Rhizovocality

QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION, SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2003, VOL. 16, NO. 5, 693–710

Rhizovocality ALECIA YOUNGBLOOD JACKSON Appalachian State University

In this conceptual paper, the author offers a rethinking of the concept of voice in qualitative research informed by feminist, postcolonial, and poststructural theories. Using Deleuze & Guattari’s (1987) figuration of the rhizome, the irruptions of voice in feminist and postfoundational qualitative research are mapped to invent a concept of voice, rhizovocality, that signifies voice as excessive and transgressive yet interconnected. This mapping begins with early feminist emancipatory research that assumed an authentic, silent woman’s voice in need of liberation. Then, the author moves into dilemmas of power that emerged from critiques of problematic representations of voice within feminist research. The third section of 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. The article concludes with an argument for rhizovocality as a conceptual, deconstructive tool for working the limits of voice in qualitative research.

Introduction The concept of voice in feminist qualitative research has a long and variegated history of deployment. In this paper, I seek to map that deployment and to offer a different way of conceptualizing and representing voices in qualitative research that draws from feminist and deconstructive paradigms. The challenge of this mapping lies in the limits of the linear space of graphic writing, for voice in feminist qualitative research does not have a lineal, hierarchical history with simple and striated originating, culminating, or terminating points. The various deployments, critiques, and reconfigurations of voice in feminist research are circular, interconnected, and deterritorializing. Therefore, the mapping I offer in this paper does not seek to reveal what voice means in feminist qualitative research but what it does – how voice functions, what enables it to function in certain ways, and what it produces.

Deleuze & Guattari’s image of the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), composed of plateaus, intensities, and multiplicities connected to other multiplicities by underground stems, is a helpful figuration1 to consider not only how to “read” this text but also how to imagine the function of voice in feminist qualitative research. As Deleuze & Guattari (1987) describe them, rhizomes do not have fixed origins like the roots of a tree; they are tuberous – multiplicitous, adventitious – and connect in nonlinear assemblages to other things. This text constitutes an assemblage and must be read as such; in this text there are “lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3). Imagine, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education ISSN 0951–8398 print/ISSN 1366–5898 online © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0951839032000142968

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then, as you read, that this is a flat, spatial text, spreading out and forming a rhizome. Read the rhizomatic “irruptions” of multiple conceptions of voice in feminist qualitative research as “lines of flight” (p. 9), as things popping up in the middle – not preceding but exceeding. Ruminate on the connections among the irruptions and understand them as historical and contextual yet neither linear nor hierarchical – an “assemblage . . . one inside the other and all plugged into an immense outside that is a multiplicity” as well (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 23).

The irruptions – the reconfigurations – of voice within feminist qualitative research are a coming and going rather than a starting and finishing, moving among and between 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 but as an attempt to present the resignification of voice in feminist qualitative research as a rhizomatic outgrowth of discursive processes.

Therefore, the “first irruption” (below) is not a point of origin; I neither return to it nor transcend it. As well, the “last irruption” is not a terminus. My invented signifier rhizovocality that sprouts in the final section of this paper is part of a larger rhizome of voice in feminist qualitative research; it emerges from and is interconnected within this multiplicitous assemblage. As such, rhizovocality gets it function from my understanding of its relationship with other “lines of articulation;” 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 an opening, a playful working of the limits (Derrida, 1981/1972). Working the limits, in this Derridean sense, means to transgress in the middle of things and reconfigure them, not to transcend or be beyond them. “One never lives elsewhere,” Derrida (1981/1972, p. 12) writes, so transgressions, resistances, and irruptions foster rhizomatic consortings with the limit. Rhizovocality is a transgression that works the limit of voice in feminist qualitative research.

That said, this text begins with an irruption – that of feminist social science research and its concern for making women’s voices heard – though you may enter it wherever you like.

