Working on a failed research: promiscuity of wanting and doing both ways

Abstract

By mixing up various writing genres, the author interweaves a hybrid narrative of a fable, her postcolonial feminist subjectivity, and her research. The narrative begins with Aesop’s fable, “the Bat, the Bird, and the Beast.” In the fable, a bat wants to be both a bird and a beast, but being neither, s/he is refused by both. Connecting her postcolonial feminist subjectivity with the positioning of the bat in the fable, the author re-engages with the moral of the story that instructs exclusive loyalty, and highlights the promiscuous potential of the bat. Through this re-engagement, she examines how feminist researcher subjectivity, epistemology, and methodology can function both as the demand of exclusive loyalty and as the transgressive desire and move (of the bat). Then, how can she both refuse and take refuge in feminist research? The promiscuity of wanting and doing both is a contradiction that enables the author to re-visit her research with Korean working class parents in New York City schools, which she thought she had failed two years ago. Through three accounts of failure that involve (1) the divide between the condition of researcher employment and the needs of the field; (2) the divide between usable and unusable data; and (3) the divide between theoretical complexity and material simplicity, the author discusses how she promiscuously – persistently and patiently – re-engages with these divides in her failed research.

Keywords:

• promiscuity
• postcolonial feminism
• research failure
• issues of subjectivity, epistemology and methodology

Acknowledgements

The author expresses her appreciation for the reviewers, Sara Childers, and Stephanie Daza for their careful reading and feedback on various versions of this article.

Notes

1. In this paper, I intentionally utilize a hybrid of writing genres, literary conventions, and cultural narratives. In this, I am writing in US English accented by Korean. Rather than trying to contain the “promiscuity” of the bat subjectivity in westernized English and academic writing, I experiment to write a research tale that crosses the boundaries of personal, cultural, and academic language. This is another promiscuous attempt of a bat that wants it both ways.

2. Throughout the paper, I apply an analogy of the Bird, the Beast, and the Bat to my own experience, relationship, and research work. What I attempt to highlight is not necessarily who can be a bird or beast. Instead, both represent what keeps the boundary. In fact, these identities can be shifting in different contexts. While I identify with a bat in this paper, I can also perform a bird or a beast in other situations, contexts, and relationships.