Political Processes & Critical Realisms.
In his recent work, the veteran social movement theorist Tarrow (2012; 06-28) describes what
seems to be a critical realist, or what he calls a “dynamics of contention” approach to social
movements, which he developed in an earlier volume with his colleagues McAdam & Tilly
(Tarrow, McAdam & Tilly, 2001). In an excellent historical survey of theories of social
movements, Tilly distinguishes between the economic approaches of Marxists such as Marx,
Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci and of new social movement theorists such as Touraine,
Melucci and Offe, and the political approaches of Weber, Michels and Skocpol, resource
mobilisation theorists such as Piven & Cloward, and the most recent political process theorists
such as Tarrow, McAdam & Tilly (2001), and, even more recently, writers such as della Porta,
Haug & Teune (2013).
So what’s so excellent about this historical survey? Almost uniquely among writers on this
political process tradition, Tarrow has made some attempt to relate his approach to economic
process approaches, such as Marxism. Many of my earlier attempts to read Tarrow’s articles led
me to adopt the slogan “writing like Sidney Tarrow” to represent a talent for making something
which should be interesting seem boring, since there was no explanation of what was supposed
to have caused political opportunities, and of how these opportunities were related to larger scale
social events, such as the coming of new systems of regulation such as neo-liberalism.
From this point of view, these political process theories can be seen as developing a relatively
autonomous political level of the social formation, as theorised by Poulantzas (Jessop, 1985).
These political process theories can be seen as excellent developments of Poulantzas’s theories,
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but, for all his considerations on Marxism, Tarrow makes no recognition of this. Rather, political
process theories treat political opportunities and processes not as relatively, but as completely,
autonomous of the economic level.
This is particularly seen in Tarrow’s treatment of the works of his new social movement theory
adversary Touraine (Tarrow, 2012: 18-20). Here, Touraine considers the most abstract level of
societies, or historicities, to be dominated by the activities of social movements contesting
existing social formations. The activities of political parties in attempting to regulate existing
social formations exist at a more concrete level, which Touraine calls the institutional system.
Here, Touraine develops an indispensable theoretical context for the more empirical work of the
political process theorists, but this seems to be lost on Tarrow, who accuses Touraine of
“declaring”, presumably without adequate empirical evidence, that these theoretical levels existed,
and who describes later writers as having avoided being “smitten with Tourainian abstractions”.
Later in his article, Tarrow (2012: 22-26) starts to come to terms with this problem. Benton &
Craib (2011: 126-127) explain how the critical realist philosopher Bhaskar (1998) organised
scientific disciplines into a hierarchy of causalities, such that each discipline was relatively
autonomous of the one below it in the hierarchy. The question for critical realism is then how to
identify the systems of causality which lead to the exercise of this relative autonomy. Previously,
Benton & Craib (2011: 124-125) explain that Bhaskar sees these systems as what he calls
mechanisms, which act within each discipline to determine whether and how this relative
autonomy will work. Thus, Smith (1998: 299), commenting on earlier work by Bhaskar (1979),
describes these mechanisms as “the way in which the structure of an object can, within definite
conditions, generate an observable event”. Unfortunately, neither Benton & Craib nor Smith
specify in any more detail what these mechanisms are, but it would appear that Bhaskar’s theories
have enormous potential for developing what has always been a bit of a vague concept of relative
autonomy, and that the task of a critical realist social science is to identify and understand these
mechanisms at each level of the social formation.
Tarrow doesn’t mention Bhaskar or critical realism, but he does recognise (2012: 22-23) the
emergence of a so-called “mechanism-and-process approach to social action” in recent decades,
associated with writers such as Snow et al. (1986) and Soule (1997, 1999, 2004). Tarrow,
McAdam & Tilly (2001) then took up these approaches to apply them to the social sciences, and
to identify three specific mechanisms operating in social movements. These are the
environmental, such as population growth and resource depletion, the relational, such as the
formation of political alliances, and the dispositional, such as the perception or attribution of
opportunities or threats.
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Interactionisms: Subjectivities, Paradigms, Knowledges, Technologies.
If we’re to develop a critical realist theory of social movements, then, what we have to do is to
identify the mechanisms within each discipline, which may lead to social events. As I’ve
explained above, these are not the disciplines themselves, but the mechanisms within each
discipline, but Tarrow seems to confuse the mechanisms with the disciplines themselves.