Irruption: women’s 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, unified approach to feminist research, one2 of the salient currents running among feminist research is the privileging of women’s lived, diverse experiences as sources of knowledge, and implicated in this theme are issues of voice. In the first phases of feminist research in the 1970s, feminists set out to create social change through their research, not exploiting women as objects of knowledge (as masculine, conventional social science would have it) but honoring them as agents of knowledge. As Reinharz (1992) explains, feminist research in the social sciences emerged from an awareness that women had “the right to criticize the accepted body of knowledge and the right to create knowledge” (p. 11). This “accepted body of knowledge” 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 women and to create research and knowledge for, not simply about, women. This emancipatory research for women was intended to have a consciousness-raising effect: it should improve and transform their lives by generating new knowledge about their social and political conditions so that women, as newly liberated and empowered, 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 point of science, called for a collapse of the binary logic of thought/action and science/ politics. She argued that the aim of the women’s movement, and therefore the goal of feminist research, is not only the study of but also the eradication of women’s oppression. For feminist research to be truly emancipatory, then, scientifictheoretical insights must be channeled back into the social, political, and historical contexts in which they are embedded. This is not to say that the resulting empowerment is limited to the participants, since feminist researchers’ awareness can 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 silences and devalues the voices of women” (p. 7). The concern for “making women’s voices heard” 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 are emancipatory seek to “give voice” to women respondents through interviewing and ethnographic methods. Feminist qualitative researchers who interview their women participants believe that “women’s voices hold meanings worth discovering” (DeVault, 1999, p. 56) and that “learning from women is an antidote to centuries of ignoring women’s ideas altogether or having men speak for women” (Reinharz, 1992, p. 19). Reinharz (1992) explains that feminist ethnographers, working in either women-only or mixed-gender field settings, use interviews to “make women’s voices audible,” to understand women’s experiences from their own standpoint and within the social contexts which shape those experiences (p. 48). Furthermore, interviewing for feminist researchers involves intimacy and reciprocity in their talks with women (DeVault, 1999; Fonow & Cook, 1991; Reinharz, 1992). Mies (1983) advocates a series of group interviews/discussions held over a period of time; she believes that this method will yield more diverse data since women talking together helps them to “overcome their structural isolation in their families and to understand that their individual sufferings have social causes” (p. 128). Similarly, Madriz (2000) contends that focus-group interviews are less intimidating for women who are more accustomed to gathering and talking about important issues, leading to greater awareness of their subjugation and, subsequently, to their personal empowerment. Creating safe spaces for women to voice their collective and individual lived experiences allows participants and researchers to legitimize women’s subjectivities, experiences, and epistemologies.

Recovering the authentic voice that speaks of material, historically subjugated experiences and privileging it as a central and a truer reflection of social life is an epistemological concern of feminist emancipatory research. Feminist researchers assume that women can offer unique points of view of the world based on their particular experiences that are different from men’s; they do research that inquires into women’s lives from the standpoint of women. The goal of these emancipatory

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projects – in addition to working against androcentric, objective social science methods – is to use women’s situated experiences as the starting point for inquiry and to release women’s voices as avenues to these experiences. Feminist researchers who valorize the authenticity of women’s voices and experiences also make each central to their research. They move beyond an “add-women-and-stir” approach to masculine-biased social science research and assume that “the more authentic ‘self’ produced by feminist struggles can tell ‘one true story’ about ‘the world’: there can be a kind of feminist author of a new ‘master story’, a narrative about social life which feminist inquiry will produce” (Harding, 1987a, p. 188). According to this view, women’s standpoints are not equally true to men’s but, by virtue of their sexual difference, are more true.

For example, groundbreaking psychological feminist research in the 1980s on women’s voices and experiences treat voice as “the core of the self . . . a powerful psychological instrument and channel, connecting inner and outer worlds” (Gilligan, 1982, p. xvi). Feminist psychologists interviewed women and girls and, in the data representations, foreground women’s voices as they talk about moral problems and relationship crises (Gilligan, 1982), experiences and feelings of connection and disconnection in their lives (Brown & Gilligan, 1992), and views of reality, truth, knowledge, and authority (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986). Employing phenomenological methods of intensive, interviewee-guided interviewing, Munhall’s (1994) edited collection of 10 feminist research projects represent women’s experiences in narrative form: “Using many women’s voices . . . the many narratives are authentic and faithful to the experience of women. . . . We must hear women speak of their experience if we are to understand their meanings and perceptions” (p. viii–xi). Fonow & Cook’s (1991), Harding’s (1987b), and Nielsen’s (1990b) edited collections include social science research that exemplifies the critical and emancipatory elements of feminist inquiry. These exemplars are research for women, and they privilege women’s disadvantaged location, their intimate knowledge of their oppressors, and their subjugated experiences as legitimate bases for knowledge claims. Metaphors of voice and silence permeate these texts which signify women’s exclusion from the production of knowledge and the absence of women’s experiences in social, cultural, and political spheres: “finding a voice,” “coming to voice,” “creating safe spaces for voice,” “centering on voice,” “voicing resistance,” “losing voice,” “giving up voice,” “bring voices to the center.” Linking voice, experience, and meaning, these feminist researchers are involved in recovery, liberatory projects which seek to empower all women who are involved 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 discourse of making women’s voices heard in scientific research. At the same time, and on into the 1990s, other feminists announced their skepticism of this seemingly unproblematic retrieval and representation of women’s voices, arguing that power is the most central dilemma for feminist researchers using qualitative methodologies (Stacey, 1988; Strathern, 1987; Wolf, 1996). While Wolf (1996) acknowledges that feminist qualitative researchers experiment with strategies of co-authoring and

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polyvocality in representation to confront or change power relations, she doubts that this move does much to either radically transform power relations or empower women since the academic feminist maintains control over the entire research process, from the topic selection to the data representation. Though feminist researchers might seek to create space for women’s voices, in doing so, they may remain transparent in their own silent presence and power (Wolf, 1996). Even voices that are presented “in the raw” to avoid problems of editing and interpretation by the researcher become “a translation of power” (Behar, 1993, p.

