On the Messy Business of Articulating Reflexivity

As numerous scholar-researchers have suggested, the rigorous, qualitative investigation of the body is at once a political project “dedicated to the contextually based understanding of the corporeal practices, discourses, and subjectivities through which active bodies become organized, represented, and experienced in relation to the operations of social power” (Andrews, 2008, p. 54) and an embodied enterprise. Regarding the former, Robert Sparkes (1995) reminds us that we are interpreting, and thus recreating through text, representations of the human condition:

No textual staging can ever be innocent. Whose voices are included in the text, and how they are given weight and interpreted, along with questions of priority and juxtaposition, are not just textual strategies but are political concerns that have moral consequences. How we as researchers choose to write about others has profound implications, not just for how readable the text is but also for how the people the text portrays are ‘read’ and understood (p. 159).

In short, the researcher is using the body to at once create representation (of the self and the other), regulation (of the researcher body in moving about space), and resistance (to the structures of oppression operating within those spaces).

Perhaps equally imperative, with regard to the latter, researchers of the body are creating conditions of interpretation whereby the corporeal inflections of the ‘present author’ are staged, performed, and ‘read’ in situ within various psychogeographic and corporeal-cultural boundaries. For these are not author-evacuated texts, as Clifford Geertz (1988) would argue; and ours is not a positivistic science of convenient absence. Rather, in seeking to contextualize, and thus problematize, the power relations of the body through various ethnographic encounters, researchers are placing their own body and identity politics within the realms of the empirical. By making use of the human body to better understand power relations layered onto, evoked by, and exchanged within bodies, the researcher in some ways projects her or his own bodily knowledges and dispositions onto the corporeal cartographies of everyday life (for an insightful overview, see J. Richardson & Shaw, 1998). As such—and at the collisions of histories, multiple subjectivities, structure and agency, researched and researcher, and body with body—those of us ‘doing’ qualitative research on the body must 1) acknowledge the [inter]subjective nature of bodily encounter; 2) maintain, to borrow from Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1973), a constant sense of ‘corporeal reflexivity’; and 3) limit the symbolic violence created in research contexts where bodily encounters produce power, inequality, exploitation, or oppression.

Drawing on my own research, it was my experience in various ethnographic detours through the New Sorting South that the bodies of both researched and researcher were indeed sites of social power; and that self-presentation and the performances of selfhood and identity were in the first instance physical in nature. The body was, a Derrida (1974) reminds us, that most transcendental of signifiers. Moreover, the closer in contact bodies came within one another, the more powerful each became. Let me explain: problematizing how “the active body is culturally regulated, practiced, and materialized. As are power and power relations, so is the active body, and its related experiences, meanings, and subjectivities, dialectically linked to social and historical contingencies” (Andrews, 2007, p. 53) became an active pursuit of placing my own body in the spaces where bodily practice, social power, and sporting identity intersected. For my ends, the more concentrated exclusively white, patriarchal, and parochial the corporeal praxis, the greater depth of observation and interaction I was able to produce toward the political ends of my research projects. Conversely, as my white masculine body and Southern dialect joined these spectacular amalgams of physicality, it added to the increased cultural dominion of the visible center over these socially-exclusive spaces.

Thus, it can be argued that, following the Hegelian-Frankfurt School theoretical synthesis offered by Phil Carspecken (1999), as empirical subjectivities and contingencies (such as those I discussed earlier) collide, they do so at and around the human body in the form of meaningful and important intersubjectivities. In other words, the subjective (in a Freireian sense of subjection to power) and objective (that of the physical corpus) intersect at various discursive formations and practices of embodiment (J. Butler, 1993). As such, the interpretive and project of post-positivistic (Lincoln & Denzin, 2000), qualitatively-grounded politico-cultural kinesis is produced through dialogic encounters between bodies; whereby the intersubjective research act is an exchange of bodily interpretations (between the researcher and the researched) and embodied performances (again between the researcher and the researched).

            In turn, and in looking back on my research encounters, I have found that the complexities of reflexivity toward, and about, the research act extend beyond the dialectics of language, representations, and reciprocity. They extend beyond Bourdieu’s (1992) critique of Weber’s ‘value-free’ sociological imperative and Foucault’s (1994) reconceptualizations of a priori assumptions regarding Western structures and organization of knowledge in The Order of Things. Perhaps what I am arguing for here is a heightened, re-engaged sense of what Merleau Ponty’s refers to as ‘corporeal reflexivity.’ A self-awareness of the researcher as ‘embodied subject’ (see Vasterling, 2003), both a discursive property in the physical world and an agent subjected to the existential structures acting upon those discourses.

In ‘reading for the best’ of the phenomenologist’s work,[i] as Stuart Hall (1986) would put it, we can surmise that Merleau-Ponty’s model of intercorporeality illuminates the meaning-making processes active within and between bodies and the power-knowledge relations produced within the bodily encounters we seek to better understand (Kelly, 2002). Rosalyn Diprose’s (2002) synthetic interpretations of Merleau-Ponty’s imperative for ‘corporeal reflexivity’ are worth quoting here at length:

. . . and while it may seem as if my corporeal reflexivity is already in place before the world or the other, which would allow the imaginary in my body to dominate, it is also the case that it is the other’s body entering my field that ‘multiplies it from within,’ and it is through this multiplication, this decentering, that ‘as a body, I am exposed to the world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1973, p. 138). This exposure to the world through the disturbance of the other’s body ‘is not an accident intruding from outside upon a pure cognitive subject . . . or a content of experience among many others but our first insertion into the world and into truth’ (ibid., p. 139) (pp. 183-184).

