Rhizovocality

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education ISSN 09518398 print/ISSN 13665898 online 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/0951839032000142968

QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION,SEPTEMBEROCTOBER 2003, VOL. 16, NO. 5, 693710

Rhizovocality

ALECIA YOUNGBLOOD JACKSONAppalachian State University

In this conceptual paper, the author offers a rethinking of the concept of voice in qualitativeresearch informed by feminist, postcolonial, and poststructural theories. Using Deleuze &Guattaris (1987) figuration of the rhizome, the irruptions of voice in feminist andpostfoundational qualitative research are mapped to invent a concept of voice, rhizovocality,that signifies voice as excessive and transgressive yet interconnected. This mapping beginswith early feminist emancipatory research that assumed an authentic, silent womans voicein need of liberation. Then, the author moves into dilemmas of power that emerged fromcritiques of problematic representations of voice within feminist research. The third sectionof the paper is a postcolonial feminist response to imperial uses of voice in feminist research,and the final part is a feminist deconstructive critique of voice in qualitative research. Thearticle concludes with an argument for rhizovocality as a conceptual, deconstructive tool forworking the limits of voice in qualitative research.

Introduction

The concept of voice in feminist qualitative research has a long and variegatedhistory of deployment. In this paper, I seek to map that deployment and to offer adifferent way of conceptualizing and representing voices in qualitative research thatdraws from feminist and deconstructive paradigms. The challenge of this mappinglies in the limits of the linear space of graphic writing, for voice in feministqualitative research does not have a lineal, hierarchical history with simple andstriated originating, culminating, or terminating points. The various deployments,critiques, and reconfigurations of voice in feminist research are circular, inter-connected, and deterritorializing. Therefore, the mapping I offer in this paperdoes not seek to reveal what voice means in feminist qualitative research but what itdoes how voice functions, what enables it to function in certain ways, and what itproduces.

Deleuze & Guattaris image of the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987),composed of plateaus, intensities, and multiplicities connected to other multi-plicities by underground stems, is a helpful figuration1 to consider not only how toread this text but also how to imagine the function of voice in feminist qualitativeresearch. As Deleuze & Guattari (1987) describe them, rhizomes do not have fixedorigins like the roots of a tree; they are tuberous multiplicitous, adventitious andconnect in nonlinear assemblages to other things. This text constitutes anassemblage and must be read as such; in this text there are lines of articulation orsegmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements ofdeterritorialization and destratification (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3). Imagine,

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then, as you read, that this is a flat, spatial text, spreading out and forming arhizome. Read the rhizomatic irruptions of multiple conceptions of voice infeminist qualitative research as lines of flight (p. 9), as things popping up in themiddle not preceding but exceeding. Ruminate on the connections among theirruptions and understand them as historical and contextual yet neither linear norhierarchical an assemblage . . . one inside the other and all plugged into animmense outside that is a multiplicity as well (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 23).The irruptions the reconfigurations of voice within feminist qualitative researchare a coming and going rather than a starting and finishing, moving among andbetween in a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away (p. 25).As a rhizomatic text, I organize and write this paper not as a linear progression butas an attempt to present the resignification of voice in feminist qualitative researchas a rhizomatic outgrowth of discursive processes.

Therefore, the first irruption (below) is not a point of origin; I neither returnto it nor transcend it. As well, the last irruption is not a terminus. My inventedsignifier rhizovocality that sprouts in the final section of this paper is part of a largerrhizome of voice in feminist qualitative research; it emerges from and isinterconnected within this multiplicitous assemblage. As such, rhizovocality gets itfunction from my understanding of its relationship with other lines of articula-tion; that is, rhizovocality is only possible within the territory it deterritorializes.New lines of flight are always connected to what produced them, which allude to anopening, a playful working of the limits (Derrida, 1981/1972). Working the limits,in this Derridean sense, means to transgress in the middle of things andreconfigure them, not to transcend or be beyond them. One never liveselsewhere, Derrida (1981/1972, p. 12) writes, so transgressions, resistances, andirruptions foster rhizomatic consortings with the limit. Rhizovocality is a transgres-sion that works the limit of voice in feminist qualitative research.

That said, this text begins with an irruption that of feminist social scienceresearch and its concern for making womens voices heard though you may enterit wherever you like.

Irruption: womens voices in emancipatory feminist research

Feminist research methodology is as diversified and dynamic as feminism itself;indeed, feminists wonder if there can even be a methodology called feminist(Abu-Lughod, 1990; DeVault, 1999; Fonow & Cook, 1991; Harding, 1987c; Klein,1983; Nielsen, 1990a; Oleson, 2000; Reinharz, 1992; Stacey, 1988; Stanley, 1990;Strathern, 1987; Westkott, 1990). While there is no homogeneous, unifiedapproach to feminist research, one2 of the salient currents running among feministresearch is the privileging of womens lived, diverse experiences as sources ofknowledge, and implicated in this theme are issues of voice. In the first phases offeminist research in the 1970s, feminists set out to create social change throughtheir research, not exploiting women as objects of knowledge (as masculine,conventional social science would have it) but honoring them as agents ofknowledge. As Reinharz (1992) explains, feminist research in the social sciencesemerged from an awareness that women had the right to criticize the accepted bodyof knowledge and the right to create knowledge (p. 11). This accepted body ofknowledge was sexist, created for and by men, and excluded women. Therefore,

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one of the first radical correctives to this androcentric practice was to study womenand to create research and knowledge for, not simply about, women. Thisemancipatory research for women was intended to have a consciousness-raisingeffect: it should improve and transform their lives by generating new knowledgeabout their social and political conditions so that women, as newly liberated andempowered, can overcome the oppressive, controlling structures in their lives(DeVault, 1999; Fonow & Cook, 1990; Harding, 1987c; Klein, 1983; Nielsen, 1990a;Westkott, 1990). Mies (1991), who believes that social change is the starting pointof science, called for a collapse of the binary logic of thought/action and science/politics. She argued that the aim of the womens movement, and therefore the goalof feminist research, is not only the study of but also the eradication of womensoppression. For feminist research to be truly emancipatory, then, scientific-theoretical insights must be channeled back into the social, political, and historicalcontexts in which they are embedded. This is not to say that the resultingempowerment is limited to the participants, since feminist researchers awarenesscan also be raised in their efforts to transform patriarchy (Fonow & Cook, 1990;Reinharz, 1992).