As Benton used to say when he was my undergraduate tutor, one way we may attempt to solve
this problem is by turning to the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Althusser seems
to have strangely disappeared from Benton’s most recent writings and also turned out to be
Algerian, but whereas Bhaskar developed a hierarchy of scientific disciplines, Benton (1984)
explains how Althusser attempted to solve the problems of the relationships between bases and
superstructures in Marxism by developing a hierarchy of levels of the social formation
characterised by relatively autonomous practices. Althusser identified these levels as the
economic, political and ideological, and, if Bhaskar’s hierarchy ended with the social sciences
(Benton & Craib, 2011: 127), Althusser’s hierarchy can be seen as applying Bhaskar’s theories to
the social sciences, and, as they say, taking things to the next level. As I mentioned above
(Jessop, 1985), the structuralist political theorist Poulantzas, a follower of Althusser, can be seen
as having developed a regional theory of relatively autonomous political practices at the political
level, and, from this point of view, Tarrow’s political process theories, far from being inconsistent
with Marxism, can be seen as contributions to a debate started by Poulantzas.
The levels or mechanisms identified by Tarrow are the environmental, the relational and the
dispositional, and he goes on to apply these to an understanding of the causes of the American
Civil War (Tarrow, 2012: 23-24), just as I once did to the collapse of the USSR (Haworth, 2011).
In another piece of writing (Haworth, 2012), I identified an ecological level of the social
formation prior to the economic level, which would be somewhere at the top of his hierarchy of
scientific disciplines. In the piece on the USSR, I developed an interactionist and individual or
psychological level relatively autonomous of the ideological level to explain the roles of
individuals such as Gorbachev or Yeltsin.
Of course, the type of situation, which Tarrow sees as having caused the American Civil War, is
what Althusser would have called an overdetermination of contradictions, or what Poulantzas
would have called an organic crisis of the social formation; a series of crises at the ecological,
economic, political, ideological, interactionist and psychological levels arising at the same time.
The question for social movement theories seems to be one of which of these levels is dominant
or decisive; what types of political alliances to develop, how to conduct an ideological struggle,
how to develop a democratic movement and the role of heroic individuals.
Interactionisms & Political Process Theories
If Tarrow has understood the role of critical realism in understanding organic crises of the social
formation, then other writers have increasingly emphasised the role of the interactionist levels.
Thus, Jasper (2012) seems to take up some of the criticisms of political process theories raised by
writers such as Bevington & Dixon that these theories, as developed by writers such as Tilly,
concentrated on so-called political opportunity structures without considering strategies of
resistance on the part of social movements and thus lacked relevance for actual social movement
members. Jasper claims to have discerned some movement in favour of these strategies by
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recent writers under the influence of theorists such as Foucault, but it’s not easy to see where
exactly this influence is, either in the writings he mentions or in the contributions to his volume.
From a more theoretical point of view, della Porta (2014), in a comparative study of the
democratisations in eastern Europe in 1989 and in North Africa in 2011, documents a shift in
studies of democratisation from the structuralism of writers as far back as Lipset (1959), Moore
(1966) and Stephens (1992) to what she calls the transitologies of more recent writers such as
Karl (1990), O’Donnell & Schmitter (1986), Collier (1999) and Linz & Stepan (1996). But it
turns out that even these are only concerned with the strategic choices of political elites. As for
social movements, della Porta mentions the critical realist approaches of writers such as Tilly,
McAdam & Tarrow (2001), although without identifying them as such, and her own work with
Rucht (Della & Porta & Rucht, 2013). Della Porta goes on to identify from her data four systems
of democratisation, one of which, eventful democratisation, especially involves social
movements. Here, she appears to develop another critical realist approach involving (2014: 17)
relational, affective and cognitive mechanisms, without really explaining what these are or how
they relate to the mechanisms developed by writers such as Tarrow. Nonetheless, della Porta
(2014: 16) claims to be “breaking with essentialist, deterministic and structuralist understandings”
and stressing “temporality, contextualisation and agency”.
Interactionisms & Ethnographies: Complexities & Actor-Network Theories.
