This article presents an uncomfortable reflexive account of a feminist poststructuralist research project on young women in Lagos, Nigeria who dress in what I call “hyper-feminine style.” It reflects on the messy processes by which I framed the research and recruited participants, and considers how the women who did or did not eventually take part exercised agency to resist the terms of my address. The article illustrates the usefulness of Butler’s theoretical notions of “excitable discourse” and “performative interpellation” for poststructuralist reflexive practice, concerning as they do the unpredictable political and ontological effects of what one says and does.
AlthusserL. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In Lenin and philosophy and other essays, tr. BrewsterB. (pp. 127-188). London, England: New Left Books.
2.
BartkyS. L. (1988). Foucault, femininity, and the modernization of patriarchal power. In DiamondI.QuinbyL. (Eds.), Feminism & Foucault: Reflections on resistance (pp. 61-86). Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.
3.
BritzmanD. (1995). The question of belief: Writing poststructural ethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8, 229-238.
4.
ButlerJ. (1997a). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York, NY: Routledge.
5.
ButlerJ. (1997b). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
6.
ButlerJ. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
7.
ButlerJ. (2011). Bodies that matter (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
8.
DaviesB.BrowneJ.GannonS.HonanE.LawsC.Mueller-RockstrohB.PetersenE. B. (2004). The ambivalent practices of reflexivity. Qualitative Inquiry, 10, 360-389.
9.
DaviesB.DormerS.GannonS.LawsC.RoccoS.TaguchiH. L.McCannH. (2001). Becoming schoolgirls: The ambivalent project of subjectification. Gender and Education, 13, 167-182.
10.
LatherP. (1993). Fertile obsessions: Validity after poststructuralism. The Sociological Quarterly, 34, 673-693.
11.
McRobbieA. (2009). The aftermath of feminism: Gender, culture and social change. London, England: SAGE.
12.
NayakA.KehilyM. J. (2006). Gender undone: Subversion, regulation and embodiment in the work of Judith Butler. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27, 459-472.
13.
PatrickA. (2005). Queening it: Women’s taste for jewelry excesses in post-war Britain. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 15, 119-146.
14.
PillowW. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16, 175-196.
15.
RiviereJ. (1929). Womanliness as masquerade. International Journal of Psychology, 10, 303-313.
16.
YoudellD. (2006). Impossible bodies, impossible selves: Exclusions and student subjectivities. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer Verlag.