229), and Lather (1991) warns that researchers, with their intrusive voices, describe and inscribe when representing data. Fine (1992) expresses similar concern; she critiques the ways in which some feminist ethnographic texts appear to let the Other speak while the feminist researcher unproblematically hides “just under the covers of those marginal – if now ‘liberated’ voices” (p. 215). Fine (1992) agrees that the researcher’s power is rendered oblique in texts that appear “as if they were constructed without . . . as if researchers were simply vehicles for transmission, with no voices of their own” (p. 211). This inescapable authority sets up relationships of manipulation, betrayal, and inequality since data interpretation is always registered in the researcher’s voice (Stacey, 1988). Fine does not dismiss the significance of using voices as qualitative research data; however, she argues that participants’ voices offer a decoy when feminist researchers rely on them as innocent, monolithic, or singular, as if the voices say it all. Denying the complex, contradictory “hard-to-code” voices makes trouble for creating borders around conclusive arguments. Fine sensitively warns feminist researchers in the social sciences not to romanticize voices but to pay critical attention to what voices we hear and how we hear them. This romanticization of voices leads to emancipatory researchers’ tendencies to idealize and totalize their participants’ experiences, ignoring the messiness of their multiple subjectivities and contextual realities (Hargreaves, 1996; Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1996).

The implicitly silent voice of the liberatory feminist researcher, as well as her potentially imperialist and racist representations, is incredibly problematic and irresponsible, particularly in emancipatory research on Other women: U.S. women of color, Third World women, and those beyond the confines of race and ethnicity (e.g., disability studies, gay/lesbian studies, class studies, generational studies). As Spivak (1986) sagely notes, feminist researchers do no more than use the Other as “simply a name that provides the alibi for erasing the investigator’s intervention into the construction and representation of the narrative” (p. 229). Alcoff (1991), similarly addressing the problem of speaking for Others, advocates a concrete analysis of the power relations involved in representation so that the researcher’s name (with the authority and power it carries) is not an alibi. She outlines four interrogatory practices used to evaluate the power relations in “speaking for” Others: questioning our desire to master and dominate as the speaker; interrogating our positionalities and how that bears on what we say (going beyond mere autobiographical disclaimers); being accountable and responsible for what we say, which involves being open and attentive to criticism; and analyzing the discursive and material effects of our words – looking at “where the speech goes and what it does there” (p. 26). Some feminist researchers have taken up some version of this challenge to reinscribe themselves into their representational texts by writing themselves as historically, culturally, politically positioned interpreters with subjective, multiple desires of their own (e.g., see Kondo, 1990; Linden, 1993; Wolf, 1992).

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Irruption: talking back3 Those feminists of color in the U.S. who are concerned about the difficulties (even impossibilities) of speaking to and the conflicts/misinterpretations in being heard by white feminists take on theoretical and methodological projects that confront the effects of power relations in (white) feminist emancipatory research for women. Abu-Lughod (1990) argues that any use of a woman’s voice in liberal feminist research draws on modern Western cultural concepts of womanhood (i.e., white, middle-class, heterosexual women); therefore, the claim that research is for women connotes a particular type of woman who benefits from this research. bell hooks (1990) cogently points out how a dominant group’s authority is reinforced and legitimized as its members speak about/for Others, while simultaneously reinscribing the Others’ silence and Otherness: Often this speech about the “Other” annihilates, erases: “no need to hear your 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 your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you, I write myself anew.

I am still author, authority. I am still the colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now at the center of my talk.” (pp. 151–152) Lugones and Spelman (2000/1983) echo hooks’s caustic accusation of the cultural imperialism inherent in liberatory feminist researchers’ intention to “give voice” to women and to “raise” their consciousness through dialogic, emancipatory research.

They claim that the demand for women’s voices to be heard is a call for a particular type of woman’s 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 women into their own image as women sharing a common bond of oppression, while keeping other voices – other ways of being in the world – silent. They go on to assert that white feminist researchers who claim to speak for/about/with women of color can only produce violently incomplete representations, replete with imperialistic overtones, because of unequal power relations between cultural communities.