But if these writers are taking things to the next level, then a new dimension in interactionist
social movement theories has been opened up by Juris & Khasnabish (2013: 01-38). The authors
begin with an ethnographic study of a meeting of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, which they
see as the start of modern global justice movements, and go on to suggest that the writings of
critical realists such as McAdam (1996), Snow (1986) and Tarrow (1998) reflect (2013: 06) “an
underlying acceptance of capitalist modernity, liberal democracy and individualism”, while these
transnational social movements are (2013: 07) “more ephemeral, rhizomatic and dynamic than
most conventional social movement analyses allow”.
The authors go on (2013: 10-15) to survey some structuralist social movement theories, such as
the resource mobilisation theories of Smith, Chatfield & Pagnucco (1997) and the international
relations theories of Keck & Sikkink (1998). These were seen as being focused on formal NGOs
and transnational social movement organisations. The authors see Tarrow (2005), della Porta
(2005; 2007) and Reitan (2007) as having used political process theories to study social
movements such as the European Social Forum of 2002. But these theories are seen as having
left out the interactionist dimensions, political tensions, cultural struggles and struggles over
knowledge production. Finally, the authors mention social network theories, such as those of
Castells (1997) and Hardt & Negri (2005), where a networked world power or Empire is
confronted by a networked world resistance or Multitude.
The authors contrast these traditional structuralist theories with an emerging interactionist and
ethnographic tradition in social movement studies. Here, Cunningham (1999) carried out
ethnographic research on so-called sanctuary activists in Arizona and Tsing (2005) on
transnational forest activists in Indonesia. Juris (2008) set out to develop the theories of Castells
by studying the use of technologies by North American social movements, and Khasnabish
(2008) studied the influence of the Zapatista movement on these northern movements.
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More interesting here seems to be the development of new interactionist theories. Thus,
complexity theories, such as that of Escobar (2008), emphasise the (2013: 13) “recursive selfgeneration of complex adaptive systems through myriad micro-level interactions” and the
“critical role of social movements as producers of insurgent knowledges”. Also, actor-network
theories, such as those of Routledge (2008), develop an (2013: 13-14) “analysis of the shifting
patterns of connection, association and translation within the People’s Global Action Network
based on ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladesh”, which “resonates with the critical role of
practice, culture and power within networked spaces of transnational encounter”.
Actor-network theories are explained in slightly more detail by Feigenbaum, Frenzel & McCurdy
(2013: 18-19). These “provide a method of thinking how interdependencies between people,
groups and objects emerge and function” and “are particularly useful for thinking about how
human and non-human actors are always enmeshed”. The authors go on to explain how these
theories have come in for criticism for failing to recognise power relations, but that some new socalled post-ANT theories “make explicit the ways in which power and difference are performed
and played out in many everyday associations”. From this point of view, it’s interesting to see
that Juris & Khasnabish (2013: 14) mention that Routledge (2008) “argues that power
differentials and intentionalities are central to shaping the contours of network associations”.
Interactionisms & Ethnographies: New Dimensions of Social Movements.
Juris & Khasnabish (2013: 15-19) go on to identify what appear to be new dimensions of social
movements, which lend themselves to interactionist or ethnographic research. These dimensions
the authors very impressively describe as emerging subjectivities, discrepant paradigms,
transformational knowledges and subversive technologies. These emerging subjectivities appear
to involve antagonisms between new social identities. Thus, Hardt & Negri (2000; 2005) suggest
that new technologies under neo-liberalism have developed a networked world power or Empire
or confronted by a networked world resistance or Multitude. This Multitude is characterised by a
so-called collective “no” to neo-liberalism, but is fragmented by many “yeses” to a variety of
alternatives. Zibechi (2010) develops this by identifying a variety of social movements in Latin
America building a (2013: 16) “new politics of autonomy and self-management, while reaching
our horizontally to develop new forms of regional and transnational co-ordination”. Finally,
Deleuze & Guattari (1987) develop the idea of social movements as rhizomes, or almost infinitely
flexible bouncy castle-type structures, requiring us to (2013: 15) “do away with fixed lines and
linearities”.
Discrepant paradigms take up the type of distinction made by the critical international relations
writer Cox (Hobden & Jones, 2008: 151) between problem-solving and critical theories. Here,
critical realist or political process theorists such as Tarrow (1998) are seen as setting out to solve
the political problems of neo-liberalism by restricting their analyses to the political level, while
critical social movement theories would identify more basic causes of these problems at the
economic and increasingly ecological levels.
