5      Volatile Bodies and Vulnerable Researchers

Ethical Risks of Embodiment Research

Carla Rice

Feminist methodology as it has developed over the past thirty years offers a critical response to conventional research, which is seen by some to carry the risk of exploiting participants. Although feminist researchers have envisioned more self-conscious and accountable ways of doing research, many acknowledge the potential for abuse inherent in researching other and/or othered people’s lives. This is particularly true for feminists researching groups less powerful than those to which they belong (Brown and Strega 2005). In this chapter, I draw on critical feminist theories of the body (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Grosz 1994), feminist disability studies (Garland-Thomson 1997; Shildrick 1997, 2002), and postconventional and postcolonial research methodologies (Hesse-Biber 2007; Naples 2003; Rice 2009) to consider ethical dilemmas in critical research focused on women’s accounts of embodiment.

My analysis in this chapter is founded on two qualitative research projects, both with a focus on embodiment—an arts-based project, titled Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference, that used digital storytelling to consider the efficacy of the arts in challenging misperceptions of women and gender variant people, and an earlier project in which I interviewed a diverse group of women about their experiences of embodiment. Drawing on examples from this research, I reflect on what I regard as a central ethical challenge of critical embodiment research: the need for all researchers, including those with and without embodied differences, to maintain self-reflexivity and vulnerability with regard to their embodied experiences and histories when conducting research with groups whose bodies are socially constructed as anomalous. These groups include people with mobility and sensory disabilities, people with chronic illness, people whose faces, physical attributes, and/or body sizes fall outside the range considered to be normal, and LGBTQ people, especially those who may not neatly fit into categories of masculine/male or feminine/female and whose gender presentation may confound onlookers, as well as those perceived as racially or ethnically different from the dominant unmarked norm. In analyzing the experience of the differently bodied, I necessarily also examine the ways in which my own body history has influenced my interpretative process.

Envisioning New Meanings

The two research projects on which I will draw below both explore the influence of cultural meanings on women’s embodiment. Beyond the body beautiful, they consider the significance of messages about the “abject body” in shaping each woman’s sense of body self. Julia Kristeva (1982, 1–2) defines the abject as the “twisted braid of affects and thoughts” that overwhelms us when we are confronted with “the jettisoned object,” that is, with something that is neither us nor not-us—some aspect of ourselves that we have rejected. In particular, we experience the abject when we encounter bodily fluids, open wounds, diseased or dying bodies, corpses, and other evidence of the unwanted aspects of our embodiment. People whose bodies remind us of the unknowability and uncontainability of our own bodies, of our vulnerability to injury and disease, and of the certainty of our death are therefore rejected—jettisoned from the social body.

While women in proximity to the ideal may become objects of the gaze, those who inhabit abject bodies are, according to disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, subjected to “the stare.” Staring, for Garland-Thomson, involves our urgent compulsion to look at disaster, or what Mike Ervin calls “the car wreck phenomenon” (quoted in Garland-Thomson 2009, 3); the double take we do when an ordinary look fails and we want to know more about something different; and the intense visual exchange between people when we can’t pull our eyes away from the unfamiliar, the unexpected, the strange. Since staring often defines the relationship between disabled and nondisabled people, it is a primary site through which those who embody difference face the curiosity, fear, and hostility of nondisabled others (Tregaskis 2002, 461). Although staring is most often a voyeuristic, dominating act, Garland-Thomson argues that the stare has the potential to transform perceptions and create possibilities for mutual recognition, especially when mediated by the arts. In what follows, I outline how disability is typically represented in mainstream culture and then turn to how disability studies and the arts represent disability differently. Before returning to Garland-Thomson’s point later in this section, I briefly discuss how some scholars are applying decolonizing theory to representations of, and responses to, disability.

Representations of disability, by shaping people’s taken-for-granted understandings and expectations, also inform the ways in which currently nondisabled folks perceive and treat those who embody difference.1 The representational history of disabled people can largely be characterized as one of being put on display or hidden away (Eliza Chandler, pers. comm., 3 November 2012). According to disability scholar Eliza Chandler, people living with disabilities have been, and continue to be, displayed in freak shows, in medical journals, in charity campaigns, and as evil or pitiable figures in novels and films. At the same time, disabled bodies have generally been removed from the public eye, hidden in institutions, hospitals, and group homes. Even today, disability continues to be interpreted in our medicalized culture as the polar opposite of health and is thought of in terms of deficiency, limitation, or flaw (Metzl and Poirier 2004).

Solutions to the “problem” of disability can take a number of forms and—in our highly medicalized, technologized, and individualized world—tend to entail elimination, cure, or the will to overcome. While people sometimes seek out cures and are relieved to find them, it is also true that many impairments aren’t curable, so to perceive all disability as something that needs to be cured discounts the human experience of living with disability (Chandler and Rice 2013, 5). This view also elides the reality that because of economic and political barriers in Canada and beyond, many people with disabilities simply do not have access to treatments and supports that could improve the quality of their lives.