According to Lugones and Spelman, the only way in which White feminist researchers can “hear” the voices of women of color is “to come to terms with having [their] world thoroughly criticized and scrutinized from the point of view of those who have been harmed by it, having important concepts central to it dismissed, being seen as of no consequence [to us] except as an object of mistrust” (p. 26). This hard listening (which resonates with Alcoff’s call) demands an unlearning of privilege, authority, and knowledge, an openness to and acceptance of severe criticism, and a profound self-questioning and circumspection.

Collins (2000) argues that the imperial violence of representations of Black women is “so uniformly negative that they almost necessitate resistance” (p. 100) – a form of “talking back” that asserts Black women’s epistemology as grounded in their material, social, political, historical experiences and consciousness. She links the intersectionality of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation with power dynamics to emphasize Black women’s particularized knowledges and situated standpoints. She argues that these knowledges and standpoints can be the grounds for developing oppositional epistemologies that shape Black women’s conscious-

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ness and redefine their empowerment. Furthermore, Collins critiques her own conceptualization of voice and explains how it has shifted in the 10 years between the 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 denigrated categories have been similarly silenced. So the voice that I now seek is both individual and collective, personal and political, one reflecting the intersection of my unique biography with the larger meaning of my historical times. (p. vi) Collins goes on to claim that, in 1990, she presents the authenticity of Black feminist thought as coherent and complete, hoping that others who are silenced will find their voices in the text and become empowered to change their lives. But in 2000, Collins aims for more fluidity in her definitions of knowledge, consciousness, empowerment, and voice. She emphasizes power relations in her analysis and is less preoccupied with coming to voice, since, as a result of power relations, voice is unstable and contingent. Collins writes, “My concern now lies in finding 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 World countries contest emancipatory feminist projects that claim to “give voice” to women, maintaining that White, First World feminist researchers make their own decisions about whose voices are authentic. Such destructiveness mirrors the historical and contemporary exploitative relations between colonizers and colonized 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 the oppressor. As colonized people of the U.S., American Indians are beginning to reject any efforts of White researchers (feminist or not) to represent their voices, since researchers leave Indians out of the decision-making processes of the research and their representations are usually stereotypic revisions that satisfy Whites’ image of them either as a lost, exotic, primitive culture or as a monolithic culture that erases tribal differences (Jojola, 1998; Thornton, 1998). Swisher (1998) advocates a separatist view and calls for an end to Whites researching Indians since it propagates the greed of Whites and the exploitation of Indians as commodity in a relationship of internal colonialism. With their focus on sovereignty and selfdetermination and a refusal to be essentialized or romanticized by White researchers, American Indians are beginning to research and represent their own voices because only they themselves are able to understand the diversity and complexity of tribal knowledges and interests. This move heavily disrupts the noninnocent project of retrieving an authentic, exotic yet oppressed voice. hooks (1992) refers to this non-innocent retrieval as “eating the other,” a diminution which commodifies cultural, ethnic, and racial differences and offers them up “as new dishes to enhance the white palate – the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten” (p. 39).

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

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In trying to tell something, a woman is told. . . . You who understand the dehumanization of forced removal–relocation–reeducation–redefinition, 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 you don’t, they will not fail to fill in the blanks on your behalf, and you will be said. (pp.

80–81, emphasis added) Trinh, similar to hooks’s view, relevantly remarks on the falsity of Third World women’s agentic speech – a speech that renders them passive in the wake of White feminists’ more powerful (yet distorted) voices. Trinh passionately argues that the authentic Third World voice is a construct – a fiction – of First World anthropologists who are in a position to decide what voices are authentic and which are not. Third World women are expected to paint themselves “thick with authenticity” (p. 88) and offer something different and exotic – but not so different that 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 and preserved by a White anthropologist, an obsessive impulse to fashion authenticity out of that which holds together without contradiction or leakiness.

Spivak (1994/1988) takes further the issue of the (in)authentic voice in her classic piece that evokes the question, Can the subaltern speak? Spivak answers with an unequivocal “no” and wonders if an oppressed group (i.e., subaltern women) can speak 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, so how can they speak of it, and how can it be purely retrieved? Furthermore, Spivak accuses First World feminist social scientists of seeking out native elites as informants, essentializing their voices as authentic and representational of all native people. The desire to create a homogenous Other is rooted in the epistemic violence of imperialism and the belief in a full, pure form of consciousness that can be represented in agentic speech; such desire keeps the “subaltern woman as mute as ever” (p. 90) with a fixed and pregiven identity. Nostalgia for retrieving the authentic voice – a “lost origin” – is dangerous to postcolonial research that critiques imperialism precisely because the “colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous” (p. 79). The act of retrieval is perniciously distorting since those who are after authentic voices will never be able to release authenticity from its dependency on the pure, real, and true in order to see the subaltern subject as anything but identical to other Third World people. Giving voice to women – retrieving the “lost figure of the colonized” (p. 91) – becomes an impossible and even undesirable project in postcolonial feminist social research.