Transformational knowledges appear to suggest that one of the tasks of researchers is to
understand systems of knowledge among social movements, which supplement that of academic
researchers. Thus, the authors (2013: 18) “specifically attempt to understand the work of
subjects deeply invested in reimagining and reconstructing their worlds as they resist the violence
of the neo-liberal order”. What much of this seems to involve is the understanding of social
105
movement practices in the global South, and the authors mention the work of Conway (2005),
whose work on southern epistemologies I’ll look at in the next section.
Subversive technologies involve the use of new technologies by social movements. Juris (2012)
famously distinguished between logics of aggregation involving the use of e-mail lists and socalled listservs and logics of networking involving the use of networking media such as Facebook
or Twitter. What seems to be subversive about these technologies is that they allow social
movement members to use logics of aggregation to develop online communities and to use logics
of networking to develop ready access to these communities, thus, in Hardt & Negri’s (2005)
terms, to develop something of an organised multitude to confront an organised empire. Here,
the authors seem to open up possibilities for discourse or conversation analysis in recognising
that the technologies are (2013: 19) “infused with questions of epistemologies, power and
subjectivities”, and involve “innovative forms of collaborative practice” and “new modes of
collectively producing and distributing knowledge”.
This use of new technologies by social movements is the subject of a study by the one-time
structuralist network society theorist Castells (2012). Here, Castells develops his network society
theories by applying them to the social movements of 2011 in Tunisia, Iceland, Egypt, Spain and
the United States. Castells (2012: 04) sets out to “suggest some hypotheses on the nature and
perspectives of networked social movements, with the hope of identifying the new paths of social
change in our time, and to stimulate a debate on the practical and political implications of these
hypotheses”.
Interactionisms & Ethnographies: Participatory & Militant Ethnographies.
The authors identify four types of ethnographic research to investigate these new dimensions of
social movements. First, they explain how Hale (2006) distinguishes between activist research
and cultural critique. Here, activist research (2013: 22) “refers to a collaborative method
involving explicit alignment with a group in struggle”, while a cultural critique involves a more
subtle “political alignment through the content of the knowledge produced”. Also, the authors
note that Mathers & Novelli (2007: 230) have suggested that neo-liberalism has led to a “more
general process of re-engagement among academics”, the most radical example of which is
participatory action research, which involves the (2013: 24) “collective design and
implementation of research between a researcher and an organisation or community of
stakeholders”.
Finally, militant ethnographies involve not so much the participation of researched communities
in research, but rather the participation of the researchers in the activities of these communities.
Here, Juris (2007; 2008) has suggested that (2013: 24) “the only way to truly grasp the concrete
logic of activist networking is to become an active practitioner”, becoming “directly involved in a
particularly involved in a particular struggle through activities such as organising actions and
events, facilitating meetings, staking out and supporting positions during discussions and debates,
and risking one’s body during mass actions”. I don’t quite know the health and safety
implications of this, but it is said to lead to a “deeper cognitive understanding” and provides a
“sense of the embodied emotions generated by activist practice”.
106
Critical Realisms & Ethnographies
Thus, participatory action research develops a new dimension in qualitative research and seems to
solve the old problem whereby researchers design a piece of research and then have to find
somebody to observe or interview. With this type of research, researchers find somebody to
observe or interview and then consult the researched communities about the type of research,
which the community wants them to carry out. However militant this research, what these
authors are distancing themselves from is not more traditional ethnographies, but rather the more
empiricist approaches of critical realist or political process theories. As for more traditional
ethnographies, these approaches have in common with them a distinction between common
sense and science, a concern for the actor’s point of view, a concern with building theories from
observations, and a danger of using common sense as a resource rather than a topic. From a
critical realist point of view, these types of ethnographies exist (Benton & Craib, 2011: 125-126)
at an actual or concrete rather than real or abstract level. They thus fail to identify underlying
structures, from which we can discern patterns, and make more detailed observations, of social
interaction.
Globalisms: Trans-Modernities & Post-Colonialisms.
If these writers have stressed the interactionist dimensions of social movements, then others have
stressed the global dimensions. Thus, Moghadam (2013) emphasises the transnationalisation of
social movements under conditions of neo-liberal globalisation and of new technologies.
