An Epistle Outlining My Queer-Feminist Orientation to Reading/Writing in Qualitative Research

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003280590-13
12
AN EPISTLE OUTLINING MY QUEER-
FEMINIST ORIENTATION TO
READING/WRITING IN QUALITATIVE
RESEARCH
Sarah E. Truman
Dear Anani and Anna and David,
I hope this finds you all well in Arizona. I’m writing to you from my kitchen table
here in Melbourne on a honey-warm summer afternoon. I’ve been musing over
your question, what does it mean for me to write qualitatively? And what’s my writing
process/tips? When I sought to answer this question the first thing I thought was,
“well I always write from somewhere:” I write from a physical location, from a
socio-cultural milieu, from inherited body/minded modes of thinking, from a the-
oretical orientation influenced by other thinkers, writers. I write in relation. I write
toward readers, futures, pasts, and in conversation with other writers, thinkers,
researchers—like how I’m writing to you right now!
My “writing” practice also always includes movement away from my desk
(walking or running), tea, and books. I’ve conducted a lot of research on the
relationship between movement and ideation—I always go for a walk as part of
a writing project. But when I’m at the desk writing (which during the world’s
longest lockdown here in Melbourne has been my mid-century-modern kitchen
table) there’s usually tea, and always books. I knew this—that I always have books
nearby. But it wasn’t until you sent me that question about writing qualitatively
that I decided that I should focus on the importance of reading for writing in my
response. And I decided to write my response in the epistolary genre, specifically
as a letter.
I’ve decided on this genre because: (1). Writing to someone always helps me
get ideas down. (2). It’s good to think about audience when writing as it invariably
changes how I write, and your question about my approach to writing qualitatively
was born from a class David organized for graduate students (so that’s my audi-
ence). (3). The epistolary genre is underused in qualitative research, and it should
be used more! (4). The books that surround me on my table currently are books
9781032248912_C012.indd 149 09-01-2023 09:06:42
Chapter by Sarah E. Truman (pp. 149-156). In WRITING AND THE ARTICULATION OF
POSTQUALITATIVE RESEARCH Edited by David Lee Carlson, Ananí M. Vasquez, and Anna
Romero. Routledge.

150 Sarah E. Truman
that employ epistolary genre or theorize it (I’ve been thinking about epistolary
forms of communication due to having been a pen pal throughout the duration of
COVID-19).
Currently on my desk are Derrida’s The Post Card (1987), Ashon Crawley’s
The Lonely Letters (2020), Kathrine McKittrick’s Dear Science (2021), and Deleuze
and Guattari’s Kafka (1986) among other piles of books I’m not going to list o.
Derrida, McKittrick, and Crawley all theorize and employ aspects of an epistolary
genre in their books: as friendship, as love, as lures for dierent futures and strange
arrivals. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari are mainly describing how Kafka’s writing
was influenced by letter writing (which is “diabolical” and introduces a ghostly
element between sender/receiver!) In my book Feminist Speculations and the Practice
of Research-Creation I use an epistolary genre as part of a larger post card project
focused on queer-non-arrivals, and the strange strangers that do arrive in research/
life. I discussed that chapter when I visited your class at ASU and so it feels fitting,
given the literal, figurative, and actual milieu I’m sitting in right this instant, to
stick with this genre in my response to you. There’s an immediacy to the epistolary
genre: it apostrophizes (attempts to speak directly to someone), allows space for
internal interjections, while at the same time—like all writing—is aware that mean-
ing might never arrive as intended to the reader (forever delayed!). Letters, like all
writing, occupy a queer time space. And I don’t know about your experiences, but
time and writing has gotten even queerer for me here during the world’s longest
lockdown in Melbourne where for months on end we were only allowed out of the
house for an hour a day, and confined to a 5 km radius of movement. Historically,
particularly in novels, epistolary genres gave voice to female characters who didn’t
enjoy the privilege of occupying space in public the same way that male characters
could: sometimes in the form of diary entries, or through the form of letters. Some
of my most important friendships in my life have been pen pals so I take the genre
seriously outside of the academy, and it became a significant event in my experience
of being here in hard lockdown during the pandemic as I started pen palling again.
So, in this epistle (letter) I’m going to talk you through how I approach reading as
a practice that relates to my writing (qualitatively): both of which are framed by
what I call the queer-feminist materialisms. I’ll then oer some propositions that
may help you, or other qualitative researchers, think about your own approach to
writing qualitatively.