Harding (1987c) writes that we live in a culture which systematically silencesand devalues the voices of women (p. 7). The concern for making womens voicesheard resonates among emancipatory models of feminist theory and research,particularly those feminist researchers who use qualitative methods to collect data.Since women are traditionally silenced, feminist researchers whose projects areemancipatory seek to give voice to women respondents through interviewing andethnographic methods. Feminist qualitative researchers who interview their womenparticipants believe that womens voices hold meanings worth discovering(DeVault, 1999, p. 56) and that learning from women is an antidote to centuriesof ignoring womens ideas altogether or having men speak for women (Reinharz,1992, p. 19). Reinharz (1992) explains that feminist ethnographers, working ineither women-only or mixed-gender field settings, use interviews to make womensvoices audible, to understand womens experiences from their own standpoint andwithin the social contexts which shape those experiences (p. 48). Furthermore,interviewing for feminist researchers involves intimacy and reciprocity in their talkswith women (DeVault, 1999; Fonow & Cook, 1991; Reinharz, 1992). Mies (1983)advocates a series of group interviews/discussions held over a period of time; shebelieves that this method will yield more diverse data since women talking togetherhelps them to overcome their structural isolation in their families and tounderstand that their individual sufferings have social causes (p. 128). Similarly,Madriz (2000) contends that focus-group interviews are less intimidating forwomen who are more accustomed to gathering and talking about important issues,leading to greater awareness of their subjugation and, subsequently, to theirpersonal empowerment. Creating safe spaces for women to voice their collectiveand individual lived experiences allows participants and researchers to legitimizewomens subjectivities, experiences, and epistemologies.

Recovering the authentic voice that speaks of material, historically subjugatedexperiences and privileging it as a central and a truer reflection of social life is anepistemological concern of feminist emancipatory research. Feminist researchersassume that women can offer unique points of view of the world based on theirparticular experiences that are different from mens; they do research that inquiresinto womens lives from the standpoint of women. The goal of these emancipatory


projects in addition to working against androcentric, objective social sciencemethods is to use womens situated experiences as the starting point for inquiryand to release womens voices as avenues to these experiences. Feminist researcherswho valorize the authenticity of womens voices and experiences also make eachcentral to their research. They move beyond an add-women-and-stir approach tomasculine-biased social science research and assume that the more authentic selfproduced by feminist struggles can tell one true story about the world: there canbe a kind of feminist author of a new master story, a narrative about social lifewhich feminist inquiry will produce (Harding, 1987a, p. 188). According to thisview, womens standpoints are not equally true to mens but, by virtue of their sexualdifference, are more true.

For example, groundbreaking psychological feminist research in the 1980s onwomens voices and experiences treat voice as the core of the self . . . a powerfulpsychological instrument and channel, connecting inner and outer worlds(Gilligan, 1982, p. xvi). Feminist psychologists interviewed women and girls and, inthe data representations, foreground womens voices as they talk about moralproblems and relationship crises (Gilligan, 1982), experiences and feelings ofconnection and disconnection in their lives (Brown & Gilligan, 1992), and views ofreality, truth, knowledge, and authority (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule,1986). Employing phenomenological methods of intensive, interviewee-guidedinterviewing, Munhalls (1994) edited collection of 10 feminist research projectsrepresent womens experiences in narrative form: Using many womens voices . . .the many narratives are authentic and faithful to the experience of women. . . . Wemust hear women speak of their experience if we are to understand their meaningsand perceptions (p. viiixi). Fonow & Cooks (1991), Hardings (1987b), andNielsens (1990b) edited collections include social science research that exem-plifies the critical and emancipatory elements of feminist inquiry. These exemplarsare research for women, and they privilege womens disadvantaged location, theirintimate knowledge of their oppressors, and their subjugated experiences aslegitimate bases for knowledge claims. Metaphors of voice and silence permeatethese texts which signify womens exclusion from the production of knowledge andthe absence of womens experiences in social, cultural, and political spheres:finding a voice, coming to voice, creating safe spaces for voice, centering onvoice, voicing resistance, losing voice, giving up voice, bring voices to thecenter. Linking voice, experience, and meaning, these feminist researchers areinvolved in recovery, liberatory projects which seek to empower all women who areinvolved in the research participants, readers, and researchers.

