‘Becoming molecular girl’: transforming subjectivities in collaborative doctoral research studies as micro-politics in the academy

Abstract

In the context of Swedish reforms of postgraduate and doctoral education in a global knowledge economy, this article aims to theorise on the documented processes of doing collaborative analysis during elective graduate course-work on deconstructive methodologies in the social sciences, with 10 doctoral students over a period of seven months. I re-engage with the documentations of our collaborative processes six years later, to read and analyse them diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophy, and with feminist post-constructivist theories, such as Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Elisabeth Grosz and Patti Lather. In the course-work, we actively aimed – by engaging in different collaborative strategies of deconstructive writing and talking, sharing and re-analysing each other’s research data and analyses – to resist “doing philosophy” as an independent, intellectual, disembodied and masculine-coded endeavour. This process made us aware of the tactile embodiment of collaborative deconstructive research strategies, and how they came to transform our subjectivities as researchers. I suggest the “molecular girl” as a metaphor for this transformation as researchers, and claim that the practices we developed constitute a “micro-politics” that contests contemporary transnational trends in knowledge economies, but which might also be understood to work in alignment with such trends.

Keywords:

• subjectivity
• feminist postconstructionism
• micro-politics
• Deleuze and Guattari

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the 10 participants who participated in the full seven months of the course-work, and who gave their consent to anyone in the group to use the collectively produced documentation, analyses and email conversations to write papers or articles, in alphabetical order: Camilla Andersen, Auli Arvola-Orlander, Ingela Elfström, Bodil Halvars-Franzén, Gudrun Alda Hardardóttir, Karin Hultman, Iann Lundeborg, Lottie Nyfors-Nyblom, Anna Palmer and Hanna Wikström.

Notes

1. Nina Lykke has suggested the umbrella term of postconstructionism under which to put the converging trends in contemporary feminist theorizing that understand materiality as co-constitutive with discourse in the production of the body, gender and sexuality, and that seek to “theorize bodily and transcorporeal materialities in ways that neither push feminist thought back into the traps of biological determinism or cultural essentialism, nor make feminist theorizing leave bodily matter and biologies ‘behind’ in a critically under-theorized limbo” (2011, pp. 131–132). Lykke argues that postconstructionist feminisms can only claim to displace and transgress a de/constructionist stance by acknowledging the inevitable continuities with theories such as feminist Marxism, psychoanalysis, social constructionism, feminist poststructuralism, queer theory and symbolic interactionism. It is precisely because they are post theories; that postconstructionist theories might be able to bring the sexed body and prediscursive facticities of materiality back onto the agenda (Lykke, 2010, p. 107).

2. In Sweden, students enrol in a four-year full-time doctoral programme in the social sciences after their Master’s degree. This program entails two years of a mixture of compulsory and elective course-work credits and about two years of writing the dissertation.

3. When starting this course-work, I asked the students for permission for all of us to collectively use as research material any material produced during the course, under the condition that we would either write collectively and/or ask permission to use excerpts from the written material extending for an unlimited time into the future, and irrespective of when the material might be published. For this and an earlier paper (Lenz Taguchi, 2010), I asked if any of the participants would like to be co-writers. However, they declined due to engagement in writing their own Ph.Ds. and conference papers. The participants have, however, regularly read, commented on and approved of my writings and agreed they be sent out to journals for review.