Efforts to eliminate disability through genetic screening or prenatal testing (which often results in aborting disabled fetuses) ignore the reality that most people acquire disability not genetically but through living in the world (Chandler and Rice 2013, 6). This suggests that the making of disability is strongly influenced by people’s social conditions, a point I take up below. And since most of us, if we live long enough, will undergo the gradually disabling process of aging, disability should not be seen as exclusive to a small number of people but rather as a central part of the human condition (Garland-Thomson 1997, 13). Finally, the “overcoming” narrative that is common in disability sports and in popular films assumes that one must surmount disability to achieve and thus that disability is antithetical to achievement. By turning those with disabilities into heroes, these larger-than-life portrayals also give viewers little space to make sense of the nuances of and contradictions within the experience of living with disability and hence can erase people’s humanity (Rice, Renooy, and Odette 2008, 7).

It is important to note that in addition to age, dimensions of social position and power such as race and class strongly influence who might acquire a disability. Structured by legacies of colonialism and the logics of capitalism, contemporary global power relations sanction dangerous working conditions and unhealthy living environments and fuel wars that disable millions worldwide (Meekosha 2011). Poor and racialized people living in the Global South and in polluted and unsafe areas in the Global North, as well as Indigenous peoples living on poorly resourced reserves, are especially vulnerable to impairment. Here, the conditions wrought by colonialism and capitalism not only produce impairment but also privilege certain bodies (such as physically “fit” bodies) over others, thus fuelling discrimination against those with disabilities (Rice 2014, 101). Put differently, race- and class-based oppressions that impair bodies (among them unregulated global capitalism, colonial histories, and legacies that have rendered some groups more vulnerable to impairment) intersect the oppression of disabled bodies (through high unemployment or by being seen as frightening and “other” or as childlike and expendable, to name a few forms of disability oppression), resulting in the production of disability as a problem.

In addition, just as social location influences who acquires disability, it also strongly impacts how different groups of disabled people are represented and treated in society. For example, racialized and poor folks with disabilities, especially those with learning disabilities or mental health issues, are often assumed to be lazy, angry, criminal, and drug/alcohol addicted. Nirmala Erevelles and Andrea Minear (2010, 127) analyze the case of Eleanor Bumpurs, “a poor, elderly, overweight, disabled black woman” who was murdered by police officers as they attempted to evict her from her apartment. The authors question whether a rich, white, and thin disabled woman would be similarly treated and then go on to argue that many critical feminists who embrace analyses of race, class, and gender often fail to engage with disability as a determinant of social location in their research.

In the Canadian context, it is worth considering the treatment of Kimberly Rogers, a poor, white, disabled college student and mother-to-be who, in 2001, died by suicide in her Ontario apartment while under house arrest for welfare fraud. This young woman, who was suffering from severe depression, was pushed into suicide by moralistic public opinion and punitive social policies that treated her as a criminal simply for having received a student loan while living on welfare (Landsberg 2003). Here, marginalization based on social class may have played a part in the production of Kimberley’s disability (assuming that the economic crisis she faced contributed to her depression), and social perceptions of her class affiliation may have influenced the court’s punitive response to her. At the very least, it is likely that Kimberley would have been treated with more respect by health and welfare systems had she been middle class and partnered, and she probably wouldn’t have been criminalized.

These examples show that while disability is represented and treated in complex and contradictory ways, in mainstream culture, the underlying message remains the same: that disability is undesired and that those with disabilities lack capability and vitality (Chandler and Rice 2013, 8). Recognizing the paucity of powerful stories about disability and difference that circulate in our society, I am guided by the insights of Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She reminds us of the danger of relying on only one story: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story” (Adichie 2009).

Disability studies teaches that disability can be represented otherwise: as a life worth living, as an identity, and as a culture. It argues that to achieve full rights, people with disabilities must be represented as fully human and that embodied difference must be seen as an integral part of human diversity rather than simply tolerated. In recent years, a generative disability arts movement has developed a new genre that aims to give expression to disability experience and to reimagine bodily difference (Allan 2005; Roman 2009a, 2009b). The racially and culturally diverse San Francisco-based performance troupe Sins Invalid, for example, revisions imperfect bodies as aesthetically interesting, exciting, and vital through cutting-edge performances that challenge medical and cultural paradigms of normal and sexy, “offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all individuals and communities.”2 Disability arts can offer a powerful counternarrative to mainstream cultural practices, which assume that disability makes life not worth living and which proliferate biotechnologies and bioethics (genetic testing, physician assisted suicide) that eliminate disability from populations. One way to take up the challenge posed by disability justice activists is through telling and listening to stories that represent disability in new ways. This is where the first research project I wish to discuss, Envisioning New Meanings, comes in.