Irruption: dilemmas of voice within feminist research

The feminist social scientists of the 1970s and 1980s tossed aside male-dominated,positivistic, detached modes of inquiry and ushered in the emancipatory discourseof making womens voices heard in scientific research. At the same time, and oninto the 1990s, other feminists announced their skepticism of this seeminglyunproblematic retrieval and representation of womens voices, arguing that power isthe most central dilemma for feminist researchers using qualitative methodologies(Stacey, 1988; Strathern, 1987; Wolf, 1996). While Wolf (1996) acknowledges thatfeminist qualitative researchers experiment with strategies of co-authoring and

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polyvocality in representation to confront or change power relations, she doubtsthat this move does much to either radically transform power relations or empowerwomen since the academic feminist maintains control over the entire researchprocess, from the topic selection to the data representation. Though feministresearchers might seek to create space for womens voices, in doing so, they mayremain transparent in their own silent presence and power (Wolf, 1996). Evenvoices that are presented in the raw to avoid problems of editing andinterpretation by the researcher become a translation of power (Behar, 1993, p.229), and Lather (1991) warns that researchers, with their intrusive voices, describeand inscribe when representing data. Fine (1992) expresses similar concern; shecritiques the ways in which some feminist ethnographic texts appear to let theOther speak while the feminist researcher unproblematically hides just under thecovers of those marginal if now liberated voices (p. 215). Fine (1992) agreesthat the researchers power is rendered oblique in texts that appear as if they wereconstructed without . . . as if researchers were simply vehicles for transmission, withno voices of their own (p. 211). This inescapable authority sets up relationships ofmanipulation, betrayal, and inequality since data interpretation is always registeredin the researchers voice (Stacey, 1988). Fine does not dismiss the significance ofusing voices as qualitative research data; however, she argues that participantsvoices offer a decoy when feminist researchers rely on them as innocent,monolithic, or singular, as if the voices say it all. Denying the complex, contradictoryhard-to-code voices makes trouble for creating borders around conclusivearguments. Fine sensitively warns feminist researchers in the social sciences not toromanticize voices but to pay critical attention to what voices we hear and how wehear them. This romanticization of voices leads to emancipatory researcherstendencies to idealize and totalize their participants experiences, ignoring themessiness of their multiple subjectivities and contextual realities (Hargreaves, 1996;Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1996).

The implicitly silent voice of the liberatory feminist researcher, as well as herpotentially imperialist and racist representations, is incredibly problematic andirresponsible, particularly in emancipatory research on Other women: U.S. womenof color, Third World women, and those beyond the confines of race and ethnicity(e.g., disability studies, gay/lesbian studies, class studies, generational studies). AsSpivak (1986) sagely notes, feminist researchers do no more than use the Other assimply a name that provides the alibi for erasing the investigators intervention intothe construction and representation of the narrative (p. 229). Alcoff (1991),similarly addressing the problem of speaking for Others, advocates a concreteanalysis of the power relations involved in representation so that the researchersname (with the authority and power it carries) is not an alibi. She outlines fourinterrogatory practices used to evaluate the power relations in speaking for Others:questioning our desire to master and dominate as the speaker; interrogating ourpositionalities and how that bears on what we say (going beyond mere autobio-graphical disclaimers); being accountable and responsible for what we say, which involvesbeing open and attentive to criticism; and analyzing the discursive and material effects ofour words looking at where the speech goes and what it does there (p. 26). Somefeminist researchers have taken up some version of this challenge to reinscribethemselves into their representational texts by writing themselves as historically,culturally, politically positioned interpreters with subjective, multiple desires of theirown (e.g., see Kondo, 1990; Linden, 1993; Wolf, 1992).


Irruption: talking back3

Those feminists of color in the U.S. who are concerned about the difficulties (evenimpossibilities) of speaking to and the conflicts/misinterpretations in being heardby white feminists take on theoretical and methodological projects that confrontthe effects of power relations in (white) feminist emancipatory research forwomen. Abu-Lughod (1990) argues that any use of a womans voice in liberalfeminist research draws on modern Western cultural concepts of womanhood (i.e.,white, middle-class, heterosexual women); therefore, the claim that research is forwomen connotes a particular type of woman who benefits from this research. bellhooks (1990) cogently points out how a dominant groups authority is reinforcedand legitimized as its members speak about/for Others, while simultaneouslyreinscribing the Others silence and Otherness:

Often this speech about the Other annihilates, erases: no need to hearyour voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself.No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know yourstory. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in sucha 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 speaking subject, andyou are now at the center of my talk. (pp. 151152)

Lugones and Spelman (2000/1983) echo hookss caustic accusation of the culturalimperialism inherent in liberatory feminist researchers intention to give voice towomen and to raise their consciousness through dialogic, emancipatory research.They claim that the demand for womens voices to be heard is a call for a particulartype of womans voice, erasing voices that would speak about being Hispana, Black,Jewish, gay, working class as well as voices that are expressed in other languages.Lugones and Spelman agree with hooks that white feminists remake Other womeninto their own image as women sharing a common bond of oppression, whilekeeping other voices other ways of being in the world silent. They go on to assertthat white feminist researchers who claim to speak for/about/with women of colorcan only produce violently incomplete representations, replete with imperialisticovertones, because of unequal power relations between cultural communities.According to Lugones and Spelman, the only way in which White feministresearchers can hear the voices of women of color is to come to terms withhaving [their] world thoroughly criticized and scrutinized from the point of view ofthose who have been harmed by it, having important concepts central to itdismissed, being seen as of no consequence [to us] except as an object of mistrust(p. 26). This hard listening (which resonates with Alcoffs call) demands anunlearning of privilege, authority, and knowledge, an openness to and acceptanceof severe criticism, and a profound self-questioning and circumspection.

