1.1 Introduction
Nina Lykke’s edited volume, Writing Academic Texts Differently. Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing, published in 2014, brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and writers that speak to acknowledging the place(s) from which one writes, to processes of [13] making language one’s own and to getting to “know a theory in an embodied way,” to name just a few topics discussed in the book (Davis 2014: 178). Already in 1995, Elizabeth Grosz had pointed out that, “Bodies are thus essential to accounts of power and critiques of knowledge” (Grosz 1995: 32). Subsequently the embodied engagement and the researcher’s body, factoring in its “cultivation,” including for example how – with an accent, with grammatical differences etc. – a (research) language is vocalized are crucial matters to power loaded processes of knowledge production. Crucial to grasping the trajectory this study took (regarding the embodied researching and writing subject), is that I have been living in Germany, England, on Cyprus, in Iceland and in the US while researching. Thus, I have and had to continuously move between (academic) environments in which I did or did not speak the majority language at all or not as a native tongue, and environments in which some of my “disciplinary homes” did or did not exist, or had different disciplinary traditions and histories attached to them. During the time of my research and the writing of this study, I furthermore experienced forced mobility in the sense that choosing when to leave a geographical setting and thus an academic setting, and crossing a border and in consequence being separated from the (research) culture within it, was not always my choice but partly based on inhabiting various roles that added complexities to how I could conduct research. Such roles included being categorized as visiting non-immigrant alien without access to professional engagements etc. Thus my “personal condition” as a researcher, as Siri Nergaard puts it in a lecture in 2016, is “to inhabit the translational space from which to continuously contribute and add to the relationship between transformation,3 interpretation and borders,” with borders applying not only to geographical borders, but to borders between disciplines, languages, cultural modes of experiencing, listening, analyzing, valuing and so on (Nergaard 2016: lecture). Such adding and contributing from within the translational space is a component of what I introduce as new to the world. The act of adding newness happens in the following forms: playing with the meanings a word has, or using it, unaware that I use it in a non-traditional manner. Yet, my unawareness puts readers into the space where the traditional meaning of a word is questioned, re-weighted or expanded upon. The confrontation with an expanded or misinterpreted meaning of a word might guide readers to rethink the word and its use, including the political, cultural and social histories engrained in its utilization.
All areas of inquiries into researching and writing, as listed and reflected upon in Lykke’s edited volume cited above, informed the methodological composition of this study as much as reading Michel Foucault did in the early years of this study, in that it allowed awareness of the researching subject as “the product of particular regimes of truth” (Foucault 1977). The subject [14] thus operates within historical, cultural, institutional, ideological, social and political mechanisms, which enforce particular discourses serving as “true” and powerful in certain times, locations and situations. Having to relocate often during this study consistently shook my work (as I had changed location, languages, modes of understanding, access to literature) and left me having to explain it to myself and to others over and over again. Eva Hoffman, although being in a very different situation, describes such experiences better than I could, stating that, “The reference points inside my head are beginning to do a flickering dance” (Hoffman 1989: 132). She continues describing displaced conditions of existence and of existing within a familiar language as, “[…] to remain outside reality itself […] I have to shift in the innermost ways, I have to translate myself’ (Hoffman 1989: 211). I came to understand that the only place to write this study from is the place that Nergaard calls the “in-between” or the translational space (Nergaard 2016). This space is the “contact zone” where boundaries are blurred and differences start to interact (Pratt 1991: 34). I would add that interactions are taking place in ways that are sometimes hard to grasp, as contact zones are filled with what I call “undisciplined interactions.” I understand the space that Nergaard calls “space in-between,” or what Mary Louise Pratt, in 1991, called the “contact zone,” and what I take a lead from to investigate “being in limbo” (in the closing pages of this book) to be greatly fertile. Pratt, defining “contact zones,” writes, “I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 1991: 34). I add that such spaces are unclaimed. Amid what Pratt calls “clashes,” processes of investigating conflict are neither here nor there and neither past nor future: they are pure chance; they are “being in limbo.” As an outlook, at the end of this book, I will suggest that “being in limbo,” as both, as relational and transitional state or place of uncertainty, can be habituated and ephemerally owned. I propose it as site for joined world-making. Until then I will be using Nergaard’s term “in-between.”
The only space to read this study from, is the space “in-between,” not only because it either exposes the reader to read a language that is not her, his or their first language or it exposes the native speaker of English to read a non-native speaker’s writing in English. In both cases, meaning establishes itself as language moves between actors.
One of the specific interventions that this study can thus provide is to make transparent that literally every chapter of this study was written in a different geographical, academic, linguistic, cultural and social setting over the duration of more than fifteen years, during which tremendous changes regarding interdisciplinary and postdisciplinary inquiries took place. During this time, I often caught myself rewriting and revising chapters over and over again, being unable to exit processes that Hoffman calls “to translate myself’ (Hoffman 1989: 211). [15] Submitting this study thus can be read as a professional experiment in interrupting processes of self-translation and instead creating “still images” of moving thoughts and bodies, as they are captured in words at a specific time in my scholarly life. Moreover, as transforming a PhD study into a book within the German framework does not allow for many changes, the content of this book inevitably hobbles behind newer thoughts and concepts I would rather investigate here, yet cannot.
Personal experiences shared here, such as they relate to forced mobility or writing in a foreign language, contributed greatly to my learning experience and to developing my own scholarly voice in the field, and they therefore are granted a space in this introduction.
1.1.1 Research Leading to this Study
During the studies for my diploma in pedagogy at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University and for my women’s studies certificate from the Cornelia Goethe Institute in Frankfurt am Main, Germany between 2001 and 2002, I followed my research interest in issues related to reproduction and women’s sexuality, which had led to a master’s thesis in social work in 1998. In Frankfurt am Main it became clear to me that women’s reproduction in Western Europe is on the level of political discourses, ethical approaches, economic connections and strategies inseparable from the fast developing field of Reproductive and Genetic Technologies (RGTs) and biomedical research and practice, as far as both are impacting factors on how we conceptualize