Moghadam (2013: 01-19) starts out with dependency and world system theories and notices how
these have been played out in neo-liberal globalisation and in its global resistance movements; on
the right, the global Islamist movement, and, on the left, the global justice movement with its
World and regional Social Forums. Moghadam goes on to describe the influence of new
technologies on these movements, and then identifies them, along with a global feminist
movement, as (2013: 14) “among the most prominent and visible of contemporary social
movements”. Moghadam (2013: 13) also suggests that transnational social movements have
dated from the rise of capitalism in the 18th century, and that these three movements are the
successors of other which have existed throughout this period of time.
Perhaps more interestingly, Conway (2013) reports on ten years of fieldwork with the World
Social Forum to develop understandings of open spaces, civil societies, autonomisms and
feminisms. The open spaces she sees as dominated by what she calls autonomist movements,
which have pushed the others, such as feminist and so-called subaltern movements to the edges
of the forum. The discourses of the forum she sees as a so-called civil society discourse, derived
from Gramsci and Habermas, at the expense of subaltern discourses. Autonomism she sees as a
discourse of white activists from the global North, concerned with horizontal, pre-figurative and
utopian ideas. Finally, feminism she sees as the most sustained and articulate body of ideas
confronting the dominant discourses of the forum.
Conway thus sees the forum as dominated by rationalist discourses from the global North, in
opposition to feminism and to what she calls post-colonial discourses. These discourses, which
she goes so far as to call epistemologies, are associated with writers such as Mignolo (2002) and
Escobar (2004), who see them as a constitutive outside of modernity; in other words, ideas relied
on but left out of modernist epistemologies. According to Mignolo (2002), inclusive political
107
theories are not possible on the basis of western traditions, and solutions to problems of
coloniality are not to be found within these traditions. According to Escobar (2004), these
discourses have been suppressed by modernity, but expose western cosmologies as arising from a
specific cultural rationality which has projected itself as universal.
Conway’s writings can be considered emancipatory in two senses. First, she follows deliberative
democrats such as Young (1996) in calling into question theories of modernism and rationalism.
Second, her writings are in a similar tradition to those of Juris & Khasnabish (2013) in calling into
question established ways of thinking about social movements. Certainly, her research methods
of interviews with key figures, leaders and activists, speeches, presentations and texts written by
leaders, texts produced by movement activists in each political current, interviews, conversations,
encounters and observations are as vague as those as those of Juris & Khasnabish, and are
suspiciously concerned with leaders and key figures. Having said this, one thing I have gained
from Conway’s book, with its concerns about edges and outsides, is that, for all the concerns of
ethnomethodologists with the achievements of their subjects, they have no clear means of
investigating what these subjects don’t achieve.
Thus, Conway leaves ethnomethodologies looking like some sort of detailed studies of rationalist
northern conversations, and conversational structures looking not universal, but the specialist
structures of the social life of North America and Western Europe. Unfortunately,
ethnomethodologists haven’t helped themselves by not studying other societies, identifying
conversational structures on a global scale and identifying the structures common to all
rationalities.
Conclusions: Critical Realisms, Interactionisms & Globalisms.
I’ve thus identified three recent traditions of social movement theories. If political process
theories can be understood as being a part of a critical realist tradition, then it has much to offer
in explaining periods of social movement activities and periods of social changes. What we’re
then looking for are the systems or mechanisms by which relative autonomies are exercised at
each level of the social formation. The more interactionist approaches of Juris & Khasnabish will
perhaps help in identifying some of these mechanisms and in drawing our attention to the
importance of the interactionist practices of social movements and ethnographies in social
movement studies. Finally, the global approaches of Moghadam and of Conway remind us of the
scale and diversity, not only of social movements but also of rationalities and knowledges under
neo-liberal globalisation, and of the challenges of developing research methods to study all of
these.
108
References
Benton, Ted (1984): The Rise & Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser & His Influence: Macmillan.
Benton, Ted & Craib, Ian (2011): Philosophy of social science: the philosophical foundations of social thought:
2nd ed.: Palgrave.
Bhaskar, Roy (1979/1998) Possibility of Naturalism: a Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human
Sciences: 3rd ed: Routledge.
Castells, Manuel (2012): Networks of outrage and hope social movements in the Internet age: Polity.
Conway, Janet (2013): Edges of global justice: The World Social Forum and its 'others': Routledge.