The power of the arts to enhance understanding, open possibilities, and break down barriers is indisputable (Cole et al. 2004; Gallagher 2009). However, there is little research that has examined the impact when misrepresented groups seek to generate and communicate their embodied experience and knowledge directly and creatively. In response to this gap, I became involved in Envisioning New Meanings of Disability and Difference, an arts-based research project with women living with disabilities and differences. The aim of Envisioning was to uncover and address the gaps in how women with disabilities and differences see themselves and are seen by others. In intensive workshops that taught the fundamentals of representation, storytelling, and filmmaking (Lambert 2010; 2013), participants from diverse locations had opportunities to make digital stories (first person films that pair narratives with visuals) in order to speak back to dominant representations about their bodies and lives (Rice et al. 2015; Rice, Chandler, and Changfoot 2016).

Creating space where disability was welcomed allowed artists to tell complex and nuanced stories about their embodied experience. Working in groups designed and led by facilitators living with disabilities and differences also gave participants the opportunity, individually and collectively, to challenge outsiders’ perceptions and to explore alternative ideas of difference. The digital storytelling genre, with its unique emphasis on image and narrative, enabled storytellers to represent their sensory worlds in new ways, conveying the volatility and instability of human embodied experience and opening possibilities for intimate encounters with difference. Recall that Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2009) understands staring as a complex response to difference, one that can bring about domination or mutual recognition. She suggests that the stare is productive when the starer is open to being changed and the staree is able to wield some control by telling her story in a way that enables both parties to recognize each other’s personhood.

In their piece, Body Language, Envisioning filmmaker Jes Sachse dares viewers to look at their body and think about how it feels to look like them, thus illustrating Garland-Thomson’s point about how intense looking can remake viewers’ perceptions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyk48Nc-a9o). Lindsay Fisher, another Envisioning artist, does more in her video, First Impression, than grant people permission to look intently at her. In her search to discover what onlookers see when fixing eyes on her difference, she asks audiences to see beyond first impressions to find value in difference (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER_jE51g6II).

By inviting us to look intensely and question our urge to stare, these filmmakers challenge us to acknowledge our responses to difference—and, ultimately, become conscious of our own embodiment. Through this refraction, they refocus our collective gaze into societal views of difference and illuminate the myriad ways in which we share the experience of what it is to be vulnerable, flawed, and embodied—and hence, to embody “difference,” at least in relation to the culturally idealized mode of embodiment, which is imagined as invulnerable, autonomous, and always in control. The works of Sachse and Fisher offer audiences important insights into how disabled artists themselves learn, even as they teach others, to sense difference differently. Put differently, the self-learning that the artists share is inextricably connected to the teaching they offer us as viewers.

Volatile Bodies and the Vulnerable Researcher

The Envisioning project grew out of earlier narrative research on the bodily experiences of a diverse group of women, published as Becoming Woman: The Embodied Self in Image Culture (Rice 2014). Because most existing research in the area of embodiment and body image focuses on average-sized, nondisabled, white women’s weight problems, I decided to interview diversely embodied women to learn more about similarities and differences in their experiences. The narratives were told by almost a hundred women from all walks of life and diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, of varying sizes, and with and without disabilities. Included were participants perceived as attractive or normative as well as those deemed to inhabit bodies rendered as abject in our culture.

During the interpretation phase of this project, I became acutely conscious of my positionality in relationship to participants’ diverse embodiments. This consciousness brought me to consider questions of intersectionality and embodied self-reflexivity in analysis (see Burns 2006). Through intersectionality and self-reflexivity, I came to think about the significance of vulnerability in embodiment research, especially with populations positioned historically and socially as “vulnerable.” We can think about concepts of vulnerability, self-reflexivity, and intersectionality as integral to critical feminist approaches and as related to and dependent on one another. For example, researchers can practice self-reflexivity only if they are willing to make themselves vulnerable, to share and analyze something difficult or discomforting about themselves as a way of deepening understanding about an issue. Moreover, an intersectional analysis entails self-reflexivity, since self-reflexivity requires researchers to subject their positionalities to the same analyses as they do participants. Self-reflexivity thus enables them to raise questions of power and difference that need to be posed in order to do intersectional research.

Intersectionality is both a concept and an approach to understanding the experiences of individuals and groups in their diversity and complexity (Hobbs and Rice 2013). Emerging as a theoretically important term in the work of African American feminists and critical race scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins (1990) and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1994), it has since been adapted and developed by other feminist researchers. Intersectionality describes the idea that people live multiple layered identities and encounter shifting privileges and oppressions (Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women 2006). It critiques the limitations of perspectives that look narrowly at social relations through a gender lens alone, encouraging a wider view focused on the multiple components of identity and intersecting axes of power that constitute individuals’ experiences in the world (Karpinski 2007; Yuval-Davis 2006).

