I'm thinking a lot about dialogue. To be honest, I'm thinking about dialogue on a fairly constant basis, but I am thinking about it especially after doing this week's readings and because of the subject matter and nature of this class in general.
In Women's Studies (as well as in some other disciplines in the humanities), we LOVE to talk about dialogue. We love it. We see it as very core to what we - as scholars, academics, activists - do. For example,the Women's Studies classroom - and the feminist movement(s) more broadly - is really centered around dialogue. We speak of bringing a "multitude" or a "diversity" of voices into a space in order to displace the idea of a singular, over-arching authority figure. It's a way of legitimizing and honoring different people's knowledges and experiences. It's also a gesture toward embracing and including voices that have been marginalized.
In my own work, I too talk about dialogue. Grad students (for better or worse) become very good and spitting out our research interests in two sentences or less. When I speak of mine, I talk about looking at conflict narratives and "putting them in dialogue with each other." Even as I type this, I have trouble clearly conceptualizing what that means. It's the part of my research that still seems a bit fuzzy. I think that this project of looking for dialogue will mean reading women's narratives with, through, and against each other in order to see if there is any "conversation" taking place, to see if these narratives "speak" to each other in any way.
I'd love to hear what we each are personally hoping to get out of this project of dialogue. Why enter into this sort of transnational dialogue? What are our aims? How do we enter into this dialogue productive and realistically? Is it okay to be idealistic and hope that dialogue truly does have the power to transform? Does it?
Wow. I'll stop asking questions now. These are just some of the questions I've been carrying with me. I thought perhaps I'd share them.
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