Della Porta, Donatella & Rucht, Dieter (2013): “Power & Democracy in Social Movements: An
Introduction”: in Meeting democracy: power and deliberation in global justice movements / eds.
Donatella della Porta & Dieter Rucht: CUP: 01-22.
Della Porta, Donatella (2014): Mobilising for Democracy: Comparing 1989 and 2011: OUP.
Feigenbaum, Anna; Frenzel, Fabian & McCurdy, Patrick (2013): Protest camps: Zed.
Haworth, John (2011) “What Do You Think Were the Main Causes of the Collapse of the
Communist System in Eastern Europe?” London Metropolitan University: M.A. European
Studies: GIP024: Contemporary East Central Europe: Spring 2011.
Haworth, John (2012) “How Do Green Approaches to International Political Economy Differ
from Those of Neo-Liberals and Marxists?” London Metropolitan University: M.A.
European Studies: GIP008: Contemporary International Political Economy: Autumn 2011.
Hobden, Stephen & Jones, Richard Wyn (2008): “Marxist Theories of International Relations” in
Globalisation of World Politics: 4th ed. / eds. John Baylis, Steve Smith & Patricia Owens: 2008.
Jasper, James M. (2012): “Introduction: From Political Opportunity Structures to Strategic
Intervention” in Contention in context: political opportunities and the emergence of protest / eds. Jeff
Goodwin and James M. Jasper: Routledge: 01-36.
Juris, Jeffrey S. & Khasnabish, Alex (2013): “Introduction: Ethnography & Activism within
Networked Spaces of Transnational Encounter” in Insurgent encounters: transnational activism,
ethnography, and the political / eds. Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabish: Duke: 2013: 01-38.
Jessop, Bob (1985): Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory & Political Strategy: Macmillan.
Moghadam, Valentine M. (2013): Globalization and social movements: Islamism, feminism, and the global
justice movement: Rowman.
Smith, Mark J. (1998): Social Science in Question: Sage.
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Tarrow, Sidney G. (2012): Strangers at the gates: movements and states in contentious politics: CUP.
Tarrow, Sidney G., McAdam, Doug & Tilly, Charles (2001): Dynamics of Contention: CUP.
I'm now 60 years old and just studying for my Ph.D. after a lifetime of obsessive compulsive
disorder and high functioning autism, which were only diagnosed and treated in the last few
years. I probably didn't realise until recently, but my interest in social movements comes from
feeling excluded from mainstream society because of these conditions, and my interest in
ethnomethodology comes from being one of those who couldn't understand the rules which
everybody else followed. If you're interested in supporting me, either in my research interests or
in understanding the roles in society of people with mental health problems, please get in touch
with me at [email protected]".
110
Publication news from UEL PhD Alumni and Alumnae
2015-2016
111
112
a) Selected Books
Refugees and the Meaning of Home
Cypriot Narratives of Loss, Longing and Daily Life in London
By Helen Taylor, 2015
This book explores the meaning of home for Cypriot refugees
living in London since their island was torn apart by war. Taking
an innovative approach, it looks at how spaces, time, social
networks and sensory experiences come together as home is
constructed. It places refugee narratives at its centre to reveal the
agency of those forced to migrate.
A glimpse in the book at:
http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137553324#reviews
Reviews
Helen Taylor has written a thoughtful analysis of stories of home, narrated by Turkish and Greek
Cypriot refugees living in London with little or no hope of returning to their pre-partition
villages. Rich with insights into the individual and communal struggles of Cypriot refugees to
make sense of their circumstances, Refugees and the Meaning of Home proposes new ways of
thinking about place, nostalgia, and home culture. While the topic of 'home' is central to the field
of forced migration and refugee studies, Taylor's book addressing spatial, temporal, material and
relational aspects of 'home' provides a comprehensive and thorough treatment of the theoretical
underpinnings and the debates in the field.
Anita Fabos, Clark University, USA
Transcending the immediate setting of the Cypriot refugees from 1974, but drawing on their
narratives after four decades of exile, Helen Taylor's book is a nuanced, compassionate and rich
ethnography of the universal preoccupation with the meaning of home and, especially, the loss of
home for forcibly displaced people. Recognising the multiple, complex, and often contradictory
spatial, temporal, material and relational meanings which refugees ascribe to home, Refugees and
the Meaning of Home. Cypriot Narratives of Loss, Longing and Daily Life in London is an
innovative and subtle exploration of the way forced displacement impacts upon the making,
unmaking and remaking of home for protracted refugees.
