International Sports Studies, vol. 23, no. 1/2, 2001
Bodily Dialogues: Writing the Self
Pirkko Markula
Brunei University
London, England
Introduction
Evocative writing has become increasingly visible within the socio-cultural
analysis of physical activity. Some observers even argue that 'the celebration
of personal narratives has become a major preoccupation within the social
sciences' (Sparkes, 2000: 42). However, the majority of scholars attempting
these kinds of writing projects, including myself, are typically trained in realist
writing traditions. Consequently, the transition from realist to narrative writing
is not always painless. In this paper, I account my own path from a realist
writer to evocative writer. I also introduce different varieties of evocative
writing as I encountered them during my development. Finally, I discuss the
contribution of narrative writing for my research on the physically active body.
Realist writing
My ethnographic dissertation, which I wrote in 1993, focused on the social
analysis of women's aerobics. When I wrote about aerobics in the early
1990s, the social sciences, and anthropology in particular, were in a crisis of
representation. We had started to realize that all our research texts were
representations: researchers' interpretations of experiences created in a web
of diverse social forces. In my dissertation, I too acknowledged my subjective
influence on the interpretation of my field data. I asserted how I, the
researcher, significantly shaped the writing process. Nevertheless, I
described my subjects' experiences in a realist manner using a blend of
interview quotations and theoretical analysis.
Two years later, I was among a group of women researchers
assembled to discuss body image issues in exercise. We laid out new
information, and referred to previous studies to better understand the
construction of the female body ideal in the fitness industry and the anxiety it
caused women. We emphatically talked about women's attempts to negotiate
a subject position within the dominant discursive construction of the feminine
body without one reference to our own bodies. I knew that many of us were
active exercisers and fitness instructors and looking at the nearly perfect
bodies around me, I realized that our own bodies were conspicuously absent
from our research. My own ethnography on aerobics depicted me as a
bodiless, intellectual academic: I didn't include any reference to my own body
shape in my research. Were my own body image experiences, due to my
educated academic awareness, unproblematic? After that session, I felt
strongly that the absence of the researcher's embodied voice created a false
dichotomy between us, the researchers with no body trouble, and them, the
researched who continuously and unsuccessfully battled their body image
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problems. Who would take us, I now pondered, the body image experts
without a body image, seriously?
Confessional Tale
When I returned home from that epiphanic conference, I was determined to
write my body story and openly acknowledge how my research into women's
body image issues derives from my own experiences as a physically active
woman. My first thought was to supplement my previous realist writing on
aerobicizers' body experiences with a personal body account. Such personal
confessions of 'what really happened' in the field from the point of view of the
researcher had began to appear in connection with many realist ethnographic
works. While these confessional tales (Bruner, 1993; Crick, 1995; Sparkes,
1995; Richardson, 1994; Van Maanen, 1988) elaborated on the accompanied
realist accounts, they invariably supported their results. But despite the focus
on the researcher's experience, the emphasis was always on the person's
role as an ethnographer, as an academic. However, I was uninterested in yet
another confessional tale of troubles that a researcher examining other
women's body image problems faced in the field. Rather, I wished to write
about my embodied experience as an exercising researcher. To capture such
an experience, I had to be evocative, I had to tell a story. I had certainly heard
of sociological narrative writing, but I had no idea how to attend my body
experience in a storied way. As a dedicated researcher I immersed myself
into the literature on new writing practices.
The Narrative of the Self
This literature was certainly not devoid of possibilities. For example, Dan
Rose (1990: 5) declared that 'the postmodern moment. . . calls for new forms
of ethnography, polyvocal texts, multigenre narratives, impressionistic tales,
cinematic reconstructions, lyrical sociology, and poetic anthropology'. Norman
Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (1994) advocated that problematic moments and
meanings in individual's lives should be collected in personal experience,
introspective, life story, observational, interactional or visual texts. Laurel
Richardson (2000) found autoethnography, fiction stories, poetry, drama,
performative texts, mixed genres, ethnographic fiction or plain writing stories
characterizing the new 'ethnographic' writing. While I supported the
philosophical rationale for this kind of research writing passionately, I was
unclear how to create any of these texts or how they would suit my purpose
of writing about my body. I did remember, however, how I had struggled to
write about my personal tourism experiences for an ethnography journal. The
editor, while kindly accepting my paper for publication, insisted on better
literary quality for my two-page 'travel diary' included in the paper. I had my
draft returned to me three times requesting more 'tension' for the 'story.'