Intersectional theories and methods work to explore ways in which factors such as gender, sexuality, Indigeneity, class, race, disability, geography, refugee and/or immigrant status, size, and age interact to shape people’s social positioning. Such differences are also examined in the context of colonialism, neoliberal globalization, and other historical and political forces that create unequal access to power and privilege. While I acknowledge that the concept of intersectionality emerged from Black feminist thought and that scholars continue to debate whether intersectionality theory should be applied to other aggrieved groups (see Alexander-Floyd 2012; Anthias 2012), in my view, the concept is flexible enough to be applied broadly in order to better understand the diverse ways in which power and oppression operate across social situations. As intersectionality theorists Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall (2013, 787) write, “Intersectionality’s insistence on examining the dynamics of difference and sameness has played a major role in facilitating consideration of gender, race, and other axes of power in a wide range of political discussions and academic disciplines.” This does not mean that researchers must include in their research all people across all differences. Instead, researchers study how the complexities and specificities of their own and participants’ particular embodied identities and social locations play an important part in shaping their research and knowledge production.

This discussion brings us to the significance of self-reflexivity in critical research. Self-reflexivity—an ongoing critical reflection on the self and how the self is influencing the research—is a key component of postconventional and postcolonial feminist research, both of which are methodologies developed as a critical response to conventional research (Ghorashi 2005; Henry 2003; Rice 2009). Here, the term “conventional research” refers to research methodologies rooted in positivism and in some earlier interpretive paradigms such as grounded theory and phenomenology. Conventional methodologies encompass all research approaches premised on epistemologies (theories of knowledge) and ontologies (theories of reality, subjectivity, and the world) that privilege a Western scientific world view over other ways of knowing and being in the world, researcher detachment and transcendence over researcher interconnectedness and embodiment, knowledge as universal and fixed over knowledge as unstable and situated, and the researcher as impartial observer over the recognition of a researcher’s embeddedness in knowledge production and social conditions (Bell 2012; Haraway 2000, 2003; Shildrick 1997, 2004). In conventional research, for example, the self is seen as insignificant—at best, an unwelcome influence and, at worst, an outright obstacle to the acquisition of reliable knowledge, as something that has to be ignored or transcended in order to produce unbiased results.

Poststructuralist and postcolonial theories have posed serious challenges to the notion of the unbiased observer who faithfully records reality. Unlike conventional science, which looks to the external world for answers to research questions, postconventional research looks both outward and inward for its answers, investigating how researcher subjectivities also influence what knowledge gets produced. Although postconventional researchers harness a diversity of methodologies ranging from the qualitative to the quantitative, their aims are quite different from those of conventional research: they seek to “de-territorialise” knowledge and reality (Shildrick 1997, 3) by challenging the myth of objectivity inherent in the positivist paradigm; to reconceptualize subjectivity as embodied, interconnected, and interdependent; to revalidate lived and local knowledge; and to recognize the social context from which knowledge originates and the implications of knowledge claims for social justice aims (Bell 2012).

In postconventional research that attends to power relations, including the impacts of colonial histories on subjectivities and social relationships, interrogation of one’s positionality is critical. Here, researchers examine the significance of the self to all stages: how our subjectivities influence our choice of topics, the methods we choose, what we hear and don’t hear in our data, and how we analyze our results. The self can’t be separated but is integral to what knowledge gets produced. We can’t escape our selves, but we can account for and critically analyze the influence of our selves in our research. For many of us, postconventional and postcolonial methods require unlearning conceptual frameworks that we as Indigenous and non-Indigenous teachers and learners in postcontact settler societies have been inculcated into. Because postconventional and postcolonial methods have as an aim to reframe whatever the “problem” is and to repurpose the methods for researching it, the research process itself becomes educative as much as an explicit pursuit of social justice.

The willingness to turn the gaze on one’s self even when this may lead to discomforting and unsettling truths thus requires that critical researchers make themselves vulnerable. Yet vulnerability is defined very negatively in our society: it is conventionally described as a susceptibility to being wounded or hurt and an openness to criticism or attack. Vulnerability is also associated with the feminine, the disabled, the aged, the marginalized, the weak, and all groups seen as more prone or susceptible to harm due to their embodiment (illness, disability, pregnancy) or social disadvantage (poverty); this is especially so in the Western world, which privileges self-contained, autonomous, and independent selfhood. But while vulnerability can increase people’s susceptibility to suffering and inequality (since groups marked as vulnerable are socially rendered violable), it is also the ground for human exchange, empowerment, and growth. It is necessary for human being and human understanding. It is fundamental to relationship and to social life. It is, finally, a condition for learning and for transforming our world views and taken-for-granted ways of sensing the world.

Legal scholar Martha Fineman (2008, 8) seeks to rescue the term vulnerability from its purely negative associations, emphasizing instead its potential for re-thinking what constitutes “the human” and for enacting more inclusive social policies and justice if understood as a “universal, inevitable, enduring aspect of the human condition.” Recognizing both the negative and positive dimensions of vulnerability is important, she argues, since together they capture the inherent interdependence that underpins human existence. Fineman’s understanding of vulnerability as something shared by all human beings challenges the myth of the invulnerable autonomous self that is the basis of Western legal systems and social policies (including education practices such as standardized testing) and enjoins us to rethink these by taking the vulnerable self, our shared common human experience, as our starting point for building a more equitable society.