Roger Zetter, University of Oxford, UK
Dr Helen Taylor received her PhD in 2009 at the University of East London, UK under the
supervision of Professor Phil Marfleet and is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research on
Migration, Refugees and Belonging at UEL. She has published in the fields of refugee studies,
migration and narrative.
113
Islamic Traditions of Refuge in the Crises
of Iraq and Syria
by Tahir Zaman, 2015
This book considers positions refugees take relative to the
state, humanitarian actors and faith-based organisations in the
humanitarian field. Attention is drawn to refugee agency as
they negotiate circumstances of considerable constraint
demonstrating relational dimensions of religious practice and
experience.
A glimpse in the book at: http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137550057#reviews
Reviews
This fine study breaks new ground, examining how forced migrants mobilize religious ideas and
institutions to help meet challenges of survival and long-term exile. Tahir Zaman tells us
something new and important about Islamic traditions in a region affected by huge refugee
movements.
Philip Marfleet, University of East London, UK
This is an impressive work which reminds us to turn our gaze to those left behind when mass
forced migration grabs headlines. Tahir Zaman does an admirable job of exploring the networks
of self-reliance, the traditions of hospitality, and the notions of refuge and sanctuary among those
hosting refugees in Syria and in the Middle East region as a whole.
Dawn Chatty, University of Oxford, UK
Dr Tahir Zaman received his PhD in 2012 at the University of East London, UK under the
supervision of Professor Phil Marfleet and is a visiting research fellow at the Center for Research
on Migration, Refugees & Belonging (CMRB) at UEL, and a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS,
University of London, UK. His research is primarily focused on the social and cultural lives of
displaced people in the Middle East.
114
The Play of Politcal Culture, Emotion
and Identity.
by Candida Yates
Offering a uniquely 'psycho-cultural' take on the
emotional dynamics of UK political culture this book
uses theories and research in psychoanalysis, cultural and
media studies and political sociology. It explores the
cultural and emotional processes that shape our
relationship to politics in a media age, referencing Joanna
Lumley to Nigel Farage.
A glimpse in the book, at:
http://www.palgrave.com/in/book/9780230302525#aboutAuthors
Reviews
Through a psychoanalytic critique of the anxieties, fantasies and obsessions that characterise
today's intensely emotional political culture, Candida Yates' new book makes a powerful case for
the argument that Psychosocial Studies is the new Cultural Studies.'
Sasha Roseneil, Professor of Sociology and Social Theory, Birkbeck, University of London, UK.
'Whether she is discussing the political manifestations of a contemporary crisis in masculinity and
fatherhood, postmodern feminism, nostalgia, narcissism, play, or therapy culture, Yates's
psychoanalytic lens illuminates, in a nuanced fashion all too rare today, both regressive social
trends toward mastery and progressive, creative potentials for change. This book is essential
reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex interplay of fantasy, emotion, identity,
media, and politics in the era of neoliberalism.'
Lynne Layton, Harvard Medical School, USA
Dr. Candida Yates is Professor of Communication in the Faculty of Media and Communication
at Bournemouth University, UK. She is a Director of the Media and Inner World research
network and has published widely on the psycho-cultural dynamics of politics, emotion and
popular culture. She received her PhD in 2004 at the University of East London, UK under the
supervision of Professor Corinne Squire
115
b) Selected Edited Collections
Bourdieu: The Next Generation
The Development of Bourdieu's Intellectual Heritage in
Contemporary UK Sociology
Edited by
Jenny Thatcher, Nicola Ingram, Ciaran Burke, Jessie Abrahams, 2016
This book will give unique insight into how a new generation of
Bourdieusian researchers apply Bourdieu to contemporary issues. It will
provide a discussion of the working mechanisms of thinking through
and/or with Bourdieu when analysing data. In ea, individual authors
discuss and reflect upon their own research and the ways in which they put
Bourdieu to work. The aim of this book is not to just to provide examples
of the development of Bourdieusian research, but for each author to
reflect on the ways in which they came across Bourdieu’s work, why it
speaks to them (including a reflexive consideration of their own
background), and the way in which it is thus useful in their thinking.
