Abstract
Departing from a methodological experiment performed by the authors, this article reflects on and discusses issues of ethics and politics in poetic strategies of ‘representation’. In relation to the experiment the article questions how to conceive the notion of connectedness between empirical time and the reconstruction of it in poststructuralist research. In continued reflection the article elaborates on the meaning and status of body and emotion in poststructuralist, feminist research. The article digs further into questions of poststructuralist epistemology and validity, and asks if poetic, open‐ended ways of presenting lived experience are especially ethical. These reflections lead to a discussion of the possibility of complex and ambiguous poetic representations being politically influential, i.e. how this research can matter to others.
Notes
1. A metaphor we developed (Hølge‐Hazelton and Krøjer Citation2008, this issue) in order illustrate that some ways of thinking and speaking of our research are antagonistic in a poststructuralist context as they derive from modern ideas of scientific methods and truth.
2. This condensation was translated from Danish, thus it is Jo's English version of a part of Elisabeth's (see note 3) Danish past.
3. Elisabeth is (the pseudonym of) the woman who, among other things, was interviewed in order to create this text.
4. Geertz calls his way of doing this ‘thick descriptions’, which means texts talking about the researcher's experience of what is going on in empirical time among the people and everything else being there.