Collins (2000) argues that the imperial violence of representations of Blackwomen is so uniformly negative that they almost necessitate resistance (p. 100) a form of talking back that asserts Black womens epistemology as grounded intheir material, social, political, historical experiences and consciousness. She linksthe intersectionality of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation with powerdynamics to emphasize Black womens particularized knowledges and situatedstandpoints. She argues that these knowledges and standpoints can be the groundsfor developing oppositional epistemologies that shape Black womens conscious-

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ness and redefine their empowerment. Furthermore, Collins critiques her ownconceptualization of voice and explains how it has shifted in the 10 years betweenthe two editions of Black feminist thought. In the 1990 preface to the first edition,Collins writes,

This book reflects one stage in my ongoing struggle to regain my voice. . . .Like African-American women, many others who occupy societally denigratedcategories have been similarly silenced. So the voice that I now seek is bothindividual and collective, personal and political, one reflecting the inter-section of my unique biography with the larger meaning of my historicaltimes. (p. vi)

Collins goes on to claim that, in 1990, she presents the authenticity of Blackfeminist thought as coherent and complete, hoping that others who are silencedwill find their voices in the text and become empowered to change their lives. Butin 2000, Collins aims for more fluidity in her definitions of knowledge,consciousness, empowerment, and voice. She emphasizes power relations in heranalysis and is less preoccupied with coming to voice, since, as a result of powerrelations, voice is unstable and contingent. Collins writes, My concern now lies infinding effective ways to use the voice I have claimed while I have it (p. xiii,emphasis added).

Like these U.S. feminists of color, some feminists from so-called Third Worldcountries contest emancipatory feminist projects that claim to give voice towomen, maintaining that White, First World feminist researchers make their owndecisions about whose voices are authentic. Such destructiveness mirrors thehistorical and contemporary exploitative relations between colonizers and colo-nized and constructs an essential, monolithic Third World woman (Mohanty, 1984;Smith, 1999). Suleri (1992) has no use for the concept of an authentic voice since,in its unmediated quality, it claims proprietary rights similar to that of theoppressor. As colonized people of the U.S., American Indians are beginning toreject any efforts of White researchers (feminist or not) to represent their voices,since researchers leave Indians out of the decision-making processes of the researchand their representations are usually stereotypic revisions that satisfy Whites imageof them either as a lost, exotic, primitive culture or as a monolithic culture thaterases tribal differences (Jojola, 1998; Thornton, 1998). Swisher (1998) advocatesa separatist view and calls for an end to Whites researching Indians since itpropagates the greed of Whites and the exploitation of Indians as commodity in arelationship of internal colonialism. With their focus on sovereignty and self-determination and a refusal to be essentialized or romanticized by Whiteresearchers, American Indians are beginning to research and represent their ownvoices because only they themselves are able to understand the diversity andcomplexity of tribal knowledges and interests. This move heavily disrupts thenoninnocent project of retrieving an authentic, exotic yet oppressed voice. hooks(1992) refers to this non-innocent retrieval as eating the other, a diminutionwhich commodifies cultural, ethnic, and racial differences and offers them up asnew dishes to enhance the white palate the Other will be eaten, consumed, andforgotten (p. 39).

Trinh (1989), who also writes about the violence of First World feministswording an essential, authentic Third World voice, offers a caveat to Third World,postcolonial women:


In trying to tell something, a woman is told. . . . You who understand thedehumanization of forced removalrelocationreeducationredefinition,the humiliation of having to falsify your own reality, your voice you know.And often cannot say it. You try and keep on trying to unsay it, for if youdont, they will not fail to fill in the blanks on your behalf, and you will be said. (pp.8081, emphasis added)

Trinh, similar to hookss view, relevantly remarks on the falsity of Third Worldwomens agentic speech a speech that renders them passive in the wake of Whitefeminists more powerful (yet distorted) voices. Trinh passionately argues that theauthentic Third World voice is a construct a fiction of First Worldanthropologists who are in a position to decide what voices are authentic and whichare not. Third World women are expected to paint themselves thick withauthenticity (p. 88) and offer something different and exotic but not so differentthat it defies what White women have made Third World women to be.Inauthenticity is condemned as a loss of origins (p. 94) that must be retrieved andpreserved by a White anthropologist, an obsessive impulse to fashion authenticityout of that which holds together without contradiction or leakiness.

Spivak (1994/1988) takes further the issue of the (in)authentic voice in herclassic piece that evokes the question, Can the subaltern speak? Spivak answers with anunequivocal no and wonders if an oppressed group (i.e., subaltern women) canspeak for themselves and know their conditions within and against an imperialistic,colonial system in which they are inscribed.4 In this system they have no history, sohow can they speak of it, and how can it be purely retrieved? Furthermore, Spivakaccuses First World feminist social scientists of seeking out native elites asinformants, essentializing their voices as authentic and representational of allnative people. The desire to create a homogenous Other is rooted in the epistemicviolence of imperialism and the belief in a full, pure form of consciousness that canbe represented in agentic speech; such desire keeps the subaltern woman as muteas ever (p. 90) with a fixed and pregiven identity. Nostalgia for retrieving theauthentic voice a lost origin is dangerous to postcolonial research thatcritiques imperialism precisely because the colonized subaltern subject isirretrievably heterogeneous (p. 79). The act of retrieval is perniciously distortingsince those who are after authentic voices will never be able to release authenticityfrom its dependency on the pure, real, and true in order to see the subalternsubject as anything but identical to other Third World people. Giving voice towomen retrieving the lost figure of the colonized (p. 91) becomes animpossible and even undesirable project in postcolonial feminist social research.

Spivak (1994/1988) firmly insists that the deconstructive practice of First Worldintellectuals is to keep the ethnocentric Subject from establishing itself byselectively defining an Other (p. 87). Spivak calls for less academic work oninvoking the authentic voice of the Other and more work on the mechanics of theconstitution of the Other an unlearning of white privilege that teaches whitefeminists to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically mutedsubject of the subaltern woman (p. 91, emphasis added). White feministresearchers speaking to the Other involves giving up the notion of authenticity whileacknowledging the power of their authority and privilege, which is an opennesssimilar to the suggestions made by Lugones and Spelman (2000/1983) and Alcoff(1991).