Much like Deleuze’s (1988) notion of “the double,” discourses of the body produce embodiments; meaningful texts projected out of similarity and difference. ‘The double’ is for Deleuze (1988) a negotiation of ‘the inside’ and ‘the outside.’ In other words, subjectivity is constructed out of normative and differential processes, and the active structures of identity which divide subjects and reinvigorate subject positions. Identification is thus the “interiorization of the outside” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 98), the connection between the external discourses of identity and the internal definitions of the self. And by thrusting our researcher-bodies into cultural fields of bodily texts (through adornment, gesticulation, physicality, musculature, deportment, etc.), we must not only remain aware of how our bodies are intruding upon the bodies of others, but also of how we are engaging and producing various ‘differential processes.’

This, of course, leads to my third and final point. Up to now I have argued that the best qualitative inquiries of the body—those which intercede on the anti-humane structures, practices, and symbolic acts within cultures of the active body—make use of both physical and ideological praxis to, as Laclau and Mouffe (1985) posited, articulate the human experience with broader contextual forces. These connections are meant to highlight “any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice" (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p. 105).[ii] As Jennifer Daryl Slack (1996) quite carefully postulates, articulation is both that connection between broader contextual formations and the empirical moment which we seek to establish, and at the same time the methodological episteme under which we operate. On the articulation of context and practice, and with particular regard to the ways in which practice produces context, she writes: “The context is not something out there, within which practices occur or which influence the development of practices. Rather, identities, practices, and effect generally, constitute the very context in which they are practices, identities, or effects” (p. 125, emphasis in original). As such, ours is not simply an exercise in context-mapping or abstracted corporeal cartography, but of using the political and politicized body to engage and interact with human action—articulatory praxis which produces, and is produced by, social, political, and economic context.

I have further argued heretofore that the best of cultural analyses of the body are those which operate from the ground up; by developing carefully-crafted critical representations and performance texts of empirical embodiment and praxis; those ‘thick’ (Geertz, 1973), rich representations of practice that come through human interaction—through sharing knowledge and experience with other human beings. Those critical analyses are typically generated by way of a conscientious, often stifling, self-awareness of the researcher and the research act (see Langellier, 1999). In critical studying the cultures of the body, we seek to better understand context through bodily practice, and the oppressive and liberatory potential of the human body as constrained by contextual forces.[iii]

But if I have made anything clear here, I hope it is that such an engaged, interventionist, reflexive, reciprocal, and practiced method can sometimes get messy. Engaged studies of the body, following Rossman and Rallis (2003), are thus complicated projects of the “recursive, iterative, messy, tedious, challenging, full of ambiguity, and exciting” (p. 4). In reflecting upon my own research, and my own body as a site of power within Southern sporting fields, I have become increasingly frustrated at how, as an embodied subject—and in spite of my best efforts to raise consciousness and thus bring about change to the iniquitous order of things in the South in which was raised—those corporeal power-knowledge structures that I my-self was trying to situate in context were ultimately articulating me. By projecting bodily performance of complicity in the New Sporting South, I had failed to reject, or my embodied self had been overdetermined by, the dominant politics of white hetero-masculine privilege at work within these empirical spaces. Following Paula Saukko (2005), I tried to “forge the micro and the macro in a way that [did] not reduce the local experiences to props of social theories” (Saukko, 2005, p. 345), but that engagement brought be in close reflection with my former self.

And thus I have become all the more aware of the duality of subjectivity; at once a subject with some agency in shaping various experience (such as those in the research field), and yet subjected to the power imbedded in my own body, and our own performances (or past and present), and of my own Southern self. So I do not offer any answers here, but only to use these reflections on the ‘Self,’ the body,’ and the politics of reflexivity and articulation to is a call for a messier, bottom-up qualitative engagement with the body; a contemplative method of articulation(s) that situates the body amongst bodies and framed through both the soi and the pour soi. In studying the complex relations of the body, the self, and reflexivity—and representing the ‘self’ and the ‘Other’ in just and reflexive ways. I will end here with a quote from Alan Ingham (1997), who, in laying the groundwork for the academic discipline which has come to be known as ‘physical cultural studies’ and attending to its embodied-ethnographic imperative, sharply postulated:

In ‘physical culture,’ all of us share genetically endowed bodies, but to talk about physical culture requires that we try to understand how the genetically endowed is socially constituted or socially constructed, as well as socially constituting and constructing. In this regard, we need to know how social structures and cultures impact our social presentation of our ‘em-bodied’ selves and how our embodied selves reproduce and transform structures and cultures; how our attitudes towards our bodies relate to our self- and social identities (p. 176).

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