Anthropologist Ruth Behar coined the term the “vulnerable observer” as a way of talking about the value of vulnerability to research. Here, researchers make themselves vulnerable in the sense of sharing something about themselves that sheds additional light on the subject being discussed—in the same way that they write about “other” people’s lives to shed light on a topic. According to Behar (1997, 14), “Vulnerability doesn’t mean that anything personal goes. The exposure of the self who is also a spectator has to take us somewhere we couldn’t otherwise get to. It has to be essential to the argument, not a decorative flourish, not exposure for its own sake.” Being a vulnerable researcher means being present and honest with ourselves throughout our projects—namely, with our contradictory, uncomplimentary, or difficult thoughts and emotions, including our fears and desires and our implicatedness in others’ suffering. At the same time, it requires a willingness to be present to others’ emotions and experiences, to approach respectfully and tread carefully.

Because our culture associates vulnerability with cultural abjection and social exclusion, it is difficult for people to be vulnerable. Some groups are forcibly positioned as vulnerable. People also learn that they may be violated if they show vulnerability. But when people decide to make themselves vulnerable, this can interrupt prevailing norms and provoke personal and collective transformation. This is especially true when individuals in privileged positions unmask their vulnerabilities in an effort to deepen understanding and expose the operations of power surrounding constructions of vulnerability. For example, in opposition to the culturally sanctioned understanding of researchers as disembodied experts, those who write from their body histories insist on revealing the vulnerability they share with others, animating Fineman’s definition of the term and blurring boundaries between bodies that are forcibly positioned as vulnerable and those that intentionally position themselves as vulnerable. Granted, the consequences of vulnerability for those on whom it is imposed differ considerably from the consequences for those who choose to become vulnerable. All the same, a researcher’s articulation of vulnerability in the context of the cultural imperative to be (or at least appear to be) “all knowing” challenges expectations of who is vulnerable.

Being vulnerable challenges research conducted through imperial eyes, a perspective that Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Maori) (1999), Kathy Absolon (Anishinaabe) (2011), Eve Tuck (Aleut) (Tuck and Yang 2012), and other Indigenous scholars have thoroughly critiqued. Vulnerability directs researchers to turn the gaze on themselves to attend to the partiality and cultural specificity of their knowledge claims. Insofar as it “unsettles” idealized notions of the self-contained, autonomous Western self, vulnerability also aids in decolonizing ways of knowing and generating knowledge. By decolonization, I mean the broad project of critiquing Western world views and challenging oppressive power structures that they uphold. According to Tuhiwai Smith (1999, 98), decolonizing, “once viewed as the formal process of handing over the instruments of government, is now recognized as a long-term process involving bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic, and psychological divesting of colonial power,” including within the academy and other sites of learning. For Dawn Rae Davis (2010), decolonization means displacing white, Western subjectivities and world views from the centre of teaching and research and disrupting Eurocentric, First World privilege through an examination of colonial relations from the perspectives of colonized others.

In decolonizing approaches to research specifically, the connection between teaching and research is inescapable, since researchers must unlearn Western ways of knowing in order to contribute to the decolonization of knowledge itself. According to Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012, 7), “decolonization is not a metaphor” for the liberation of all oppressed groups but a specific process that involves “the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted” by Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Thinking with these writers, I understand decolonizing research as research that aims to understand Indigenous experiences of colonization and to revalue Indigenous knowledges as a way of reclaiming Indigenous lives, lands, languages, and world views. I see researcher vulnerability as a potentially “unsettling” process that supports decolonization because it means continuously working to divest myself of the masks of white, ableist, and settler privilege and power that uphold colonial and other oppressive histories and legacies. In my work, I strive to enact decolonizing methodologies by prioritizing process and relationship—by working to ensure that the participants gain something valuable from the research experience, that they come to see themselves as knowledge producers in the process, and, perhaps most importantly, that they are self-determining throughout it.

Ethical Risks of Self-Reflexivity in Embodiment Research

In this final section, I share my research as an example of how one researcher’s embodied identities and experiences have influenced her research process and the knowledge she produces. I use my research to take up how we can use our selves in an ethically transparent way. My point is not to privilege or centre the self but to develop a consciousness of the self so that we can see how the self impacts on our projects: What am I both seeing and not seeing because of the positions I occupy? I begin by discussing my embodied difference and a digital story I made about embodied self-reflexivity called The Elephant in the Room. I then analyze what I had chosen to conceal about my bodily experiences and look at some of the ways in which my body secrets influenced my interpretation of the accounts told by women participating in my research. I conclude by thinking critically about the risks and rewards of embodied vulnerability and self-reflexivity in research.