Spivak (1994/1988) firmly insists that the deconstructive practice of First World intellectuals is to “keep the ethnocentric Subject from establishing itself by selectively defining an Other” (p. 87). Spivak calls for less academic work on invoking the authentic voice of the Other and more work on the mechanics of the constitution of the Other – an “unlearning” of white privilege that teaches white feminists “to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman” (p. 91, emphasis added). White feminist researchers speaking to the Other involves giving up the notion of authenticity while acknowledging the power of their authority and privilege, which is an openness similar 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 an authentic voice equates expression with a consciousness of the True and the Real.

The liberal concept of “giving voice to women” falls apart under poststructural theories of language, particularly within the theory of Derrida,5 whose deconstruction of metaphysics (“being as presence”) denies this foundational principle and disrupts the concepts it keeps in tow: voice, experience, meaning, and consciousness. Derrida’s language theory puts presence under erasure, exposing its sneaky claims to certainty, transcendence, and purity, which, in turn, deterritorializes liberal conceptualizations of voice.

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

However, Derrida believes that language is so unstable that meaning is endlessly deferred; therefore, there never can be a transcendental Truth that serves as the foundation for meaning. Derrida (1973/1967) attacks the priority of voice, present consciousness, and transcendental meaning through a deconstruction of Husserl’s phenomenology, which centers on being-as-presence: something is because it can be present in consciousness (to itself, to others). In Husserl’s phenomenology, expression is the route to consciousness; the intentional aspect of expression makes present (re-presents) the meaning of experience (Allison, 1973). Voice is this transparent, expressive medium which “both preserves the presence of the object and the self-presence” of the speaker (Derrida, 1973/1967, p. 76). To speak is to be heard in the present and to keep the “meaning-intention” in close proximity, in control, giving presence to the speaker. The phenomenological voice, with its transcendent purity, governs and expresses a fully present meaning, bringing it and the speaker to consciousness, which “means nothing other than the possibility of the selfpresence of the present in the living present” (Derrida, 1973/1967, p. 9). In this way, voice is consciousness; it makes us aware of ourselves, what we are saying, and what 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 is uncontaminated by any exteriority that would challenge its truth value.

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

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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 indefinitely postponed. And, in Derrida’s view, language produces rather than reflects meaning. Meaning is constructed through a process of diff´erance: a constant deferral of meaning, leaving traces of other different signs that had to be excluded for the sign to be itself. Meaning is suspended, still to come, and is never fully present in the moment of interpreting a sign.

With this poststructural view of language, voice is not transparent; it can no longer express an absolute, ideal, essential meaning that is present/conscious to itself. Derrida (1973/1967) compares voice to a labyrinth, “which includes in itself its own exits. . . . Contrary to what phenomenology has tried to make us believe: the thing itself always escapes” (p. 104, emphasis added). The escape of full presence leaves behind the fiction of origins, foundations, and a pure consciousness; the instability and excess of language; and traces of partial absence and partial presence. Meaning is not transcendental, essential, identical with itself. Meaning is infinite. Therefore, what “voice” is able to express is equally as contingent, partial, and unstable.

Concomitant with Derrida’s deconstruction of the phenomenological voice, meaning, and consciousness is a feminist deconstruction of what that voice expresses: phenomenological experience (De Lauretis, 1984; Fuss, 1989; Scott, 1991). Phenomenological experience, according to Derrida (1997/1967), “has always designated the relationship with a presence” (p. 60), a transcendental essence of experience that implies origin and identity. Experience as “uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation – as a foundation on which analysis is based” – erases difference as well as the constructed nature of experience and vision (Scott, 1991, p. 777). This view of experience as the origin of knowledge and as something that merely happens to people ignores the ways in which experience produces subjects and subjectivities (de Lauretis, 1984; Scott, 1991); this view is also dubious of an individual with a transcendental consciousness who is capable of fully reflecting on experience, since “subjectivity is an ongoing construction, not a fixed point of departure or arrival . . . it is the effect of experience” (de Lauretis, 1984, p. 159, emphasis added). Scott (1991) rejects any notion of an essential experience, expressed by fully aware speaking subjects, that serves as an authoritative foundation for authentic knowledge. In emancipatory projects, “experience is the start of a process that culminates in the realization and articulation of social consciousness” (p. 785); in this paradigm, experience becomes cumulative and homogenizing, providing a transcendental essence on which to build consciousness and identity. Instead, Scott (1991) wants experience historicized, explained, and interpreted for the ways in which it constitutes subjectivities. Scott wants to redefine the meaning of experience to focus on it as “at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted.

