Читать книгу Contradicting Maternity - Carol Long - Страница 9

Contradicting Maternity can be read in different ways, and the book has different purposes. One purpose is to present a theoretical understanding, based on interview data, of motherhood in the context of HIV. This aspect of the book will appeal to academic readers. The second purpose of the book, which will appeal to both academic and non-academic readers, is to explore the stories of real mothers, aiming to preserve the complexity, sophistication, conflicts and joys expressed by them. The reader will therefore notice that there are two different styles in the book, which reflect these different nuances. Certain chapters foreground the theoretical voice, while others foreground the voices of the mothers themselves, although all the chapters are interested in both foregrounding and theorising maternal experience. In the chapters more centrally concerned with the mothers themselves, theoretical concerns are deliberately implicit so as not to detract from the importance of the mothers’ voices.

There are also different perspectives in this book: those of the mothers and my own. Because I am writing the book, the mothers’ voices are necessarily filtered through my own positioning as a white women, an academic and a clinical psychologist, as well as through the voices of the theories upon which I draw. My presentation of motherhood in the context of HIV is interpretive, although it is grounded heavily in the actual words of the mothers I interviewed. I experienced an ongoing debate about how much of myself to put in the book. For example, there were points in interviews where my own responses to the stories I was hearing were striking: points at which I was unable to hear something, or found myself uncharacteristically sympathetic or annoyed, sometimes wanting to adopt mothers or their babies, sometimes wishing I were somewhere else. I sometimes wondered why it might be, for example, that, at one point in an interview with a particular woman, I could not think of a single question to ask, even though this had not occurred before, or where I identified or disidentified with interviewees. I found it useful to note my internal responses during the process of writing in relation to the meanings I was writing about (e.g. the points in analysis where I felt stuck, or where I felt that meaning was proliferating out of control, or where I dreaded writing about a particular issue). Another relationship useful to reflect upon while writing concerned aesthetics. I often had to wonder whether my desire for beautiful words was working towards my desire to convey the sophistication and complexity of interview material or whether it was working to defend myself against some of the difficulty and ugliness of HIV-positive motherhood.

My initial intention was to write these experiences fully into the analysis. However, I was concerned about the extent to which these reflections would rewrite interview material in ways that distanced the experiences I was trying to convey. While it is important to state one’s position, jokes about post-modern research (where it is all about the researcher) prompt caution about the practice of reflexivity. It could be argued that an overemphasis on the position of the researcher runs the risk of both reifying difference and detracting from the voices of interviewees. It is important to acknowledge that analysis is informed by my own subjectivity, but the inclusion of particular examples does not necessarily help to understand maternal experience and potentially complicates interpretation rather than making it more transparent. I have therefore limited reflections on my own position in the book, and have aimed to practise reflexivity by inserting my subjectivity into my writing, i.e. in a less descriptive and more process-oriented manner. I have used relationships with a trained psychoanalyst, who supervised the project, and with colleagues (including fellow graduate students, academics and clinical psychologists) to explore the analysis with the help of other subjectivities. This has provided a countercheck regarding the coherence of interpretation and the verity of its links to the data (Elliott, Fischer & Rennie, 1999; Taylor, 2001). Because the study has an unusually large sample size for qualitative research, it has also been easier to use repetitions in the data in order to reflect upon my interpretations.

Readers will also encounter the book through their own subjectivity and may read the accounts of mothers in different ways to the ones presented in this book. Each reader will find his/her own way to read the book, and I have deliberately avoided presenting a monolithic account. As one of the anonymous reviewers for the book favourably noted, Contradicting Maternity ‘insists on complicating matters, rather than simplifying them. As such, it perhaps raises more questions than it answers’. Such questions invite possibilities for dialogue and for avoiding constricted understandings of motherhood in the context of HIV.