'What the hell is "tension"'? I despaired and rearranged my words yet again. I
am convinced that the editor finally gave up but I was left thinking that writing
in a literary manner was more demanding than I first thought. With this
experience in mind, I decided to avoid entirely fictionalized accounts as I
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International Sports Studies, vol. 23, no. 1/2, 2001
imagined them the most challenging genre of narrative writing. Therefore, I
did not attempt 'ethnographic fiction' or 'writing stories' as my first work of
narrative writing. Instead of creating characters influenced by imaginary
events to illustrate my point, I was more interested in recording my own story.
While I did not mind bending some facts for the sake of a more enticing story,
my intended work was essentially 'autobiographical'. I looked into writing
genres that were based on the inclusion of the author's voice and my body
story started to take the shape of what Andrew Sparkes (1995) described as
a narrative of the self and Laurel Richardson (2000) as autoethnography.
Richardson (2000: 11) characterizes autoethnographies as 'highly
personalized, revealing texts in which authors tell stories about their own lived
experiences, relating the personal to the cultural'. These are essentially 'true
stories' about events that really happened to the writer. Their narrative power
depends on how well the author can stage her story to evoke the reader to
emotionally relive the event with the writer. 'In telling the story,' Richardson
(2000: 11) continues, 'the writer calls upon such fiction-writing techniques as
dramatic recall, strong imagery, fleshed-out characters, unusual phrasing,
puns, subtexts, allusion, the flashback, the flashforward, tone shifts,
synecdoche, dialogue, and interior monologue' to construct a 'plot.' Although I
was unaware what these techniques might entail, and Richardson did not
stop to explain, autoethnography/narrative of the self seemed the appropriate
form for my personal body story.
Through a narrative of the self I hoped to write about my lived body
experience in a vivid manner that would resonate with women who had
shared their experiences with me without any reciprocity. I grew, however,
increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of a self-narrative. My uneasiness
escalated during a research project I conducted on eating disorders. I came
across very revealing personal stories written by anorectics, some of whom
were researchers recovering from the illness. While I found their stories very
touching, and felt for the sufferers of anorexia, I was unsure what this
personal writing added to the knowledge of anorexia already filling the
research journals. I then grew ashamed about my previous passion to write
my own body story. If the personal accounts on anorexia, a serious, visible,
almost incurable illness, sounded like therapy for the recuperating anorectics
rather than valuable research, what would my much more commonplace tale
contribute to the research on women's body image? Was my enthusiasm for
a personal bodily confession a disguise for therapy? Should I write a diary
instead, or confess my problems to a therapist?
Partly, my discomfort derived from my notion that a narrative of self
would contain personal confessions. I was uneasy with the word 'confess.' In
my research on exercising women's body image problems, I had found Michel
Foucault's notion of disciplined control through docile bodies persuasive.
Foucault believes that telling the truth about oneself and to oneself is a
means to insure control and order in culture. Therefore, confession is used by
powerful societal institutions like justice, medicine and education as a means
to control, to normalize, individuals who try to transgress accepted societal
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Bodily Dialogues
boundaries. 'One confesses one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's
illnesses and troubles; one goes on telling, with the greatest precision,
whatever is most difficult to tell' says Foucault (1980: 59). Carol Spitzack
(1990) argues that confession characterizes particularly women's lives. While
ultimately a tool of domination, according to Spitzack, confession is framed
with promise of liberation and increased self-knowledge. At first, I concluded,
my body story might increase my self-knowledge and liberate me to conduct
more informed research on other people, but could telling what is most
difficult for me to tell, my body image problems, act as a normalizing practice?