What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, and always therefore political” (p. 797). Fuss (1989) takes this further and wonders if truth claims can even be based on experience since what constitutes “a woman’s experience,” while it may seem self-evident and immediately perceptible, is always socially mediated; “experience is never as unified, as knowable, as universal, and as stable as we presume it to be” (p. 114).

In sum, poststructural theories reject the pure, full presence of an experience that 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 of experience. In poststructuralism, there is no prelinguistic experience or meaning that is “out there” waiting to be expressed by our innocent voices. Instead, language and experience are productive in that they create a meaning that is always already slipping away – not meaningless, but contingent. Therefore, retrieving the authentic voice so that it can (finally) fully express meaning, bringing the subject and its experiences into consciousness, collapses under poststructural scrutiny.

Derrida (1973/1967) wonders, “Can we always hold out for the possibility of a pure and purely self-present identity at the level of pre-expressive experience, the level of sense prior to meaning and expression?” (p. 83, emphasis added). Preexpressive experience – experience that comes before language – points to those who have been subjugated in silence, and “giving voice” to them presumes the act of raising that voice (and identity) to consciousness. If there cannot be an essentialist search for lost origins – giving voice to women – how can research be “made to mean?”

(Lather, 2000b). This is a productive concern for qualitative researchers, and one that feminist poststructural qualitative researchers take up.

Irruption: voice in poststructural feminist research Feminist qualitative researchers who shift from a critical to a deconstructive paradigm (or who work within the tensions between them) consider voice not as a problem to be solved but as a concept to be problematized. Patti Lather and Deborah Britzman are two (of many) poststructural feminists who, in their exemplary 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 feminist research. Lather (2000b) comments, “Contrary to both the interpretive and critical paradigms, within our project, we deconstructively assumed both researcher and researched as unreliable narrators given the indeterminacies of language and the workings 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 and Smithies use a “theory of deferral” that locates voice, consciousness, and meaning not as presence but as infinite delay and produce a stuttering, messy text full of contradictory, fractured voices that cannot promise “to deliver a message to its proper receiver” (Lather, 2000c). The voices in the text neither represent authenticity nor valorize lived experiences that can be immediately consumed by a reader in an easy, tidy narrative; instead, Lather and Smithies employ destabilizing strategies of telling the Other and highlight voices, stories, and “the real” as multiple, layered, shifting, and unending through a split-text format that refuses to smother the women’s voices with the researcher’s authorial presence. The multiple voices, stitched together by “seemingly disconnected narrative worlds, angelology, email and journal entries, letters, poems, interview transcripts, academic talk about theory and method, and autobiography” (Lather & Smithies, 1997, p. 221), send readers in different directions in their reading, which creates excessive readings and 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

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ethnographic realism of voices speaking for themselves” (Lather, 2000c). Making a deconstructive move from the romance of voice to the politics and power of inscription, Troubling the angels works, in rhizomatic fashion, the tensions between feminist decrees of making women’s voices heard and poststructural critiques of representation.

Lather and Smithies’s text raises questions of what researchers have the right to know, what researchers are capable of hearing, and the difficulties of knowing. In this epistemological and ethical practice of listening to women’s (or any participants’) voices, researchers can never fully represent voices as noninnocent, nonproblematic, or noncontaminated; language is not transparent, voices do not speak for themselves, and referents always slip away. There is always an excess to knowing, and efforts to “translate” voices into representations of research data are no more than a “knowing disruption,” an acknowledgement that “faithful reproduction is false” (Lather, 2000a). A disruption of knowing requires researchers to address the untranslatable, to be aware that, as a translator of voices, researchers’ actions are violent, forced, and foreign – at once inadequate yet necessary. The challenge is to work the tension between assuming or even desiring transparent voices and diminishing women’s interpretations and meanings of their experiences; therefore, Lather encourages researchers to: Assume narrator as both unreliable and bearer of knowledge in a way that attends 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 which interpretation works as a transformation and renewal of something living in the text, to that which cannot be said and that which cannot be heard in the saying. (2000a) Lather’s point is not to deny the act of translation but to doubt that it merely reflects or imitates some original. Translation/interpretation/representation, like any act of language, produces rather than reflects reality, and working the limits of voice exposes the ways in which the researcher’s voice as well as the voices of participants betray meanings and significations of experiences.

