Laurel Richardson

Fields of play : constructing an academic life

How do the specific circumstances in which we write affect what we write? How does what we write affect who we become? How can we maintain professsional and personal integrity in todays university? In a series of traditional and experimental writings, a culmination of ten years of works-in-progress, Laurel Richardson records an intellectual journey, displacing boundaries and creating new ways of reading and writing. Applying the sociological imagination to the writing process, she connects her life to her work. Deeply engaging, movingly written with grace, elegance, and clarity, the book stimulates readers to situate their own writing in personal, social, and political contexts. Laurel Richardson is a professor of sociology, graduate faculty in womens studies, and visiting professor in the College of Education at the Ohio State University.

Getting personal: writing-stories

Halloween, 1972. My face was broken, the cheekbones, the jaw. My head had gone through the windshield of the Volkswagen bug and then my leg, as the seat broke backwards, and then my face again, and my pelvis and my ribs hitting things, or being hit, ricocheting. I have a body memory of my right eye out of its socket, lying in wetness on my cheek. And then there was blackness, unconsciousness, coma. Once the kind-faced doctor tried cheering me. ‘‘You’ve only lost about 10‐15% of your I.Q.,’’ he said. ‘‘There’s plenty left.’’ Did he not know that his patient who could not do her times tables was a professor of sociology who taught advanced statistics at a major research university? She had not the slightest idea now what ‘‘10‐15%’’ meant, but she could hear, feel the word, lost. What had I lost? Much more than I.Q. points. I had lost access to my brain. I had lost language: my sword and my shield.My habitual routes for naming things weretorn up, blocked o¶ ; paths to words and formulae were gone. I could not locate where anything was stored in my brain. I could feel my mind searching ‐ this way, no, that way, up here, try there ‐ searching, searching in my brain, as if it were a computer, searching for words, thoughts, connections, searching for memory, endless searches. Sometimes I could sense the place where a word was ‘‘hiding,’’ but I couldn’t make it come out, be recognized, be spoken. When I could e nd the word’s e rst letter, I felt grateful. I still do.

Talking and thinking about qualitative research

This script comes from an edited transcript of a session titled “Talking and Thinking About Qualitative Research,” which was part of the 2006 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 4-6, 2006. This special session featured scholars informally responding to questions about their personal history with qualitative methods, epiphanies that attracted them to qualitative work or changed their perspectives within the qualitative tradition, ethical crises, exemplary qualitative studies, the current state of qualitative methods, and challenges and goals for the next decade. Panelists included Arthur Bochner (communication), Norman Denzin (sociology/communication/critical studies), Yvonna Lincoln (education), Janice Morse (nursing/anthropology), Ronald Pelias (performance studies/ communication), and Laurel Richardson (sociology/gender studies). Carolyn Ellis (communication/sociology) served as organizer and moderator.

The “other woman”

Based on interviews with 26 single women who have had long-term intimate relationships with married men, a power continuum of management styles is derived. At one end are women who are hyper-submissive; at the other end, women who are hyper-dominant. Reasons for ending the relationship and the role of the other woman in that decision are discussed. The kind of ending is classified into three types: the shock-out, the drag-out, and the peter-out.

Fiction and Ethnography: A Conversation

This is Part 2 of a paper presented at the Couch-Stone conference in Houston, Texas, in February 1998. It is a conversation between Lockridge, a novelist, and Richardson, an ethnographer. The conversation considers: (a) the profound importance of initial and last encounters (for people, including ethnographers), and ways to represent those encoun ters ; (b) the understanding that an (inter)action has multiple symbolic meanings and ways to represent that understanding; (c) attention to the seemingly minor and marginal as mirrors of what we view as major and central; (d) the potential to envision a study in both its specificity and its generality; and (e) mystery as it appears in everyday interactions.

The Politics of Location: Where Am I Now?

In this article, through the use of several narrative devices, the author reflects on how the past remains in the present and shapes the future. Using the metaphor of locating oneself on a writing-map, she writes about fact and fiction, autobiography, and coauthor ship. The author finds that writing about ones spatial-temporal locations is a powerful tool for the relocation of the self—physically, symbolically, and emotionally.

Sticks and Stones: An Exploration of the Embodiment of Social Classism

This article explores the ways in which childhood ontologies shape adult biases of the social world. Specifically, it focuses on the construction of social class and how even after sixty years, the author’s earliest memories shape her interactions and anxieties.

My left hand : Socialization and the interrupted life

Because of a serious tear in the cartilage of the author’s left wrist, her life as she wants to live it has been seriously interrupted. To represent this experience of interruption, the author records the other interruptions of the day and week, structuring them as narrative interruptions. The author interrupts her text further by moving back in time to write of a horrendous interruption experienced as a young child: the denial to her of her left-handedness. Thus, the text links body trauma, emotional trauma, socialization practices, and the fluidity of self.

Twelve Uneasy Pieces on Research and Therapy

In this article, the author chronicles two specific days plus her academic career from the intersecting lenses of research and therapy.

SEXUAL FREEDOM AND SEXUAL CONSTRAINT: The Paradox for Single Women in Liaisons with Married Men

Feminist thought characterizes womens sexuality as both a source of freedom and a source of exploitation. Central to the feminist research agenda on womens sexuality is the analysis of strategies that women use to increase their sexual autonomy and reduce their sexual constraints. One such strategy is the sexual liaison between single women and married men. In this article, liaisons between single women and married men are examined from the perspective of the single woman. Data come from intensive interviews with 65 single women who have been or are involved with a married man. Gender norms play a significant role in transforming a platonic relationship into a sexual one, but once a liaison is established those norms can be curtailed. In these liaisons, single women experience greater control over their sexuality than they do in socially approved relationships because they feel freer to repudiate their sexual repressions, to abstain, to have safe sex, and to explore their sexual preferences. The article concludes with a discussion of these liaisons as strategies women adopt to achieve sexual autonomy within the constraints of androcentric institutions.