In the past twenty years, feminist researchers concerned about ethics in representation have advocated a range of practices, including the following: building researcher accountability through checking interpretations with informants and consequences of representations for researched groups (Cosgrove and McHugh 2000; Lather 1991); increasing researcher responsibility through immersing oneself in the experiences, world views, and challenges of communities under investigation (Merrick 1999); enhancing researcher advocacy through commitment to producing knowledge with possibilities for improving people’s lives (Fine et al. 2003); and engaging in researcher self-reflexivity through interrogating the researcher’s emotions, embodiments, identities, and allegiances that affect research processes (Deutsch 2004; Hoskins and Stoltz 2005; Johnson-Bailey 1999; Reger 2001). While I have used all of these methods and strategies, I have also struggled with the challenges that they each pose, especially embodied self-reflexivity. To shed light on why turning the gaze on myself has been difficult, I examine how secrets in my body story simultaneously complicated my understanding of participants’ accounts and provided important entry points into them.

My own account of my relationship to this research topic is heavy with secrets and silence (see Rice 2009). Before outlining my body history, I want to give some background on the digital story I made about it (view at carlarice.com/carla-rice/, password: abc123). While I created this video as a self-reflexive exploration for the Envisioning project, it captures the dilemmas I encountered throughout the earlier Becoming Women project. Since I was asking women involved in Envisioning to expose their vulnerabilities, I knew that I wanted to acknowledge my own. I intended the film as a tool for calling attention to power relations based on appearance and difference, analyzing shared vulnerabilities across differing experiences of body privilege and abjection, and blurring boundaries that exist in our culture between categories of normal and abnormal and male and female, as well as between the disabled and nondisabled worlds.

The first body secret explored in the digital story is that I am a former fat girl. This embodied identity still haunts me. As the Becoming Women research progressed, my body shifted from a comparatively large to a culturally acceptable size. Although I lost weight gradually over a long period of time, as I move through space today, I still imagine my bodily boundaries to be much larger, carrying body memories of my fat embodiment. My body secrets do not stop at my former fat girl identity. I am also a woman with facial hair. This aspect of my embodied identity I have hidden through electrolysis and other efforts at hair removal. As with fat, anxieties about exposing this devalued difference continue to plague me. For example, I have wondered: Would unmasking my fatness or facial hair invite others’ pitiful or critical gaze? Increase my vulnerability to harsh assessments that I have “failed” as a feminine, or as a feminist, woman? I see similar dilemmas represented on the Post Secret website (www.postsecret.com), a site to which people anonymously mail handcrafted post cards revealing closely guarded secrets. The site’s popularity might reveal something about how people in our society are subjected to rigid standards of normal and how failure to live up to rules for normalcy can open up space to see the constructedness of these categories.

During data collection for Becoming Women, I confronted situations in which my own and others’ queries about my appearance sharpened these inner conflicts. One example of self-questioning arose in an interview with a young South Asian Canadian woman who I’ll call Erum. While many women identified body hair as a problem trait, Erum emphasized that facial hair was especially frightening because it was read as a sign of biological maleness, undermining her sense of security in her sexed identity, by eliciting the intensely anxiety-provoking sensation that she was not really a woman. As Erum spoke about her fears of feeling “other than female,” I identified strongly with her sense of difference. When she spoke about the ways in which racialized women are imagined as hairier and more masculine, I began to understand how this abject—the image of the dark, hairy other—works to uphold a white body ideal. Reflecting on Erum’s comment about how these notions about the bodies of racialized women had to be grounded in “stereotypes” because “Italian women are hairy too,” I realized that she was drawing on a cultural imaginary that sees women from the Global South and from southern Europe as dark others who deviate from northern European ideals of femininity.

There is a colonial basis for this sort of racist extrapolation. Historically, certain groups of racialized women, including darker-skinned African and South Asian women, as well as Indigenous South American women and, to a lesser extent, those from southern Europe, were perceived to have more hair than northern European women. (I am of both Scottish and Italian ancestry, and others invariably associate my hairiness with my Italian heritage.) In the service of British and European imperialism, this presumed difference was incorporated into a culturally constructed hierarchy of beauty and femininity that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientists created to support colonial policies of subjugation. In the nineteenth century, for example, Julia Pastrana, an Indigenous woman from Mexico, became a freak show performer in Europe owing to her excess facial hair, the result of a rare condition called hypertrichosis. Hypersexual advertising presented her in highly exaggerated ways as a cross between male (with a full beard) and female (wearing a knee-length dress), and as a human-animal hybrid (with a supposedly ape-shaped skull and body) (Browne and Messenger 2003; Garland-Thomson 1997, 73).

Controversy surrounding the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) exhibition that featured the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, suggests that the depiction of racialized Indigenous women as hairy and masculine is a practice not relegated to our colonial past.3 Believing that audiences knew little of Kahlo save for her iconic “unibrow,” AGO marketers initiated a scheme inviting patrons to take self-portraits sporting stick-on unibrows in photo booths installed in front of the gallery (Mortimer 2012). The resulting photos of people with felt unibrows making funny faces, later printed in local newspapers, suggest that rather than raising awareness, the gimmick tended to provoke public ridicule because it drew on old ideas about Indigenous women as unfeminine and ugly. The AGO tried to defend its stunt by asserting that Kahlo aggressively challenged these associations in her art. However, it is questionable whether the gallery would promote an exhibition featuring a revered white male artist that poked fun at attributes (such as penis or skull size) similarly weighted with historical meanings. In the wake of recent bullying-related suicides in North America and an antibullying law passed by the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, it strikes me as particularly ironic that one of the province’s major cultural institutions would pursue a marketing scheme that teaches children that it is permissible to mock others’ bodies and perceived differences.

