Procedimiento para el control de Calidad de Humedades en Proceso P-ACC-011 versión

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Is even this con/text, a con? This context shuttles between so many different places. I am left breathless. I have succumbed to Michelle Fine’s (1992, 1994a & b) charge of ‘ventriloquising’ 1 have choreographed all my significant selves from the text. Yes, 1 know that this is the third time that this phrase has appeared. I am repeating it to give the reader and opportunity to read it again. To read it having taken in the words between the repetitions. To read it knowing that repetition needs to be used as a transforming as well as a rhythmic and structural device:

Repetition as a practice and a strategy differs from incognizant repetition in that it bears with it the seeds o f transformation. When repetition calls attention on itself as repetition, it can no longer be reduced to connote sameness and stagnancy as it usually does in the context of Western progress and accumulation . . Repetition outplays itself as repetition, and each repetition is never the same as the former. In it, there is circulation, there is intensity, and there is innovation.

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I am a doctoral candidate and my-own-text, my-own-research is shaped by this knowledge and by the choices I must make as candidate. 1 have certain obligations to fulfil. 1 work toward the thesis text. Is the context of this work merely the pedagogic momentum that carries me toward the fat bound and boundaried text of the doctoral thesis?

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There is muteness. The writer as

witness, speaking the stories, is a lie, a liberal bourgeois lie.

Because the speech is the w riter's speech, and each word of the

writer robs the witnessed of their own voice, muting them.

Michael Joyce (1991, ^29, quoting from Erin Moure)

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I am cautious of becoming what Trinh Minh-Ha labels the ‘ideal insider’. That is to say, one who faithfully represents the Other with/in the established order and who in doing so polices the self-other boundary by gathering ‘data’ and offering difference in its expected/acceptable form. 1 am a woman in the

hyphens at the Rape Crisis Centre. I have neither a place inside nor an outside position to occupy. To return to Trinh:

The moment the insider steps out from the inside, she is no longer a mere insider (and vice versa). She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside. Like the outsider, she steps back and records what never occurs to her the insider as being worth or in need of recording. But unlike the outsider, she also resorts to non-explicative, non-totalizing strategies that suspend meaning and resist closure. (This is often viewed by the outsiders as strategies o f partial concealment and disclosure aimed at preserving secrets that should only be imparted to initiates.) She refuses to reduce herself to an Other, and her reflections to a mere outsider’s objective reasoning or insider's subjective feeling... Not quite the Same, not quite the Other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out.

Trinh Minh-Ha (1991, p.74)

As insider/outsider, I am a Rape Crisis worker. But 1 am not ‘typical’. There is no homogeneity of Rape Crisis workers. Furthermore, my status is not static. I am an increasingly different sort of worker because of doing this research. As Jane Ribbens points out (1989, p.589) with regard to her work with mothers: M began the project thinking that 1 was in some senses researching my own peer group, talking about a way of life from the “inside", close to the position of observing participant. However, one of the clearest emerging personal feelings is that, through the research, 1 have come to a much greater awareness (and acceptance) of my own differences'. Working at the insider-outsider means that I am constantly at risk of ‘falling off. I know that my feminisms have not been arrived at'; my place as a Rape Crisis worker/researcher is not an end point, it is

a point of re-departure in the process of understanding how to live my feminist politics.6

I am showing you my valise: it is opened, but not unpacked. Nothing in it is ‘mine'; everything is appropriated as the makings of a rhetoric or a poetics that teaches me how to make something, reproducing the fundamental feature of language as an open system - the capacity to invent new texts out of extant, familiar units.

Gregory Ulmer (1991, p.5)

6 Indeed, towards the end o f my doctoral research it became clear to me that my position at the Rape Crisis Centre was no longer tenable. Whilst I do not seek to attribute this to the research process, being a researcher did serve to place me as marginal in some Rape Crisis situations. And I ‘felt’ as if I was heard less clearly than I had previously been Perhaps I have toppled from the insider/outsider position? Perhaps I have re-departed to live my politics differently?

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