Abstract

A dissertation, with its chapters, footnotes, abstract, and syntax of alienation, seemed to me the last way I'd want to write about anything that really mattered. For months I was so alienated by the idea of writing a dissertation that I couldn't even produce a prospectus. Finally, I did. My idea was to take contemporary American women's experience, as expressed in published personal narratives, as the focus of an inquiry into feminist standpoint epistemologies. In particular, I wanted to focus on women's experience of their bodies, to see whether, as Emily Martin explores in The Woman In the Body , women's own stories about our bodies are convergent with or divergent from scientific medical models that represent them in terms of production and disease . ;My prospectus was approved. Several months later, I hadn't written a thing. A friend suggested that I was building a wall of theory between myself and writing, and at this rate the wall would only get thicker and I would get farther from writing. Eventually I did realize that before I could write, I would have to deconstruct my wall of theory to enable my own seeing and knowing. I also needed to reconceive the form of academic writing, which I perceived as distancing and depersonalizing, and which seemed to me to reach a crazy pitch of alienation in the dissertation. I resolved to write my dissertation in journal form, as a response in kind to the personal narratives I wanted to write about. Soon it was clear that my journal, like the journals I was reading, had a shape of its own, a shape that was curved rather than linear. It wasn't an argument. I had to give up my notions of fitting women's experiences to an explanatory model. My journal developed as a spiral, balanced deeply within itself and growing by addition at the open end. In the process of writing it, I enacted my own epistemology: to see what I see and know what I know