Abstract
“Bag-lady Storytelling” is a performative methodology, a creative (re)twist of Ursula Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” into a new materialist methodology. Using the figuration of Trudy, the chatty Times Square bag-lady character in the one-woman Broadway play, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, the author conducts a feminist critique of traditional research methodologies and draws together theories of research that inform, instead, the practice of research as Bag-lady storytelling, a performative research praxis of gathering stories/ideas/theories and creating habitual nomadic research patterns. Such a praxis requires a different logic, an attunement and attentiveness to what gets gathered up, used, shared; an attentiveness to which seeds should be saved for future reseeding, for future reworlding.
How else might we tell the story, and how might those stories gather us?
Jenny Reardon
Quote from Jenny Reardon’s (2014) presentation titled “Inhabiting Multispecies Bodies: Panel Discussion with Donna Haraway, Margaret McFall-Ngai, and Jenny Reardon” at the conference Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Reprinted with permission by author, Jenny Reardon.
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Notes
- 1.
Similar to Haraway (2004, 333): “I like layered meanings, and I like to write a sentence in such a way that, by the time you get to the end of it, it has at some level questioned itself.” Definitions of terms are palimpsestic, multimodal, multidisciplinary, historically situated, and often (mis)translated. My hope in this book is to search for polysemes, and hold together the multiple definitions of terms to create a deeper, richer, and more complex understanding(s). My goal is to create thick meanings, messy meanings, that drawing on multiple fields/planes/modes of thought; to create generative (re)interpretations and translations. The definitions scattered throughout the book are not intended to be conclusive static definitions; they are simply the current gathering of descriptions that shape my understanding.
- 2.
Throughout this book, the character of Trudy generatively interrupts the text, posing questions, providing insights, and sharing research stories. Trudy’s interruptions were originally posed in Jane Wager’s (1986) play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, that was turned into a film in 1991 directed by John Bailey (although the film title was intentionally misspelled, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe). The play was also published as a book in 2012.
- 3.
WCHP is an acronym that describes, what Haraway (2008a) calls, “white capitalist heterosexist patriarchy.”
- 4.
Throughout this book I utilize the term “thick” drawing on Donna Haraway’s interpretation, infliction, and influence in wanting to highlight (by using this term) that the in-between spaces, separations, dead zones, or seemly “empty” spaces really are not empty at all. They are filled with ideas/beings/concepts, material and immaterial, that simply cannot be seen/touched/comprehend/identified within our current frame or sensual abilities. Or they are occupied by beings/ideas/concepts that are not accepted or acknowledged by the dominant normalizing/colonizing social entities/states and thus these unvalued dead zones are erased, ignored, and given no value. They are ghostly. But all ghosts have a presence, an affect, a mattering. Haraway (1997) also uses the word “thick” to draw the “material” back through into the discursive; she describes words “as thick, living, physical objects that do unexpected things.”
- 5.
In this book I take up a nomadic deleuzeguattarian interpretation of the term wander, or what Braidotti (2011) describes as conscious nomadism, atypical to its usual (negative) description of wandering aimlessly, without direction, id est being lost. A nomadic deleuzeguattarian interpretation of the term “wander” allows us to understand the practice of conscious wandering as a “move in a noncausal yet (inexplicably) clearer direction” (Berman 2000, 198). It is a practice of being open and attentive to the vital forces that shape our becoming-withs. A nomadic worldview calls for rhizomatic/ecological thinking, an element that Braidotti argues is vital to creating nomadic subjects and an ethics of sustainability. The term “nomad” derived from the Greek nomas, meaning wandering (roaming or roving) in search of pastures (OED); wandering is a spiritual movement, a practice of connecting with universal flows and forces. As Morris Berman (2000, 81) explains, according to Bruce Chatwin (1987) in his book The Songlines, the wandering movement is “central to the nomadic consciousness, to human fulfillment…it is an instinctive migratory urge, something we carry with us in a genetic or inherent sense.” The term wander also refers to the changes occurred during metamorphosis, a body wandering off from its usual course of development. Or simply (in a negative connotation) to an elderly persons’ brain/mind/thoughts wandering off due to illness or exhaustion, causing delirious, rambling talk.
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Adsit-Morris, C. (2017). Bag-lady Storytelling: The Carrier-bag Theory of Fiction as Research Praxis. In: Restorying Environmental Education. Curriculum Studies Worldwide. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48796-0_3
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