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Irruption: voice in poststructural theory

A fixation on lost origins that can be retrieved and represented through anauthentic voice equates expression with a consciousness of the True and the Real.The liberal concept of giving voice to women falls apart under poststructuraltheories of language, particularly within the theory of Derrida,5 whose deconstruc-tion of metaphysics (being as presence) denies this foundational principle anddisrupts the concepts it keeps in tow: voice, experience, meaning, and conscious-ness. Derridas language theory puts presence under erasure, exposing its sneakyclaims to certainty, transcendence, and purity, which, in turn, deterritorializesliberal conceptualizations of voice.

Derrida develops an admirable argument against the metaphysics of presenceby attacking phonocentrism, the priority of speech. Metaphysics privileges voiceand therefore the speaking, fully conscious subject who utters pure and fullmeaning. In the metaphysics of presence, voice is living and provides access to thereal. Voice lingers close to us, and because of this proximity it remains in ourcontrol, at our disposal, and gives life to our ideas, our self. This absolute will-to-hear-oneself-speak (Derrida, 1973/1967, p. 102) is a drive to make ourselves heardand understood, bringing meaning and self to consciousness and creatingtranscendental, universal truths. Derridas notion of transcendental truth(1997/1967) is one in which meaning is identical with itself; it surpasses the chainof significations and exists as a foundation, an origin, an ideal, essential truth forour beliefs; Riley (1988) suggests that Women, even in its plurality, is atranscendental signifier, a simultaneous foundation of and irritant to feminism(p. 17).

However, Derrida believes that language is so unstable that meaning is endlesslydeferred; therefore, there never can be a transcendental Truth that serves as thefoundation for meaning. Derrida (1973/1967) attacks the priority of voice, presentconsciousness, and transcendental meaning through a deconstruction of Husserlsphenomenology, which centers on being-as-presence: something is because it canbe present in consciousness (to itself, to others). In Husserls phenomenology,expression is the route to consciousness; the intentional aspect of expression makespresent (re-presents) the meaning of experience (Allison, 1973). Voice is thistransparent, expressive medium which both preserves the presence of the object andthe self-presence of the speaker (Derrida, 1973/1967, p. 76). To speak is to be heardin the present and to keep the meaning-intention in close proximity, in control,giving presence to the speaker. The phenomenological voice, with its transcendentpurity, governs and expresses a fully present meaning, bringing it and the speakerto consciousness, which means nothing other than the possibility of the self-presence of the present in the living present (Derrida, 1973/1967, p. 9). In thisway, voice is consciousness; it makes us aware of ourselves, what we are saying, andwhat we mean in the moment. Voice is transcendent because it reflects, here and now,a pure meaning that refers to nothing other than its presence (Derrida,1981/1972, p. 22), a presence that implies immediacy and essence and isuncontaminated by any exteriority that would challenge its truth value.

Derrida seizes upon this idea of the phenomenological voice as being-as-presence. There is no pure immediate awareness (or consciousness) since meaningin language is dependent on what is not present to us. Differance, the trace, the hinge(discontinuity) of the sign marks the impossibility of full speech, consciousness,


and meaning (Derrida, 1997/1967). The living present is always already a trace;each present sign has traces of other absent signs, and meaning is indefinitelypostponed. And, in Derridas view, language produces rather than reflectsmeaning. Meaning is constructed through a process of differance: a constantdeferral of meaning, leaving traces of other different signs that had to be excludedfor the sign to be itself. Meaning is suspended, still to come, and is never fullypresent in the moment of interpreting a sign.

With this poststructural view of language, voice is not transparent; it can nolonger express an absolute, ideal, essential meaning that is present/conscious toitself. Derrida (1973/1967) compares voice to a labyrinth, which includes in itselfits own exits. . . . Contrary to what phenomenology has tried to make us believe: thething itself always escapes (p. 104, emphasis added). The escape of full presenceleaves behind the fiction of origins, foundations, and a pure consciousness; theinstability and excess of language; and traces of partial absence and partialpresence. Meaning is not transcendental, essential, identical with itself. Meaning isinfinite. Therefore, what voice is able to express is equally as contingent, partial,and unstable.

Concomitant with Derridas deconstruction of the phenomenological voice,meaning, and consciousness is a feminist deconstruction of what that voiceexpresses: phenomenological experience (De Lauretis, 1984; Fuss, 1989; Scott,1991). Phenomenological experience, according to Derrida (1997/1967), hasalways designated the relationship with a presence (p. 60), a transcendentalessence of experience that implies origin and identity. Experience as uncontest-able evidence and as an originary point of explanation as a foundation on whichanalysis is based erases difference as well as the constructed nature of experienceand vision (Scott, 1991, p. 777). This view of experience as the origin of knowledgeand as something that merely happens to people ignores the ways in whichexperience produces subjects and subjectivities (de Lauretis, 1984; Scott, 1991); thisview is also dubious of an individual with a transcendental consciousness who iscapable of fully reflecting on experience, since subjectivity is an ongoingconstruction, not a fixed point of departure or arrival . . . it is the effect ofexperience (de Lauretis, 1984, p. 159, emphasis added). Scott (1991) rejects anynotion of an essential experience, expressed by fully aware speaking subjects, thatserves as an authoritative foundation for authentic knowledge. In emancipatoryprojects, experience is the start of a process that culminates in the realization andarticulation of social consciousness (p. 785); in this paradigm, experiencebecomes cumulative and homogenizing, providing a transcendental essence onwhich to build consciousness and identity. Instead, Scott (1991) wants experiencehistoricized, explained, and interpreted for the ways in which it constitutessubjectivities. Scott wants to redefine the meaning of experience to focus on it as atonce always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted.What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is alwayscontested, and always therefore political (p. 797). Fuss (1989) takes this furtherand wonders if truth claims can even be based on experience since what constitutesa womans experience, while it may seem self-evident and immediately percepti-ble, is always socially mediated; experience is never as unified, as knowable, asuniversal, and as stable as we presume it to be (p. 114).