I respected Erum for revealing her experiences. Yet, during our interview, I concealed my own similar struggles. Over time, I have become uncomfortably aware of the ways in which my secrecy, by contributing to silence about white women’s hairiness, also reflects the racially based assumption that there is something wrong with body hair—that, as a quality associated with the dark-skinned other, it renders a woman something other than female. In other words, my silence about white women’s facial hair simply acquiesces in, and thus reinforces, a racial hierarchy of beauty and femininity.

Throughout this process, not only did I privately question my capacities to analyze informants’ accounts, but such questions were also raised during public lectures about this research. For instance, after one talk, a young academic asked me how I could name so many bodily differences and affinities between myself and participants while ignoring what she perceived to be the “elephant in the room”: that I was “an attractive woman.” At that moment, I realized the impossibility of removing my bodily struggles from interpretation. As I scrambled to compose an answer, I once again confronted my duplicity. Reflecting on my self-questioning and the audience’s queries that culminated with this woman’s question, I began a searching examination of my critical intentions, including my role in upholding or interrupting processes of “othering” throughout the research. I began to appreciate the privileges of passing as a conventional woman: from the safe space of the unmarked centre, I could theorize about other/ed women’s lives. This is what finally galvanized me to turn the gaze on myself.

As a result of internalizing dominant ideas about what counts as knowledge, I had removed myself from my analysis. In so doing, I suppressed a source of insight into theorizing women’s narratives. Some feminists have argued that sexist, racist, and consumerist interests push women into appearance alteration (Bordo 1999, 33–65; 2009). Others contend that women are not “cultural dupes” but “secret agents” who strategically alter their appearance in their best interests (Davis 1995, 159–81). My body secrets, considered in conjunction with informants’ stories, suggest to me that appearance alteration might encompass both positions—that body modification may signify women’s capitulation to ideals and their opposition to being othered. Analyzing my experiences alongside those of other women also reveals how body secrets work to sustain our sex/gender system. For example, keeping secrets such as hair removal serves to uphold sex categories as “natural” and suppresses knowledge about the ways in which so-called natural sex differences are socially produced. Keeping body hair removal a secret also upholds racial categories as “natural” by reinforcing the myth that certain groups of racialized women are more hairy and hence less female. Revealing these practices further reveals the gendered racism that reinforces hierarchies among different groups—namely, the sliding scale of beauty, femininity, and femaleness that positions white northern European women on the highest rung. In this way, self-reflexivity has allowed me to deepen my own understanding and analysis of corporeal power relations underpinning this research.

I now turn to “embodied engagement” and my ongoing examination of the ways in which my body history has influenced research activities. The strategies I began to use in an attempt to do research differently included decentring my bodily self, revisiting my story, and imagining the experiences of others. Because I was interviewing across and about differences, I tried to pose questions that facilitated exploration without making assumptions about participants’ experiences. For example, the question “What is an early, or perhaps your earliest, memory of your body?” called to mind, for some, memories of sexual abuse and its consequences for embodiment. For others, this probe elicited accounts of bodies as vehicles for their active exploration of the world. By centring each woman’s story while bearing in mind my own and other women’s points of connection with her account, I was able to craft new questions that considered commonalities across differences. Questions that emerged—such as “When, if ever, did you begin to feel like a woman?”—invited participants to reflect on the idea of “qualifying” as a woman and/or to consider how differences have disqualified them.

I knew from the beginning that I did not want to appropriate others’ stories to tell my own. Conducting a self-interview at the beginning of my project (when I was fat) allowed me to add my own voice to those of participants without centring myself. After spending time immersed in other women’s stories (and having lost weight), I was shocked to discover, upon returning to my own, that I had become “other” to myself. When I reread my transcript, I encountered a familiar yet foreign self whom I recognized but no longer regarded as me. It was difficult to stay present with the pain and anger that made her story simmer. For the first time, I understood how narratives capture ephemeral moments in individuals’ lives. Surprised by the forceful emotions that gripped me when I encountered this other who had been displaced by subsequent selves, I inferred that some participants might have similar responses to their stories. I began to view analysis as a relational process that occurs between investigator and informants and between a researcher’s (and participants’) past and present selves.

