An uncertain balance: Negotiating theory,politics and love in academic writing

Abstract

Writing up qualitative research requires researchers to consider many issues, including the representation of participants, academic standards for scholarship and researcher subjectivity or agency. In this article I refer to Žižek's notion of the ideal love relationship to examine some of the messy processes involved in constructing the written texts of such research. Principally, I describe the loss of authorial voice that occurred in my doctoral thesis following my appropriation of Žižek's post-Lacanian psychoanalytic approach as the methodological framework. In an attempt to untangle the tensions that plagued my use of Žižek's work and convey a sense of their disruptive implications, I adopt a writing style that is intermittently disordered, a voice that is inconsistently empowered and a reflexive engagement that is critically self-conscious. I argue that the negotiation of an academic writing style is an under-acknowledged site of ethical, political and personal struggle that, as such, represents an important methodological concern for feminist researchers.