In sum, poststructural theories reject the pure, full presence of an experiencethat can be fully understood and that can be fully expressed through a

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transcendental voice that reflects a direct and unmediated consciousness ofexperience. In poststructuralism, there is no prelinguistic experience or meaningthat is out there waiting to be expressed by our innocent voices. Instead, languageand experience are productive in that they create a meaning that is always alreadyslipping away not meaningless, but contingent. Therefore, retrieving theauthentic voice so that it can (finally) fully express meaning, bringing the subjectand its experiences into consciousness, collapses under poststructural scrutiny.Derrida (1973/1967) wonders, Can we always hold out for the possibility of a pureand purely self-present identity at the level of pre-expressive experience, the levelof sense prior to meaning and expression? (p. 83, emphasis added). Preexpressiveexperience experience that comes before language points to those who havebeen subjugated in silence, and giving voice to them presumes the act of raisingthat voice (and identity) to consciousness. If there cannot be an essentialist searchfor lost origins giving voice to women how can research be made to mean?(Lather, 2000b). This is a productive concern for qualitative researchers, and onethat feminist poststructural qualitative researchers take up.

Irruption: voice in poststructural feminist research

Feminist qualitative researchers who shift from a critical to a deconstructiveparadigm (or who work within the tensions between them) consider voice not as aproblem to be solved but as a concept to be problematized. Patti Lather andDeborah Britzman are two (of many) poststructural feminists who, in theirexemplary work, work the limits of voice in their qualitative research.

Troubling the angels (1997), a feminist ethnography of women living with HIV/AIDS, is research that works within and against the romance of voice in feministresearch. Lather (2000b) comments, Contrary to both the interpretive and criticalparadigms, within our project, we deconstructively assumed both researcher andresearched as unreliable narrators given the indeterminacies of language and theworkings of power in the will to know. Hence our focus was on voice as limit.Moving from paradigms that rely on theories of essence and realism, Lather andSmithies use a theory of deferral that locates voice, consciousness, and meaningnot as presence but as infinite delay and produce a stuttering, messy text full ofcontradictory, fractured voices that cannot promise to deliver a message to itsproper receiver (Lather, 2000c). The voices in the text neither representauthenticity nor valorize lived experiences that can be immediately consumed by areader in an easy, tidy narrative; instead, Lather and Smithies employ destabilizingstrategies of telling the Other and highlight voices, stories, and the real asmultiple, layered, shifting, and unending through a split-text format that refuses tosmother the womens voices with the researchers authorial presence. The multiplevoices, stitched together by seemingly disconnected narrative worlds, angelology,email and journal entries, letters, poems, interview transcripts, academic talk abouttheory and method, and autobiography (Lather & Smithies, 1997, p. 221), sendreaders in different directions in their reading, which creates excessive readingsand meanings; its excess, its supplementarity, will always take it somewhere else(St. Pierre, 1999, p. 283), belying authorial intentions and researcher voice.Furthermore, the multilayered, shifting countervoices that emphasize partiality,chunkiness and deferral rather than depiction disrupt any claim to an innocent


ethnographic realism of voices speaking for themselves (Lather, 2000c). Making adeconstructive move from the romance of voice to the politics and power ofinscription, Troubling the angels works, in rhizomatic fashion, the tensions betweenfeminist decrees of making womens voices heard and poststructural critiques ofrepresentation.

Lather and Smithiess text raises questions of what researchers have the right toknow, what researchers are capable of hearing, and the difficulties of knowing. Inthis epistemological and ethical practice of listening to womens (or anyparticipants) voices, researchers can never fully represent voices as noninnocent,nonproblematic, or noncontaminated; language is not transparent, voices do notspeak for themselves, and referents always slip away. There is always an excess toknowing, and efforts to translate voices into representations of research data areno more than a knowing disruption, an acknowledgement that faithfulreproduction is false (Lather, 2000a). A disruption of knowing requires research-ers to address the untranslatable, to be aware that, as a translator of voices,researchers actions are violent, forced, and foreign at once inadequate yetnecessary. The challenge is to work the tension between assuming or even desiringtransparent voices and diminishing womens interpretations and meanings of theirexperiences; therefore, Lather encourages researchers to:

Assume narrator as both unreliable and bearer of knowledge in a way thatattends to the price subjects pay to tell the truth about themselves [and to]revalue how sources speak to us and the traces of meaning upon whichinterpretation works as a transformation and renewal of something living inthe text, to that which cannot be said and that which cannot be heard in thesaying. (2000a)

Lathers point is not to deny the act of translation but to doubt that it merely reflectsor imitates some original. Translation/interpretation/representation, like any actof language, produces rather than reflects reality, and working the limits of voiceexposes the ways in which the researchers voice as well as the voices of participantsbetray meanings and significations of experiences.

