Description
In this paper, I argue that IR needs to create more space for forms of writing that are less rigid than the conventional form of ‘scientific’ writing that prevails in the discipline. Feminist IR has already recognized the importance of narrative within IR research, but it has tended to focus on narratives, especially women’s narratives and experiences, as a form of primary data. I argue that we might also benefit from considering our own writing as a form of narrative, and take inspiration from work done by feminist and postcolonial IR scholars regarding the politics of our own writing form. The types of narratives we craft affect what we can say and think. The disembodied perspective of most conventional IR writing, what some call ‘fictive distancing’, pretends to be ‘objective’, yet mostly succeeds in hiding its own biases and in alienating both its readers and writers. One possible narrative method that might help work against the issues of standard, “boring” IR texts is to include the self in one’s writing. This is not an automatic solution but one possible avenue that is worth exploring. While such writing is sometimes criticized as being “self-indulgent,” it is not so when narrative that includes the self attempts to go beyond the self, to counter alienation and connect to the reader, to open up new insights, and to make audible something different. A more flexible form of writing is especially important when one tries to write about trauma – an important topic for IR, and especially feminist IR, even if this topic is not always labeled as “trauma” – as traumatic experiences makes one’s relationship to language and memory complicated, and require new linguistic forms in order to be narrativized and processed. A more open form of writing might therefore allow for a more complex and nuanced understanding of trauma and its effects within IR scholarship.
