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'I didn't interview myself': The researcher as participant in narrative research
Maggie Kirkman
Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, Bundoora VIC
Abstract
Genesis of the Research Project: Narratives, Infertility, and Women's Lives
This research project (Kirkman 1997) had as its focus women's autobiographical accounts of infertility. My interest in the topic was at once personal and intellectual. Both strands informed my sense that women who have experienced infertility are poorly served by academic and popular writing on the subject.
A little personal history will be necessary in explanation and as part of the reflexive process: I failed to become pregnant in my twenties, and underwent a hysterectomy at thirty when I was a second-year undergraduate studying psychology. I had previously read the popular literature on infertility, often feeling affronted at the patronising attitude adopted by the authors. With access to a university library, I now began to read about infertility in the psychological, sociological, and medical literature. What I read caused me to reflect on my own experience, which in turn informed my interpretation of the literature. I became convinced of the inadequacy of the category 'infertile women', in which I failed to recognise myself.
Conventional research on infertility tells the stories sanctioned by disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and medicine. Personal stories, and with them, personal meanings, are lost to the goals of generalisation and prediction. Caroline Steedman argued that 'Personal interpretations of past time - the stories that people tell themselves in order to explain how they got to the place they currently inhabit - are often in deep and ambiguous conflict with the official interpretative devices of a culture' (Steedman 1987: 6). This does not invalidate the unofficial interpretations, Steedman suggests, but rather points to the need to study personal narratives and their contrasts with official versions, on the understanding that those which are officially accepted arise from more powerful sources.
When I came to conduct my own research on infertility, I was encouraged to search for unofficial interpretations as a result of both my personal engagement with the literature and my feminist commitments. Feminism directed me to this search in two conflicting ways. First, it led me away from the traditional treatment of research 'subjects' to a consideration of the ethical implications for individual people who were recruited for research. Later, when the story became public of how I became a mother because my sister gave birth to my daughter (through so-called 'gestational surrogacy': Kirkman 1999a; Kirkman & Kirkman 1988), the publicised condemnation of some radical feminists (for example, West 1988) astonished and distressed me. As a result, I pursued the feminist literature of the 1980s and early 1990s concerning assisted reproductive technology (ART) and (indirectly) infertile women. The radical feminist depiction of women who had tried ART was as alien to me as their counterparts in the traditional literature of the social sciences. I was led to reflect on what it meant to be a feminist; on why some feminists had been so cruel in their public statements about women using ART; and on how women like me could be both feminists and women who sought various solutions to infertility. My attitude to radical feminism, and my reflections on that attitude, influenced the way in which I approached the research.
In the light of my discomfort with the disciplinary and radical feminist constructions of the generalised infertile woman, it became very important to me that I did not distort or misuse the autobiographical narratives of other women. To this end, I wanted to allow the narrators to guide the way in which the events of their lives and their opinions were interpreted.
In terms of my role in the research, there was also a need to balance my desire not to be an invisible, apparently neutral, presence in the research with the equally important goal of not conducting research that was more about me than the other participants. My own involvement in the public narratives of infertility, as a woman interviewed by the news media in Australia (and occasionally internationally), added several further complex threads of reflexivity to the research.
I conducted my research in the context of narrative theory, which requires a brief introduction here because of its essential contribution to the way in which my participation was theorised.
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