In her study of student teachers, Britzman (1991) attends to language andconstructs a poststructural notion of a critical voice that does not destroy or devaluethe voices of others but attempts the delicate and discursive work of rearticulatingthe tensions between and within words and practices . . . as it questions theconsequences of the taken-for-granted knowledge shaping responses to everydaylife and the meanings fashioned from them (p. 13). Britzmans deconstructivepractice through a critical voice is not unlike Lathers methodological strategies;Britzman works the limits of voice not to negate or render the concept useless butto view language as problematic and voice as contingent and nontransparent. Thisdoes not mean that voices are incapable of expressing truth; instead, voices onlypartially tell stories and express meaning since they are bound by the exigenciesof what can and cannot be told. . . . Narratives of lived experience are alwaysselective, partial, and in tension (Britzman, 1991, p. 13). This tension comes fromthe struggle to express meanings that are difficult to pin down, irreducible to oneessential source, historically contingent, contextually bound, and socially con-structed. Viewing voices and meanings as elusive, contingent, and thereforecontradictory simultaneously expressing the said and unsaid is not to assert adreary relativism that all meanings are equal, accurate, just, or empowering, or that

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communication is either impossible or a mere matter of individual thought (p.15). Britzman wants ethnographic retellings to foreground voice as polyphonic, asa site of creativity, play, ambiguity, and a place of departure (rather than arrival,suggesting endings) for open possibilities and dialogic understandings of the waysin which experience produces subjectivities and subjects produce meanings.Britzman takes up Scotts (1991) and de Lauretiss (1984) challenge and does notfocus on experience, with an essential meaning, as simply something that happensto individuals; Britzman uses her concept of the critical voice to analyze thenegotiation of subjectivity in experience. Her words are worth quoting at lengthhere:

In poststructuralist versions, meaning is unruly. Despite our best authorialintentions, language cannot deliver what it promises: unmediated access tothe real. Nor is reality, in any sense, understood as objectivity out there orsimply apprehended through language. This is not, however, to assert thatthe real does not exist. Rather, the real must be continually imagined andarticulated. . . . Poststructuralist theories are concerned with the inheritedand constructed meanings that position and regulate how social life isnarrated and lived. The object of study, then, is with the politics and poeticsof narration and with what relations of power have to do with inscriptions ofthe self. (1994, p. 56)

Britzman affirms Derridas (1997/1967) assertion that there is no end to the book.Multiple experiences and subjectivities, the inadequacies and excesses of language,and the shifting power relations between those who speak and those who listenmake it impossible to get to the essence and authenticity of voices. There is nevera closure to a project that purports to explain it all. There are always alreadymeanings, intentions, and subjectivities spinning off into future significationsbecause of what researchers can and cannot hear, because of traces of the past andpresent that are unspeakable, because of subjectivities that shift and contradict inthe very telling of stories, the naming of experience. It is impossible, perhaps evenundesirable, to tell everything.

What is not said, then, is produced by what is said, and silence, as theantithesis of voice, destratifies the binary of (living, present) speech/(dead,absent) silence. If poststructural feminists refuse voice as a guarantor of essentialtruth and as the free expression of authenticity capable of transcending history,perhaps a task in feminist qualitative research is to go behind the narration toconsider what it is that structures and dissolves particular meanings and at whatcost (Britzman, 1994, p. 73). Voice carries silence in what cannot be said becauseof what is said. Rather than giving in to the humanist impulse to fill up silencewith voices, feminist qualitative researchers can resist this urge and point to thesilence, critique it, and expose how discourses govern silence (Spivak,1994/1988). Visweswaran (1994) goes as far as to refuse polyvocality as a remedyto the danger and ubiquitous threat of silence; feminist researchers should beattentive to womens silence as a marker of agency, since a refusal to speak isresisting the power relations between feminist researchers and women subjects.Decisive silence is a refusal to speak that goes beyond what cannot be said,and learning to hear silence is to interrupt the feminist project of retrieving theauthentic voice in order to allow the power relations to unfold between unequalsubjects (Visweswaran, 1994, p. 50).


Reading the absent against the present (Britzman, 2000/1995) rendersfeminist research on womens voices as suspect, as a betrayal, since it can neverdeliver anything more than partial truths (Clifford, 1986) uttered from voices thatare constrained and determined by the contexts in which they are fashioned. Voice,then, is neither originary nor authentic; it is a social effect of the inevitable tensionbetween power and knowledge. Knowledge as situated and articulated bycontradictory, partial voices positions those utterances as noninnocent effects ofpower relations and holds them responsible for the locations of those knowledgeclaims (Haraway, 1991). Therefore, representing the voices of women is aboutconstructing particular versions of truth, questioning how regimes of truthbecome neutralized as knowledge. . . . Pointing out the differences among thestories, the structures of telling, and the structures of belief (Britzman, 2000/1995,p. 38). Experience, in this vein of poststructural thought, is utilized not to revealmeanings with essential truths but to expose ideological contradictions (Viswes-waran, 1994).

How might feminist qualitative researchers consider the concept of voicemethodologically? How can feminist qualitative researchers approach listening andrepresenting in their research endeavors? Haraways (1991) figuration of theTrickster incites images of feminist interviewers striking up non-innocentconversations in qualitative research projects in which they give up mastery butkeep searching for fidelity, knowing all the while that [they] will be hoodwinked . . .[this] makes room for surprises and ironies at the heart of all knowledgeproduction (pp. 593594). Visweswaran (1994) makes use of this figuration as welland explains that the feminist ethnographer as Trickster proceeds in her researchsupposing that she can give voice to women while knowing that she cannot fullydo such a thing, displacing again the colonial model of speaking for and thedialogical hope of speaking with (p. 100). The feminist Trickster trips on, butis not tripped up by, the seductions of a feminism that promises what it may neverfully deliver: full representation on the one hand, and full comprehension on theother (p. 100). Recognizing failure from the start is not paralysis. Visweswarandefends failure as possibility; a failed account of a totalizing explanation in itsplenitude makes way for a number of partial accounts that postpone to infinity(Trinh, 1989, p. 116) an incomplete, active, ongoing project of endlessresignification.

