Eliciting Narratives of Disorientation: A Methodological Exploration

Abstract

This article offers a methodological framework for eliciting and reading narratives of, what Sara Ahmed has termed, disorientation. Drawing on the findings from a project on lesbian and queer women’s orientation toward HIV objects, knowledges, and subject positions in Australia, it concludes with a reflection on gathering “difficult” or “reluctant” narratives.

Keywords:

• Disorientation
• lesbian
• fragmented narratives
• life writing methods

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This project received ethics approval from the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee.

2 Smith et al., “Clinician Imaginaries of HIV.”

3 Dews, “HIV Elimination in Australia.”

4 Kirby Institute, Monitoring HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis; Australian PrEP surveillance data does not record women’s sexual orientation (i.e. heterosexual, plurisexual, lesbian) or sexual practices (i.e. women who have sex with men, women who have sex with women, women who have sex with men and women), nor distinguish between cisgender and transgender women.

5 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology.

6 Ibid., 6.

7 Ibid., 157.

8 Lajoie “Being at Home;” McNulty Being Betwixt and Between; Vaughan “Exploring Disorientation & Disability.”

9 Harbin et al., “Discomfort, Judgement, and Health.”

10 Wasson, “Before Narrative.”

11 Manlik, “Allies or At-Risk Subjects?”; Logie and Gibson, “Queer Women and Violence”; and Dworkin, “Who Is Epidemiologically Fathomable.”

12 Richardson, “Social Construction of Immunity,” 43.

13 Kirby Institute, “National HIV/AIDS Case Reporting,” 96–99.

14 Ibid., 50.

15 King et al., Annual Surveillance Report; Stevens, “Lesbians and HIV”; and Logie and Gibson, “Queer Women and Violence.”

16 For example, see Sabantini et al., “Kaposi’s Sarcoma”; Marmor et al., “Possible Female-to-Female Transmission”; and Monzon and Capellan, “Female-to-Female Transmission of HIV.”

17 Dworkin, “Who Is Epidemiologically Fathomable.”

18 Ibid.; Logie and Gibson, “Queer Women and Violence,” 33.

19 Logie and Gibson, “Queer Women and Violence.”

20 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 8.

21 Ibid., 2.

22 Ibid., 21.

23 Tack, “The Logic of Life,” 51.

24 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 145; Butler cited in Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 174.

25 Müller, “Beyond ‘Invisibility’”; Logie et al., “‘We Don’t Exist’”; and Matebeni et al., “South African Lesbians’ Experiences.”

26 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 158.

27 Ibid.

28 Müller, “Beyond ‘Invisibility’.”

29 Logie and Gibson, “Queer Women and Violence.”

30 Ibid., 33; one example of these violences is “curative rape” (i.e. when a person is raped in an attempt to “cure” them of their – real or perceived – divergence from heterosexuality). For a more extended discussion of sexual violence and HIV, see Logie and Gibson, “Queer Women and Violence”; Lenke and Piehl, “Women Who Have Sex.”

31 Dworkin, “Who Is Epidemiologically Fathomable.”

32 Logie and Gibson, “Queer Women and Violence,” 32.

33 Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking”; Shildrick “Living On.”

34 For example, Frank, “Health Stories as Connectors”; Wasson, “Before Narrative,” 107; Shildrick, “Living On”; Miller, “Is This Recovery?”; and La Cour and Poletti, “Graphic Medicine’s Possible Futures.”

35 Strawson, “Against Narrativity”; Mackenzie and Poltera, “Narrative Integration, Fragmented Selves.”

36 Woods, “Rethinking “Patient Testimony”; Hall and Rossmanith, “Imposed Stories.”

37 Gilmore, “Agency Without Mastery”; Wasson, “Before Narrative.”

38 Wasson, “Before Narrative.”

39 Ibid., 107; see also Shildrick “Living On.”

40 Wasson, “Before Narrative.”

41 Ibid., 107; Ibid., 108.

42 Frank, The Wounded Storyteller.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., 99.

46 The title is (in part) a reference to Billie Holiday’s 1939 song “Strange Fruit,” which calls attention to the historic lynching of Black people in the United States. The song is, Leonard (quoted in Blume, “Zoe Leonard Interviewed” n.p.) explains, “[a]bout loss and violence.” Although, she clarifies, the title of her installation is “also a pun – ‘fruit’ meaning ‘fag’” (Leonard quoted in Blume, “Zoe Leonard Interviewed,” n.p.).

47 Leonard quoted in Blume, “Zoe Leonard Interviewed,” n.p.

48 Ibid.; Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 99.

49 Leonard quoted in Blume, “Zoe Leonard Interviewed,” n.p.

50 Leonard reproduced in Quabeck, “Intent in the Making;” Quabeck, “Intent in the Making.”

51 Leonard quoted in Blume, “Zoe Leonard Interviewed,” n.p.

52 Leonard reproduced in Quabeck, “Intent in the Making.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Leonard quoted in Blume, “Zoe Leonard Interviewed,” n.p.

56 Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 110.

57 Wasson, “Before Narrative,” 108.

58 Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 97.

59 Wasson, “Before Narrative.”

60 Diedrich, Treatments.

61 Wasson, “Before Narrative,” 109.

62 Ibid.

63 Harbin et al., “Discomfort, Judgement, and Health.”

64 Ibid., 152.

65 Wasson, “Before Narrative,” 106, 109.

66 Bacchi and Bonham, “Poststructural Interview Analysis.”

67 Ibid., 113.

68 Ibid., 118.

69 Ibid., 113; Ibid., 115.

70 Bacchi and Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis, 23.

71 Diedrich, Treatments, xviii.

72 Wasson, “Before Narrative”; Diedrich, Treatments.

73 Diedrich, Treatments, xviii.

74 Bacchi and Bonham, “Poststructural Interview Analysis,” 5.

75 Diedrich, Treatments; see also Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology.

76 Diedrich, Treatments.

77 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 16; 80.

78 Ibid., 158.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid., 56.

81 Ibid.

82 Wasson, Sara and Sharon Ruston, “Translating Chronic Pain.”

83 Logie, “(Where) Do Queer Women”; Schulman quoted in Thistlethwaite, “154 Polly Thistlethwaite,” 30; and Richters and Clayton, “The Practical and Symbolic.”

84 Vähäpassi, “An Imaginative Geography,” 30.

85 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 141.

86 Vähäpassi, “An Imaginative Geography,” 30; Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 111.

87 Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 161.

88 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 139.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Macquarie University [Research Training Program Scholarship].

Notes on contributors

Kate Manlik

Kate Manlik is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at Macquarie University. Their research seeks to problematise lesbian and queer women’s place in the Australian HIV landscape and has been published in Feminist Media Studies and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She is currently working on a collaborative project, examining doctoral students’ well-being and access to support initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia.

Nicole Matthews

Nicole Matthews teaches media and cultural studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. Her most recent book (written with Naomi Sunderland) was Digital Storytelling in Health and Social Policy (Routledge 2017). She has published articles and essays at the conjunction of media, disability and deaf studies in a wide range of journals including Life Writing, Signs, Feminist Media Studies, Television and New Media, Media, Culture and Society, Storytelling, Self and Society and Australia Feminist Studies.