My angle of orientation to conducting qualitative research is through the
queer-feminist materialisms (Truman, 2019, 2021). I’ll explain all those terms but
I’m going to start with the term materialisms. What do I mean by materialisms?
I write about materialisms a lot, but for the sake of this letter, I’m talking about
the material eects/aects of words, concepts, ideas, gestures, events, and citations
throughout a qualitative research endeavor. Thinking, reading, theorizing, citing,
and writing are material practices (Barad, 2007; Snaza, 2019; Truman, 2016). And
they materially change me as a researcher, reader, writer. They are also situated and
speculative practices (Haraway, 1988): in other words, reading and writing take
place somewhere and are reaching somewhere (kind of like this letter which is
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An Epistle Outlining My Queer-Feminist Orientation 151
taking place here in my kitchen in Melbourne as well as the milieu I’m writing
from and hopefully reaching you all in Arizona and your milieus across space and
time!). Both situatedness and speculation are important concepts in queer and fem-
inist thought: we always read, write, cite and conduct research from somewhere, in
situ. But, we are also always undergoing change through the processes of reading,
conducting research, chatting with people, and writing. And we’re also (hopefully!)
reaching toward somewhere else (speculative) in these endeavors—luring dierent
worlds (Keeling, 2019; Stengers, 2011; Truman, 2019). That dierential is always
at work.
As an ethico-political tending, feminism is the advocacy of (more-than) human
rights and justice fueled by a desire for equity across all sexes, genders, sexualities,
classes, abilities, and races (Ahmed, 2013; Kafer, 2013). As a scholar and researcher
and writer and reader, I think that “doing” feminism requires me to interrogate insti-
tutional structures, genealogies of thought, and social-cultural-language practices to
recognize where inequality lies. This also includes armative, or speculative prac-
tices that might propose dierent worlds: reading, citing, and writing practices can
do this. I sometimes use the term queer in front of feminist materialisms to acti-
vate queerness’ potential to unsettle norms and acknowledge how queer and trans
scholars have influenced feminist scholarship as well as arm queerness as an iden-
tity (and in case there’s any confusion, “gender critical,” trans-exclusionary scholars
are not feminist) (Halberstam, 2005; Luciano & Chen, 2015; E K Sedgwick, 2003).
However, as Shannon and I argue (2020), queerness must not merely function as a
“lubricant for easing into doing thing dierently while failing to attend to dierence”—
this refers to the very real dierences experienced by LGBTQ2A+ people in a
cis-hetero-white-ableist-patriarchy. That caveat returns me to the beginning concept
in this section: materialisms. The need to take concepts seriously. Activating a con-
cept is a material practice and creates and destroys worlds (and can have material eects
on research participants and other concepts in writing). If I’m writing about particu-
lar people or research participants, I think about what kind of concepts they may or
may want to be aligned with, narrated through, subsumed beneath, lifted by and so
on. In this way, there’s a feminist praxis at work throughout the research practice.
That was a quick tour through my orientation to qualitative research. It also
informs my orientation to reading practices and citational practices. Citational pol-
itics are mentioned frequently in Black, Indigenous, and feminist approaches to
research (McKittrick, 2021). But it’s dicult to cite (and write) well if students and
researchers don’t have the time to read well. As a researcher, where I write from and
in relation with changes through the process of researching and writing—which
always includes reading. But there’s many kinds of reading! So, I want to write a
bit about some of the swirling politics of reading I’ve encountered in the academy.
Then I’m going to talk about some of my pragmatics for reading/writing—which
are of course related to my politics.
Now you, Anani, and Anna are graduate students, and this may or may not relate
to you, but I often speak with graduate students who are overwhelmed at the pros-
pect of where to start in reading. And I encourage them to start where they are and
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152 Sarah E. Truman
take the time to study. I notice here in Australia, and during my time in the UK, that
because PhDs are only three years long, students are in an oddly rushed state where
writing (which translates into publishing or finishing a dissertation) has become
more important than taking time to read well. I think this is beginning to happen
in Canada and the US, too, although those programs are longer. Concomitant with
this rush to write before reading (or rush reading in order to write), I’ve noticed
that students entering graduate school—especially in the field of education—have
vastly dierent undergraduate degrees and training. For instance, graduate students
who’ve completed undergraduate degrees in literature or history will have studied
in very dierent ways to those who studied music or biomedical sciences. I’m not
sure of your backgrounds, but my BA was in English literature and philosophy. As
a result, I had read a significant amount of critical and literary theory in undergrad.