In her study of student teachers, Britzman (1991) attends to language and constructs a poststructural notion of a critical voice that does not destroy or devalue the voices of others but “attempts the delicate and discursive work of rearticulating the tensions between and within words and practices . . . as it questions the consequences of the taken-for-granted knowledge shaping responses to everyday life and the meanings fashioned from them” (p. 13). Britzman’s deconstructive practice through a critical voice is not unlike Lather’s methodological strategies; Britzman works the limits of voice not to negate or render the concept useless but to view language as problematic and voice as contingent and nontransparent. This does not mean that voices are incapable of expressing truth; instead, voices only partially tell stories and express meaning since they are bound by the “exigencies of what can and cannot be told. . . . Narratives of lived experience are always selective, partial, and in tension” (Britzman, 1991, p. 13). This tension comes from the struggle to express meanings that are difficult to pin down, irreducible to one essential source, historically contingent, contextually bound, and socially constructed. Viewing voices and meanings as elusive, contingent, and therefore contradictory – simultaneously expressing the said and unsaid – is not “to assert a dreary 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, as a site of creativity, play, ambiguity, and a place of departure (rather than arrival, suggesting endings) for open possibilities and dialogic understandings of the ways in which experience produces subjectivities and subjects produce meanings.

Britzman takes up Scott’s (1991) and de Lauretis’s (1984) challenge and does not focus on experience, with an essential meaning, as simply something that happens to individuals; Britzman uses her concept of the critical voice to analyze the negotiation of subjectivity in experience. Her words are worth quoting at length here: In poststructuralist versions, meaning is unruly. Despite our best authorial intentions, language cannot deliver what it promises: unmediated access to “the real.” Nor is reality, in any sense, understood as objectivity “out there” or simply apprehended through language. This is not, however, to assert that “the real” does not exist. Rather, the real must be continually imagined and articulated. . . . Poststructuralist theories are concerned with the inherited and constructed meanings that position and regulate how social life is narrated and lived. The object of study, then, is with the politics and poetics of narration and with what relations of power have to do with inscriptions of the self. (1994, p. 56) Britzman affirms Derrida’s (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 listen make it impossible to get to the essence and authenticity of voices. There is never a closure to a project that purports to explain it all. There are always already meanings, intentions, and subjectivities spinning off into future significations because of what researchers can and cannot hear, because of traces of the past and present that are unspeakable, because of subjectivities that shift and contradict in the very telling of stories, the naming of experience. It is impossible, perhaps even undesirable, to tell everything.

What is not said, then, is produced by what is said, and silence, as the antithesis of voice, destratifies the binary of (living, present) speech/(dead, absent) silence. If poststructural feminists refuse voice as a guarantor of essential truth and as the free expression of authenticity capable of transcending history, perhaps a task in feminist qualitative research is to go “behind the narration to consider what it is that structures and dissolves particular meanings and at what cost” (Britzman, 1994, p. 73). Voice carries silence in what cannot be said because of what is said. Rather than giving in to the humanist impulse to fill up silence with voices, feminist qualitative researchers can resist this urge and point to the silence, critique it, and expose how discourses govern silence (Spivak, 1994/1988). Visweswaran (1994) goes as far as to refuse polyvocality as a remedy to the danger and ubiquitous threat of silence; feminist researchers should be attentive to women’s silence as a marker of agency, since a refusal to speak is resisting 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 the authentic voice in order to allow the power relations to unfold between unequal subjects (Visweswaran, 1994, p. 50).

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Reading the “absent against the present” (Britzman, 2000/1995) renders feminist research on women’s voices as suspect, as a betrayal, since it can never deliver anything more than partial truths (Clifford, 1986) uttered from voices that are 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 tension between power and knowledge. Knowledge as situated and articulated by contradictory, partial voices positions those utterances as noninnocent effects of power relations and holds them responsible for the locations of those knowledge claims (Haraway, 1991). Therefore, representing the voices of women is about “constructing particular versions of truth, questioning how regimes of truth become neutralized as knowledge. . . . Pointing out the differences among the stories, 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 reveal meanings with essential truths but to expose ideological contradictions (Visweswaran, 1994).

How might feminist qualitative researchers consider the concept of voice methodologically? How can feminist qualitative researchers approach listening and representing in their research endeavors? Haraway’s (1991) figuration of the Trickster incites images of feminist interviewers “striking up non-innocent conversations” in qualitative research projects in which they “give up mastery but keep searching for fidelity, knowing all the while that [they] will be hoodwinked . . . [this] makes room for surprises and ironies at the heart of all knowledge production” (pp. 593–594). Visweswaran (1994) makes use of this figuration as well and explains that the feminist ethnographer as Trickster proceeds in her research supposing that she can “give voice” to women while knowing that she cannot fully do such a thing, “displacing again the colonial model of ‘speaking for’ and the dialogical hope of ‘speaking with’ ” (p. 100). The feminist Trickster “trips on, but is not tripped up by, the seductions of a feminism that promises what it may never fully deliver: full representation on the one hand, and full comprehension on the other” (p. 100). Recognizing failure from the start is not paralysis. Visweswaran defends failure as possibility; a failed account of a totalizing explanation in its plenitude makes way for a number of partial accounts that “postpone to infinity” (Trinh, 1989, p. 116) – an incomplete, active, ongoing project of endless resignification.