I also came to understand how my embodiment at the time of my self-interview had significantly contoured my interpretation of the memories told. Revisiting this previous bodily self enabled me to see how my interpretations shifted and changed at different times because of my changing embodiment. The rage and shame I had felt because of others’ disparagement of my body gradually decreased along with my diminishing weight, but reconnecting with this “other within” helped me to relate to the strong emotions that inflected other women’s accounts. Through appreciating this other within, who was displaced by subsequent embodied selves, I could begin to acknowledge the unbridgeable space between self and other, and other in the self. I came to see how re-encountering this former self could bring me closer to others’ accounts of embodiment, even though that prospect frightened me. Expressed differently, confronting difficult emotions of shame and rage became a productive move during analysis, since it propelled me to question my shifting shades of body abjection and privilege relative to others’ embodiments and to my current and former bodily selves.

Feminist researchers have critiqued the idea that you can know or become an authority on someone else’s experience. However, some have argued that women can traverse differences without assuming an arrogant “all knowing” role. Nira Yuval-Davis (2006) proposes a transversal approach that combines “rooting” in one’s own situation (understanding one’s own history and implicatedness in conditions) with “shifting” to the position of the other (understanding the other’s history and current conditions) as a method for difference-sensitive feminism. According to Yuval-Davis (1997, 125), a transversal politics replaces feminist claims to, or aims of, unity and sameness with dialogues that recognize women’s situated differences; it strives to find or forge common values from divergent positions. While feminists have since advocated taking a transversal approach for crossing borders of ethnicity, nationality, history, and place (see, for example, Archer 2004), such a method could also be used by those seeking to traverse boundaries of subjectivity, body, and physical space.

This crossing does not replay what Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack (1998, 335) call the “race to innocence” or what Tuck and Yang (2012, 10) refer to as “settler moves to innocence”—strategies or positionings wherein researchers from privileged locations cast off their subjectivities, embodiments, histories, and cultural legacies to fantasize merging with a mythical other. Nor does it involve taking up the stance of what Susan Dion (2009, 179) calls “the perfect stranger,” the position of false innocence achieved through non-Indigenous people’s claims to ignorance and denial of the enmeshed histories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Canada. Rather, I came to see what I now call “embodied transversalism” as a method that acknowledges the unbridgeable space between self and other, that approaches rather than appropriates others’ experiences, and that invites generative engagement with, rather than denial of or disengagement from, questions of privilege and difference. This method also resonates with Roxana Ng’s (2011, 347) “integrative critical embodied pedagogy or embodied learning,” an approach to decolonizing teaching and learning that highlights the importance of the learner’s interrogation of the social and sentient experience of self and other throughout the learning process. Central to an embodied transversal interpretive approach is shifting between empathically interpreting my own body history and empathically imagining others’ embodied lives. Moving beyond empathy alone, this approach combines empathic with informed imagining by immersing me in my own perspectives and histories as well as in those of research participants. Significantly, the method enabled me to recognize differences and affinities while respecting the incommensurability, indeterminacy, and asymmetry of my own and other women’s embodied accounts.

Conclusion

In this research, I used embodied reflexivity and vulnerability as a way to risk fathoming, while resisting mastery over, other women’s experiences. Had I not analyzed my body secrets, I might have missed how appearance is an important social category that intersects and overlaps with, but is not reducible to, more familiar categories such as gender, race, Indigeneity, disability, or class. In this analysis, I centred my own bodily struggles not to decentre others’ stories of injustice or to appropriate their suffering but to bring to the surface another axis of power and oppression that functions through bodies in our homogenized, biomedicalized Western world: bodily difference, normalization, and norms. Had I not acknowledged the elephant in the room, I might also have missed the shared vulnerabilities and experiences of abjection underpinning my own and participants’ accounts. In this way, attending to power relations operating through bodies in this research offered insights into the intrapsychic and social relations of appearance and difference that regulate our lives.

In the wake of completing the Becoming Women project and this work, however, I am left with an unsettling question regarding the perils of traversing the space between self and other in feminist-informed social justice and decolonizing research. I worry about “playing in the dark,” to extend writer Toni Morrison’s (1992) metaphor (about the ways in which white writers historically have projected their culturally shaped anxieties and desires onto the racialized characters they create) beyond the literary to the researcher’s imagination: I’m concerned about how my leap into other women’s lives might embody my own fears and desires. I worry, too, about “playing Indian,” as Philip Deloria (1998, 7) has put it, about how exposing vulnerability may be a way of disguising myself as other to evade my implicatedness in colonial, ablest, and other processes of othering. Methods of decentring myself, revisiting my body story, and imagining others’ embodiments have made possible more faithful accounts that come closer to informants’ experiences. At the same time, I have learned that difference can’t be fully known, for to claim that one can know the other is to collapse difference and absorb it into the self. In teaching me that difference cannot be mastered or overcome then, these methods of traversing positionalities have also taught me to shoulder responsibility for my privilege and to honour the space in-between.

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1  Since disability is a temporal condition that is both dynamic and emergent over the lifespan, I use the term “currently nondisabled” to capture the reality that almost all nondisabled people will become disabled if they live to old age.

2  “About Us: Our Mission,” Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility, n.d., http://sinsinvalid.org/mission.html.

3  The exhibition, “Frida and Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting,” ran from 20 October 2012 to 30 January 2013.