Both English literature and philosophy rely on theory to make sense of the texts
a student is studying. In many instances philosophy is theory (and arguably so is
literature). But it’s also always intertextual—in that a philosophical text is in con-
versation with other philosophers, philosophies, or thought experiments related to
other fields. English is entirely intertextual: from understanding Greek or Roman
mythology, biblical references, or intertextual references of other literary works
(and it is often also very Eurocentric!). When I took courses in “women’s writing”
or the lecturers would have us read Judith Butler (1999) for example or some other
theory to help make sense of gender as it is activated in a literary text. Or if we
read a book/film that brought up queerness we were introduced to Eve Sedgwick
(1993). Or when studying “world literature” we would be introduced to some liter-
ary scholar who critiqued empire and racial logics alongside the text (Spivak, 1988).
Other fields are like this in their own ways, but literary studies, cultural studies,
and philosophy did provide me with an angle of reading/writing that helped me in
graduate school. So, it’s an approach I still use. And as a lecturer I try to remember
that the reading repertoire (Iser, 1972) and reading techniques that students arrive in
grad school with can be very diverse.
This brings me to the importance of reading time. In our increasingly rushed
production and output machine of academe, all too often I hear from students and
colleagues, not only that they don’t know where to start to read, but also that they
don’t have time to read. Last year I even heard a senior academic telling a group of
junior academics how to block out time for writing to get 200 words down a day.
Now of course making time for writing is an important part of writing, however,
when I chimed in for the need to block out time to read before writing and during
writing, I was met with a confounded stare.
I’m curious as to how you make time for reading to accompany your writing
and complicate your writing? How do you read? Where do you read? What are
your techniques? I’d love to hear them. In the meantime, I have some propositions
I’ve been thinking about on how to cultivate a culture of reading in the academy.
Those of us who are teaching, supervising, and students in the academy need to
make time to read ourselves, and to foreground the necessity of reading for all aca-
demics. One way to start this is to make reading part of classes—like we did in high
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An Epistle Outlining My Queer-Feminist Orientation 153
school. I’m not sure about your high schools, but we would sit and read during class
at my high school. Let graduate students read during class time. If you’re a student
tell your instructor to read Thompson and Harney’s Ground Provisions (2018) and
how they discuss the importance of not “outsourcing” reading in the academy: they
argue that we must make it part of the work we do when “at” work (in class). So
that’s an important ethos for those of us teaching to consider. Those of us who are
academics, or want to be academics, likely need to read more than just during class
as well. And one way to help facilitate this is having a social reading practice, par-
ticularly with challenging texts. Join a book group: read in conversation. Start letter
writing in response to books and articles (like I have during lockdown with some
colleagues and friends). Also, I think that departments should build in reading time
as part of an academic’s workday. Two hours per day, paid reading time ($$$!). One
hour in the morning and one in the afternoon. That’s ten hours of paid reading
time a week. Then when academics go to write, they will be up to speed on theory
and research to inform their writing.
How many hours a week do you have time to read?
Another thing I think about a lot is the politics of reading practices. In the race
(and it really can feel like a race) to keep up with publishing/reproductive speed
in the academy, some students may be enticed to skim read—even as a means of
seemingly performing a “good” citational politics. This may look like reading a tiny
bit of a paper/book to extract a resource. This may be done for various reasons—
perhaps to demonstrate breadth. It may be just to cite a scholar and they may thank
you for it in a world where citation indexes are weighed against grant and tenure
applications. Over time, however, skim reading is not a particularly helpful practice.
I think it should be discouraged.
In my book Feminist Speculations and the practice of Research-Creation (2021), I have
an Interstice on citational practices where I list a series of metaphors that I think of
when thinking about citational practices—and the scholars who incited my think-
ing about the term. An important part of reading is remembering where ideas came
from—particularly if I’m going to then be writing about those ideas. I challenge
you to think metaphorically about your approach to reading as it relates to scholarly
writing: why are you doing it? What is your theoretical orientation to reading?
In conversation? Snowballing? Cross-pollinating? Casting a net? Plugging holes? Covering
your ass? Playing politics? Trolling? Stealing? Montaging? Aecting? Diracting? Magpie-
ing? Quilting? Weaving? Digesting? (Remember what happens after digestion—absorb those
nutrients—fuel a new genre—and don’t just circulate crap!) If you have other metaphors
for how you think about reading practices, I’d love to hear them.
