Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on how feminist methodology engages with a problematic of loss in taking fuller account of the fall into language and the loss of pure presence, and explore the enablements that might be imagined from loss.

Abstract: Getting Lost is an experiment in and of method against the normative critical framework of much feminist methodology in order to ask: if it is what it does, in a nominalist vein, what then is feminist methodology? The answers the book puts forward include: effaced, abjected, uncertain, engaged, reflexive (perhaps to a fault), and deeply invested in a sustained ethical engagement with those we study, particularly those with less power, while troubling what Adele terms "confession, testimonial and the intrusiveness of much research." Situated as an index of more general tensions in the human sciences, I focus on how feminist methodology engages with a problematic of loss in taking fuller account of the fall into language and the loss of pure presence. The book's sensibility is toward that which shakes any assured ontology of the "real," of presence and absence, a post-critical logic of haunting and undecidables. In this, it is important to remember that my methodological musings collected in the book are grounded in Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/ AIDS,1 a study that preceded the "new" anti-retroviral treatments of the mid-1990s. Hence this was, in many senses, a study of living with dying. Not-knowing was not difficult in such a space and I felt keenly how not wanting to not know is a violence that subsumes the Other into the Same. Abstracting a philosophy of inquiry from an archive of such work set me up well to explore the enablements that might be imagined from loss.