A glimpse in the book at : https://www.book2look.com/embed/9781317436232
Reviews
'The development of Bourdieu's intellectual heritage in UK sociology' is a wonderful, exhilarating read, full of
innovative ideas and new ways of thinking about perennial social concerns from social mobility to migration. Its
wide-ranging, fascinating insights into how Bourdieu's thinking can be developed for the 21st century breathe fresh
life into established social theories. It is a 'must-read' not only for those trying to make sense of Bourdieu but for
everyone interested in wider philosophical and political issues of inequality, identity and the role of the state.
Diane Reay, Professor of Education, Cambridge University, UK
This book is a truly refreshing and accessible account of Bourdieu’s work; it breaks with the traditional jargon filled
sociological work of the past whilst still managing to discuss highly complex ideas. The authors each strike a delicate
balance between discussing research, theory and personal experience. I would recommend this book to all students
with an interest in inequality and Bourdieusian sociology.
Annabel Wilson, PhD Student, Cardiff University, UK
Dr Jenny Thatcher received her PhD at the University of East London in 2016 under the supervision of
Professor Derek Robbins. Her thesis focused on Polish migration and the education market in the UK in
which she used a Bourdieusian framework. She is a co-founder and co-convenor of the BSA Bourdieu
Study Group and member of the Early Career Researcher editorial board for The Sociological Review.
116
Cartographies of Differences:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Edited by Ulrike M. Vieten and Gill Valentine
This volume investigates the process of learning
how to live with individual and group differences in
the twenty-first century and examines the
ambivalences of contemporary cosmopolitanism.
Engaging with the concept of ‘critical cartography’,
it emphasizes the structural impact of localities on
the experiences of those living with difference,
while trying to develop an account of the countermappings that follow spatial and social
transformations in today’s world. The contributors
focus on visual, normative and cultural
embodiments of difference, examining dynamic
conflicts at local sites that are connected by the
processes of Europeanization and globalization.
The collection explores a wide range of topics, including conflicting claims of sexual minorities
and conservative Christians, the relationship between national identity and cosmopolitanism, and
the ways that cross-cultural communication and bilingualism can help us to understand the
complex nature of belonging. The authors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and
all contribute to a vernacular reading of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, aimed at opening
up new avenues of research into living with difference.
Dr Ulrike Vieten received her PhD in 2008 for the thesis, Situated Cosmopolitanisms: the notion of the
Other in discourses on cosmopolitanism in Britain and Germany, the University of East London
(UEL),under the supervision of Professor Nira Yuval-Davis. She is a Research Fellow at the
Institute for the Study of Conflict, Transformation and Social Justice at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her
work engages theoretically and empirically with the (de-)construction of racialised, classed and
gendered group boundaries, particularly in the context of nationalism, cosmopolitanism and the
shifting axes of difference and otherness.
117
b) Selected Articles and Chapters in Books
Alzeer, Gergana. 2016. ‘Types and dynamics of gendered space: a case of Emirati female learners
in a single-gender context’. Gender and Education, on-line first,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2016.1205183
Barbagallo, Camille. 2016. ‘Feminist Demands and the Contradictions of Choice: Work and
Childcare in Neoliberal Britain’ Feminist Review, Special Edition: Women, Work and
Value.
Barbagallo, Camille. 2016. ‘24-hour Nurseries: The Never-ending Story of Care and Work’ IN:
Jensen, T., Garrett, R., and Voela., A (eds.) We Need to Talk About Family: Essays on the
family, (popular) culture and neoliberalism, Newcastle : Cambridge Scholars.
Barbagallo, Camille. 2015. ‘Leaving Home: Slavery and the Politics of Reproduction’,
Viewpoint, Issue 5: Nov 2015.
Bramal, Rebecca. 2016. Austerity, special issue in New Formations, 87.
Esin, Cigdem, 2016. Telling stories in the picture: Constituting processual and relational
narratives in research with young British Muslim women in East London. Forum:
Qualitative Social Research.
Fathi, Masi and Halvorsrud, K., 2016. Special Issue: Citizenship, Class and Belonging under
Coalition Government. Journal of Citizenship Studies.
Hakak, Y. and Fathi, Masi, 2016. Keeping the Ties, Saving the communities: Muslim Parenting in
the West. Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies.
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