To get back to your original question, what does it mean for me to write qualita-
tively? And what’s my writing process/tips? and my decision to write about reading
as an important component of my approach to writing (which is embedded in a
queer-feminist materialist tending), I’m going to share some of my techniques for
reading that turns into writing. These are all techniques I encourage graduate stu-
dents to try. I have decided to write these as an unordered list. As a literary device, a
list has the capacity to link seemingly “disparate agents into a tense unity” (Truman,
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154 Sarah E. Truman
2021, p. 99) and promises disjunction rather than flow (Bogost, 2012). I also think
lists are underused in qualitative research, like the epistolary genre, and so I’m going
to write you one now as an intervention into qualitative research writing.
Trumey’s Unordered List of Reading Practices (which also includes some writing practices)
• Be consistent in your reading. Read every day.
• Use marginalia. Make notes in/on texts. Illuminate it. Engage materially with
the text.
• Create annotated bibliographies of key texts. Develop knowledge of a field/
concept by building your own annotated bibliography of it. Many students go
straight to writing lit reviews when I think an annotated bibliography can be
very useful and develop an understanding of the breadth of a field. Start with
a favorite text. Don’t cut and paste the abstract, write your own entry in your
own words (then you can use it later and not be plagiarizing!).
• Look at the citation list in a text you have written an entry on. And read those
texts if they’re related to your bibliography (as well as searching the library to
build your bibliography!).
• Read theory related to your annotated bibliography (and make an annotated
bibliography of theory).
• Create summaries and precis of the most important articles, books, texts that
are part of your annotated bibliographies. This way you begin to expand your
writing from the constraints of an annotated bibliography.
• Remember your politics: look at who is missing. Who is missing in these
fields? Build an annotated bibliography of them! Build an anti-annotated
bibliography!
• Alongside this approach I also “read” tangentially.
• Read philosophy.
• Read fiction.
• Read poetr y.
• Listen to songs.
• Listen to podcasts.
• Read the news.
• Go for a walk or swim or run and think with movement and place.
These tangential readings and musings and scholarly practices help frame up the
vector I am—the situated place I write from, and write to, in a field that I’m help-
ing create. In terms of the epistolary genre that I’ve engaged with throughout my
life in research projects, and in this brief letter to you all, it has been informed on
all the registers I just outlined above: I’ve read theorists who write about the genre
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1986); I’ve read theorists who employ the genre (Crawley,
2020; Derrida, 1987; McKittrick, 2021); I’ve read fiction that activates the genre in
the form of letters and diary entries from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to Octavia Butler’s
Parable of the Sower, to Je Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (which draws atten-
tion to the notion of an unreliable narrator, which of course I’m not, ha!). Further,
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An Epistle Outlining My Queer-Feminist Orientation 155
I just went on a walk to the shop to clear my head before I wrote that section
above. In terms of this letter to you, I’ve activated elements of that genre and the
ethico-political orientations of some of those pieces of writing here.
As someone who is currently supervising PhD students and does press them
to read deeply, and broadly, as well as do the seemingly mundane task of writing
annotated bibliographies/summaries, once they have completed an annotated bib-
liography or summaries of a series of texts, I often ask them to link those writings
in a literature review across a series of texts. And then I usually ask them to try and
activate a concept in relation to them, based on their own argument regarding a
piece of data (this could be “data” in terms of something that came up in research,
or it could be “data” in terms of an idea they have, or it could be “data” in terms of
something missing in the literature, or it could be by performing whatever they’re
thinking about—i.e. letters!). I think of synthesis as a mode of reading theory, or
a thread of thought, through a series of other texts. Significantly, the writer in
this situation is also a vector. What would it mean to be a queer-feminist vector primed
by whatever else I’ve synthesized in reading and research sites, and then set about writing?
I always tell students to take their situated and speculative orientation to writing
seriously.
So, I’m going to end on this note to you all (well not you, David, you’re already
a scholar, but for the students): what kind of contribution do you want to make
to the field? A piece of writing will have the synthesis of all the readings and texts
you’ve encountered, and the vector of you moving through it! Have an opinion!
And use 1st person voice (or 2nd person like I am here if you’re writing to someone
but usually in qualitative articles/books I use 1st person, owning the argument).
Vectorize and realize that you will be changed in the process of reading and writing
(and research). But take the time to read. I often tell students that the most time
they’re ever going to have to read is during their time as a grad student. Savor it,
protect it, use it.
The sun is setting here—a salmon hue. I’m going out for another walk among
the eucalyptus trees. I hope you’re all well, and I look forward to hearing your
approach to reading and writing—and what you’re currently reading and writing!
Warmly,
SET
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