To do this unsettling work in the middle of apprehension and uncertainty – to “stand at the edge of the abyss – that fearful and terrible chaos created by the loss of transcendent meaning” (St. Pierre, 1997b) – is to work the limits of voice in poststructural feminist research. Attempts to signify texts in qualitative research as multivoiced or even polyvocal (e.g., see Wolf, 1992) do not go far enough, given Ellsworth’s (1994) claim that simply pluralizing “voices” (e.g., critiquing the researcher’s voice through reflexivity and/or amplifying conflicting, partial voices) oftentimes fails to consider the rich texture of vocality. To only pluralize voice remains focused on units of voice rather than dimensions of voice. In addition, a feminist qualitative researcher’s deconstructive (instead of reflexive) voice abandons (rather than questions) authority and transparency, confronts (rather than acknowledges) the power of interpretation/translation, and emphasizes the noninnocence of their own vocalizations (Visweswaran, 1994). From these reconceptualizations of voice that put feminist qualitative researchers and their participants 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 to reference those unstable voices as excessive, transgressive, overflowing, and surprising.

Rhizo, a prefix I borrow from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) image of the rhizome, captures the heterogeneity of vocality in a spatial figuration, accentuating its connection to other things through its very diversity. Vocality, in music theory, emphasizes the performative dimension of voice, its expressive power, its tensions of dissonant counterpoint, and its variations on thematic connections; it challenges our attention and demands deep concentration if we are to hear its nuances.

Rhizovocality, as my combined, invented signifier, offers a vision of performative utterances that consist of unfolding and irrupting threads. These threads have the ability to irrupt and unfold simultaneously in “smooth, open-ended spaces” (Massumi, 1987), which compel poststructural feminist qualitative researchers to listen for texture and subtlety within and among discordant, muted, and harmonious voices, including their own.

Without origins, rhizomes cannot claim authenticity; neither do voices, which, as adventitious themselves, rupture into lines of flight, deterritorializing any demand for coherence or stability. Along these lines of flight flee irruptions of resistance, transgression, “decisive silences” (Visweswaran, 1994) which, in their excess, disrupt homogeneity and even rudimentary binary constructions of vocality (e.g., voice/silence) and their ensuing good/bad status. Enunciations in a rhizomatic framework can never be merely good or bad since everything gets restratified, reformatted, reconstituted in a rhizome. Like a map, rhizovocality “is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 12). In their partiality, vocalizations are at once in a process of becoming as they interlink, intensify, and increase territory. In their becoming, vocalizations are not reaching for a more full, complete, coherent status; rather, they are opening up territory, spreading out, and “overturning the very codes that structure [them] . . . putting them to strange new uses” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 11, 15). In this way, silence can be resignified as resistance, as agency, since the irruption of silence penetrates and transforms fixed definitions of what it means to be subjugated. Partiality and contradiction irrupt as transgressive, “never coming back to the same,” never taking root (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 12). However, this is not to imply that partial and contradictory voices remain isolated and disconnected; in a rhizome, the partiality of voices proliferate, irrupt, disrupt, and stretch to reconnect, creating multiple entryways 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, rhizovocality can be neither fully transcendent nor authentic since it has no original departure or destined arrival. Rhizovocality “is perpetually in construction or collapsing . . . a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting again . . . connecting any point to any other point” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 20–21).

A Trickster working the limits of rhizovocality learns to listen for texture in a rhizomatic way. Rhizovocality, in its multiplicity and contingency, is difference within and between and among; it highlights the irruptive, disruptive, yet interconnected nature of positioned voices (including the researcher’s) that are discursively formed and that are historically and socially determined – irrupting from discursive pressures within/against/outside the research process. Locating the coordinates of

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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, selfvibrating intensities” would be to discard the: . . . tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world its object nor one or several authors as its subject. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 22–23) 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 contradiction and disjunction and are useful as “tools of rigorous confusion that jettison clarity in favor of the unintelligible” (St. Pierre, 1997a, p. 281).

2. Other currents included in feminist research methods are the uses and innovations of a multiplicity of research methods, an ongoing criticism of nonfeminist scholarship, the use of feminist theory as a framework, the transdisciplinary nature of academic projects, and efforts to represent diversity, to include the researcher through reflexivity, and to develop special relationships with the research 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 authority figure . . . daring to disagree . . . having an opinion” (p. 5). She uses this phrase to signal a movement from 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 researchers’ “giving voice” to subaltern women and Freud’s giving voice to the hysteric, transforming her into the subject 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 the dominator’s making.

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

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