To do this unsettling work in the middle of apprehension and uncertainty tostand at the edge of the abyss that fearful and terrible chaos created by the lossof transcendent meaning (St. Pierre, 1997b) is to work the limits of voice inpoststructural feminist research. Attempts to signify texts in qualitative research asmultivoiced or even polyvocal (e.g., see Wolf, 1992) do not go far enough, givenEllsworths (1994) claim that simply pluralizing voices (e.g., critiquing theresearchers voice through reflexivity and/or amplifying conflicting, partial voices)oftentimes fails to consider the rich texture of vocality. To only pluralize voiceremains focused on units of voice rather than dimensions of voice. In addition, afeminist qualitative researchers deconstructive (instead of reflexive) voice aban-dons (rather than questions) authority and transparency, confronts (rather thanacknowledges) the power of interpretation/translation, and emphasizes the non-innocence of their own vocalizations (Visweswaran, 1994). From these recon-ceptualizations of voice that put feminist qualitative researchers and theirparticipants in the middle of things, in the thick of it, where conflict, confusion,

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and possibility proliferate, my invented signifier rhizovocality irrupts in order toreference those unstable voices as excessive, transgressive, overflowing, andsurprising.

Rhizo, a prefix I borrow from Deleuze and Guattaris (1987) image of therhizome, captures the heterogeneity of vocality in a spatial figuration, accentuatingits connection to other things through its very diversity. Vocality, in music theory,emphasizes the performative dimension of voice, its expressive power, its tensionsof dissonant counterpoint, and its variations on thematic connections; it challengesour attention and demands deep concentration if we are to hear its nuances.Rhizovocality, as my combined, invented signifier, offers a vision of performativeutterances that consist of unfolding and irrupting threads. These threads have theability to irrupt and unfold simultaneously in smooth, open-ended spaces(Massumi, 1987), which compel poststructural feminist qualitative researchers tolisten for texture and subtlety within and among discordant, muted, andharmonious voices, including their own.

Without origins, rhizomes cannot claim authenticity; neither do voices, which,as adventitious themselves, rupture into lines of flight, deterritorializing anydemand for coherence or stability. Along these lines of flight flee irruptions ofresistance, transgression, decisive silences (Visweswaran, 1994) which, in theirexcess, disrupt homogeneity and even rudimentary binary constructions of vocality(e.g., voice/silence) and their ensuing good/bad status. Enunciations in arhizomatic framework can never be merely good or bad since everything getsrestratified, reformatted, reconstituted in a rhizome. Like a map, rhizovocality isopen and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptibleto constant modification (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 12). In their partiality,vocalizations are at once in a process of becoming as they interlink, intensify, andincrease territory. In their becoming, vocalizations are not reaching for a more full,complete, coherent status; rather, they are opening up territory, spreading out, andoverturning the very codes that structure [them] . . . putting them to strange newuses (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 11, 15). In this way, silence can be resignifiedas resistance, as agency, since the irruption of silence penetrates and transformsfixed definitions of what it means to be subjugated. Partiality and contradictionirrupt as transgressive, never coming back to the same, never taking root(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 12). However, this is not to imply that partial andcontradictory voices remain isolated and disconnected; in a rhizome, the partialityof voices proliferate, irrupt, disrupt, and stretch to reconnect, creating multipleentryways for understanding and political options for problems (Deleuze &Guattari, 1987, p. 13). These multiple entryways for understanding are acentered,nonhierachical, temporal, productive, and exist in the middle; thus, rhizovocalitycan be neither fully transcendent nor authentic since it has no original departureor destined arrival. Rhizovocality is perpetually in construction or collapsing . . . aprocess that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting again . . .connecting any point to any other point (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 2021).

A Trickster working the limits of rhizovocality learns to listen for texture in arhizomatic way. Rhizovocality, in its multiplicity and contingency, is difference withinand between and among; it highlights the irruptive, disruptive, yet interconnectednature of positioned voices (including the researchers) that are discursivelyformed and that are historically and socially determined irrupting from discursivepressures within/against/outside the research process. Locating the coordinates of


irruption and following a line of flight enables the Trickster to blow apart strata,cut roots, and make new connections (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 15).Employing and deploying rhizovocality as an assemblage of continuous, self-vibrating intensities would be to discard the:

. . . tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field ofrepresentation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, anassemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn fromeach of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world its object norone or several authors as its subject. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 2223)

The question is not: is it true? But: does it work. (Massumi, 1987, p. xv)

Notes

1. I prefer the use of figuration, as opposed to metaphor, since figurations foreground contradictionand disjunction and are useful as tools of rigorous confusion that jettison clarity in favor of theunintelligible (St. Pierre, 1997a, p. 281).

2. Other currents included in feminist research methods are the uses and innovations of amultiplicity of research methods, an ongoing criticism of nonfeminist scholarship, the use of feministtheory as a framework, the transdisciplinary nature of academic projects, and efforts to representdiversity, to include the researcher through reflexivity, and to develop special relationships with theresearch participants (Fonow & Cook, 1991; Klein, 1983; Mies, 1991; Nielsen, 1990a; Reinharz, 1992).These trends are neither mutually exclusive nor all-inclusive in feminist research methodologies.

3. hooks (1989) writes of talking back as an act of courage, speaking as an equal to an authorityfigure . . . daring to disagree . . . having an opinion (p. 5). She uses this phrase to signal a movementfrom object to subject defiant speech that liberates the voice from exploitation and colonization.

4. To illustrate this point, Spivak makes an apt comparison between white feminist researchersgiving voice to subaltern women and Freuds giving voice to the hysteric, transforming her into thesubject of hysteria. This highlights the potential dangers of essentialism and imperialism in White,liberatory feminist research, in which an object of research is reconfigured into a subject of thedominators making.

5. For further elaboration on Derridas language theory, see Of grammatology (Derrida, 1997).

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