A Personal Narrative of the Body
Concerned with discursive control, I abandoned my body story project, but
continued to experiment with ways of writing my self into research texts. I
wrote evocative accounts that addressed theoretical concerns regarding new
ethnographic writing; I experimented with poetry; I attempted an academic
presentation combining text with dance movement; and I created a dance
performance where I inserted academic text into my choreography. While all
of these works were about social issues surrounding the body, movement,
and physical activity, my own body experiences still remained unattended.
Nevertheless, my suppressed intention on writing a personal body story kept
resurfacing and I started to rethink my previous discomfort with that project.
Perhaps my uneasiness was only an excuse to avoid confronting a
deeply personal, but also culturally perplexing issue. To feel comfortable
about writing about my body, I obviously had to go beyond a confession. I
agreed with B. Morrison (1998: 11) who asserted that 'Confessionalism has to
know when to hold back . . . It takes art. Without art, confessionalism is
masturbation. Only with art does it become empathy'. Evidently, instead of
being engaged in a mere self-indulgent pleasure of confessing my problems,
my personal story had to resonate with the experiences of a larger audience.
Morrison recommended that art lifted confession above personal whining, and
my research writing definitely had insufficient literary quality. On the other
hand, was pure literary artistry sufficient criterion for a worthwhile
autoethnographic body story? As a social scientist, I believed women's
varied, but simultaneously strikingly similar, personal body experiences
stemmed from a cultural context. Obviously, then, my story had to depict the
context of my body struggle to resonate with other women's experiences. I
concluded that it was necessary, after all, to write about my body, but I
resolved to emphasize the cultural boundaries of my experience instead of
simply complaining about my terrible body troubles. This way, I confirmed, my
story would not only function as a personal body therapy, but also increase
our understanding of women's cultural condition in western society. As
creative ways of writing can effectively and sensitively expose the societal
construction of our experiences, I set to write my personal narrative of the
body.
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International Sports Studies, vol. 23, no. 1/2, 2001
I first began to jot down my bodily recollections chronologically. While
that was a very efficient way to record my experiences, it did not feel too
evocative, neither did it articulate the social nature of my body troubles.
Although a mere chronology proved uninteresting, I clearly needed to reflect
on the past to make sense of my present body experiences. As I was
determined to write about myself as a physically active researcher, a
university context, I resolved, would be the most appropriate location for my
story. But how would I open this story? How would I frame my experiences? I
suddenly remembered a recent guest lecture I gave on the female exercising
body for the course, Gender and Body. That, I decided, would create a
perfect context for my story. In the course of the story, the students' questions
about the women's ideal thin, toned and young body shape prompted a
number of my own recollections about my struggles with my body shape.
These recollections include a memory of myself as an aspiring, but
hopelessly plump dancer during my undergraduate years; my time as a lean
but muscular aerobics instructor obsessed with exercise; and my troublesome
relationship with my aging body. Collectively, they present a portrait of me, an
educated, feminist academic, attempting to understand her own contradictory
body experiences through/with/against/in social theory, as I am faced with the
never ending battle to resist the body ideal in western culture. My story ends
with my attempt to confront my body image troubles by engaging in exercise
forms like Tai Chi which de-emphasize the bodily reconstruction. But
regardless of this nisus for resistant practice, I am faced with my inability to
disrupt my own disciplinary gaze. Therefore, this story fails to offer a clear
solution against the ideal feminine body shape, thus emphasizing, with this
open ending, the postmodern cultural context of my life.
Conclusion
Although I still struggle to implement even the simplest evocative writing
techniques in my papers, I continue my experimentation because I believe in
the power of evocative writing to acknowledge the context of the writer's
experience as well as the context of the audience's reading. As Richardson
(2000: 11) assures, new writing practices 'evoke new questions about the self
and the subject; they remind us that our work is grounded, contextual, and
rhizomatic. They can evoke deeper parts of the self, heal wounds, enhance
the sense of self - or even alter one's sense of identity'.
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