Phillips: 540 Week 14 Post

What's Love Got to Do with WWW?

Shirley Brice Heath's "The Madness(es) of Reading and Writing Ethnography" outlines the coulda-shouda-woulda revisionist rhetoric of the author's project in Ways with Words. While I appreciate her reflexive approaches to her critics, I am surprised that Heath leaves out something that seems obvious to me. She did a lot of this work out of love, and, yes curiosity. Even the way the book was constructed over a long timespan in a "schizophrenic existence" imposed by state requirements is a nod to love. Why refer to "madness" instead of "love"?

Clearly, WWW was a labor of love for Heath. Her communities, her extended family, her husband, her daughter all played a significant part in this work. Does the word "love" come with too much baggage for a female researcher writing in the time that Heath does? I wonder. Yet, we know emotional attachment and intrinsic motivation as well as the ability to proceed under duress collude in our brain. 

Katherine Hayles writes: "an observer makes a cut . . . to tame the noise of the world by introducing a distinction, which can be understood in its elemental sense as a form, as a boundary between inside and outside" (Hayles 137). Heath made cuts, which all of us must do to get things accomplished as the NPR story I linked to above corroborates. How we mark the boundary between inside and outside as writers and observers is going to vary contingent with the bodies involved.

In a different book, Feminist Pedagogy, two people (one a junior female literature professor and one a more senior male literature professor) discussed their approaches to teaching Virginia Woolfe's A Room of One's Own. In the article, a retrospective of a conference presentation, the female prof. analyzed her and her co-presenter's discourse. She did not refer to the emotional engagement she had with her student, but the male professor did. She asked herself why that happened. Her answer? She felt uncomfortable expressing emotion lest she be perceived "too soft." I wonder if Heath's omission of love from her article or book indicated a similar insecurity.

References:  Hayles, N. Katherine.“Making the Cut: The Interplay of Narrative and System, or What Systems Theory Can’t See.” Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity. Eds. William Rausch and Cary Wolfe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 137-62. Print.

NPR Radio Lab - Choice (see link above)