Evolución y perspectivas de futuro de las salas de cine digitales

4.2.1 Representing the storied narratives in the first-person mode

I certainly did not lose sleep over or wrestle with the issue of whether to write the stories of the women in the first person or third person. It was clear to me that I was to represent all my narratives in the first person only. I was aware that reading a story

121 told directly from the perspective of the co-researchers in their voice can have certain influence in the empathy felt by the reader, not the least of which is the marvelous sense of immediacy, credibility and psychological realism that storytelling always carries with it (Nikolajeva, 2014). However, my argument for using the first person differs. My argument is not only because this is a feminist study that wants to portray the experiences of women as real but also because I was conscious of a mistake had I made whilst completing my master’s degree. At the time of writing up stories for my master’s degree Saloojee (2009), I did not think it problematic to write up my male co- researchers’ stories in the first person and my female co-researchers’ stories in the third person. I had neglected to acknowledge that women’s experiences were different from men’s and highlighted the men’s experiences in a positive light therefore silencing and marginalising the women’s struggles. I will not forget my examiner’s comment in her report of my dissertation:

I would like to challenge the student to examine her own gendered story more deeply and interrogate the reason for the “ease” of writing in the first person for the men, and the third for women. (Examiner report, 17 February 2011) With those words, I took up the challenge and assumed the role of the first person narrator for the stories of Lona, Prudence, Zandile and Thabile (Portraits 1–4).

4.2.2 Crisis of Representation

Writing up the stories

As a feminist researcher, I must admit that narrating the stories was tantalising as well as challenging. Initially, my story was not part of the study and my supervisor questioned the absence of the researcher’s voice. I struggled with the option of being in the study. It was only when Zandile, one of the co-researchers remarked after being interviewed, “we are all the same, Indian and black. It’s so great for us to tell our stories together,” that I felt a lack of solidarity with my co-researchers. I decided then that if the co-researchers were taking risks to make a change, I too needed to do the same and place myself in the public domain. I gained the status of researcher and researched and my story being part of this study, refuelled my feminist conscience. I

122 learned that as a feminist researcher, my role was very important because one of the principles of feminist research is acknowledging that the beliefs of the researcher shape the research (Bartky, 1990).

I was finally able to conquer the challenge around the issue of my voice in the study but was then confronted with other challenges. Firstly, I struggled to write up the stories. I first used Polkinghorne’s narrative approach as a tool to help me plot the stories because this approach assumes that people’s realities are constructed or revealed through narrating their stories (Polkinghorne, 1988). However, I found this approach to be too universal for my study because I wanted to capture the lives of a particular group of people - African postgraduate women students. I then turned to a feminist narrative approach to help me write up the storied narrative. This approach has certain parameters as discussed in chapter three that made me conscious of an additional layer that Polkinghorne (1988) did not talk about, relating specifically to women’s experiences.

Keeping within the parameters of feminist narrative approach to plot the story, I had to ensure that the women in the study had been oppressed in social research, and allow for the positive portrayal of women’s subjectivity as fluid and in flux, rather than viewing the incoherent narratives of self-representation as problematic (Bartky, 1990). Taking these parameters into account helped me to include and exclude certain data as I constructed and reconstructed portrayals of the women’s experiences from their perspective as African postgraduate students within UKZN.

Secondly, the process of construction and reconstruction of the women’s stories revealed tensions and dilemmas that were very real and confrontational to my feminist ideologies. I feel compelled to come clean and reveal the reality of the story writing. I must acknowledge that, whilst interacting with my co-researchers I have to come to like some more than the others. Is this a crime? Sometimes, there were aspects of their data that resonated with my own. Similarly, I noticed that some co-researchers liked me more than did others which would definitely have affected the ways in which they voiced their experiences. My inner bias therefore played up whilst I was reconstructing their stories.

123 With respect to the co-researchers who I took a particular liking to, I was able to write up their stories in two days. There was a peaceful flow of writing that transpired onto paper. It was an amazing feeling. Another co-researcher’s story, with whom I felt disgruntled at times, took me about three weeks to write up. I struggled to make a connection with her in the story. I felt I was writing her story in a boring manner and that it read in a bland and uninteresting way. This concerned me greatly. I expressed this concern to my supervisor who told me that no story is a boring story and in order to feel some connection, I needed to terminate all feelings of professional frustration. I eventually did that and really surprised myself at the end.

Using feminist narrative approach as a tool enabled me to capture the richness and nuances of the meaning of African postgraduate women students in their everyday human existence and to give insight into the complexity of their experiences and understandings. It helped advance knowledge about the nature and context of the women’s experiences, to expose circumstances leading to social injustice and oppression and ultimately to contribute to the improvement of women’s lives as postgraduate students at UKZN for that traditionally silenced, marginalised, or vulnerable population.