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Week Two: Feminist Research Practice - Her shape and his hands

Gordon, Avery. 2008. “Her Shape and His Hands.” In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd edition, 3–30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Why do dreams die, according to Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye (1970) - because of the "ensemble of social relations that create inequalities, situated interpretive codes, particular kinds of subjects" p.4

Complex personhood: "all people (albeit in specific forms whose specifity is sometimes everything) remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others." p.4

"Complex personhood means that even those called "Other" are never never that." p.4

"the nature of the ghost, the very distinctions between there and not there, past and present, force and shape." p.6

"To study social life one must confront the phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it." p.7

"Ghostly Matters looks for a language for identifying hauntings and for writing with the ghosts of haunting inevitably throws up." p.7

"The persistent and troubling ghosts in the house highlighted the limitations of many of our prevalent modes of inquiry and the assumptions they make about the social world, the people who inhabit these worlds, and what is required to study them." p. 8

"If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sing, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place." p.8

"The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life." p.8

Poststructuralism and postmodernism have had a lasting effect on how we experience the world. The issue postmodernism raises is "the relationship between what in everyday language we call 'experience' of 'reality' and what we then decide to call 'knowledge' about it" (Jardine 1985: 145) p.10

"At the core of the postmodern field or scene, then, is a crisis in representation, a fracture in the epistemological regime of modernity, a regime that rested on a faith in the reality effect of social science." p.10

This predicament has resulted in the idea that "practices of writing, analysis and investigation... constitute less a scientifically positive project than a cultural practice that organizes particular rituals of storytelling told by situated investigators." p.10

Feminism's links to postmodernity are "its participation in the critique of the transparency of language, objective causality, transnational generalization... all of which are part and parcel of the so-called crisis in representation." p.11























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