Our stories

Lois Presser concludes “Negotiating Power and Narrative in Research: Implications for Feminist Methodology” with; “The researcher’s goal is not to emancipate the authentic story of the narrator– none exists– but rather to expose as much as she can of the relations that influence the construction of the story that is told.”(p2087)

While the paper clarified reflexivity I am going to continue with my theme of trying to understand the power moral imperatives and religious beliefs and identity have on us. The men Presser presents in the paper, Kevin and Dwight, saw themselves like most prominent male figures in religious myths;  “the protagonist was cast as a hero in his own life battling adversaries in an ongoing struggle.” (p2075)
    Presser, on the other hand, providing a “research -subject collaboration in gender accomplishment”(p2073) achieves “femininity by conveying empathy for a small animal.”(p2080)
     But if the men’s inner myths, as Kevin states, include heros battling “corrupt authority” (just like Marduk, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Husayn Ibn Ali, Arjuna) what is Presser’s feminine story?

Another excerpt from the NYTimes:
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente  is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.
    In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.
The rest at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=2&ref=homepage&src=me