Mapping Feminist Thought Using Computational Text Analysis

hw1

leah dion

hemmings

text-as-data

Introduction to text-as-data research project.

Author

Leah Dion

Published

October 23, 2022

Introduction

In her book Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings takes to the task of disentangling familiar and conflicting stories told of feminist theory’s past contributors and their work. Her goal in this retelling is to explore the ways the stories can undermine logical arguments in essentializing ways similar to those the arguments claim to be against. She narrows this down to three common overarching narratives found in popular feminist theory journals – progress, loss, and return.

Hemmings identifies how each arch contains contradictory logic to the others, yet various factions of feminists and feminisms share differing sentiments in reference to the same time periods. Collectively, these stories dislocate writers, their work, and their thinking from the conversations they are engaged with at the time of their publications. The text itself thus takes a back seat to the stories, which are perpetuated and further naturalized within the gloss of feminist journal articles.

Feelings of progress, according to Hemmings, mark present day thought and knowledge as evolved beyond the more limited thinking of earlier times. For example, the 1970s are commonly seen as the site of a lesbian separatist movement centered around an essentialized definition of what is a woman. One shared perspective from 2022 is to think “look how far we’ve come from our ill-begotten past”.

Loss flips the feeling of progress and instead focuses on a longing for how things used to be; a suggestion that prior times had it right and we’ve diverged from our mission. Thinking again to the 1970s, another shared feminist perspective from 2022 is a sadness for the loss of a stable category of woman to share as a unifying identity.

A return narrative extends the idea of loss by adding a desire to reclaim the present and return to the good old days. Good for whom? That very often lies in the eyes of the storyteller. This view has also been weaponized by a small fragment of purported feminists aligning against gender troubled others typically seen as responsible for the relative deconstruction of the category of gender. Often referred to as trans exclusionary radical feminists, these groups are essentially determined to reestablish the label of woman as exclusive to those assigned female at birth.

Individually, these shared ideologies risk misinterpreting texts from prior decades by focusing primarily on the language of modernity rather than the persistence of the underlying institutional frameworks. Collectively, they reveal an apparent thirst for a tidy truth that neatly aligns with a unifying, shared experience in relation to prior time periods. One that Hemmings believes paradoxically unravels the reflexive praxis offered by feminist theory in the first place.

Feminist genealogy project

The main goal for my project is to conduct a comparative intertexutal exploratory analysis on a handful of academic journals invested in publishing feminist theory. I will use Clare Hemmings’ analysis to guide my own, highlighting in particular her use of amenability and citation tactics to look for trends in three of the six journals used by Hemmings herself:

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, (1975 - 2016)
Feminist Review, and (1975 - 2022)
Feminist Theory. (2000 - 2022)

It seems the entire published archive of each of these journals in the time periods above is available on JSTOR’s Constellate project here. In my next post I’ll download the relevant archives and attempt to read them into R Studio to see how much useful information they contain.

References

Hemmings, C. (2011). Why stories matter : the political grammar of feminist theory. Duke University Press.

--- title: "Mapping Feminist Thought Using Computational Text Analysis" author: "Leah Dion" description: "Introduction to text-as-data research project." date: "10/23/2022" format: html: toc: true code-fold: true code-copy: true code-tools: true categories: - hw1 - leah dion - hemmings - text-as-data --- ```{r include = FALSE} #| label: setup #| warning: false knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE) ``` ### Introduction In her book *Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory,* Clare Hemmings takes to the task of disentangling familiar and conflicting stories told of feminist theory's past contributors and their work. Her goal in this retelling is to explore the ways the stories can undermine logical arguments in essentializing ways similar to those the arguments claim to be against. She narrows this down to three common overarching narratives found in popular feminist theory journals -- progress, loss, and return. Hemmings identifies how each arch contains contradictory logic to the others, yet various factions of feminists and feminisms share differing sentiments in reference to *the same time periods*. Collectively, these stories dislocate writers, their work, and their thinking from the conversations they are engaged with at the time of their publications. The text itself thus takes a back seat to the stories, which are perpetuated and further naturalized within the gloss of feminist journal articles. Feelings of progress, according to Hemmings, mark present day thought and knowledge as evolved beyond the more limited thinking of earlier times. For example, the 1970s are commonly seen as the site of a lesbian separatist movement centered around an essentialized definition of what is a woman. One shared perspective from 2022 is to think "look how far we've come from our ill-begotten past". Loss flips the feeling of progress and instead focuses on a longing for how things used to be; a suggestion that prior times had it right and we've diverged from our mission. Thinking again to the 1970s, another shared feminist perspective from 2022 is a sadness for the loss of a stable category of woman to share as a unifying identity. A return narrative extends the idea of loss by adding a desire to reclaim the present and return to the good old days. Good for whom? That very often lies in the eyes of the storyteller. This view has also been weaponized by a small fragment of purported feminists aligning against gender troubled others typically seen as responsible for the relative deconstruction of the category of gender. Often referred to as trans exclusionary radical feminists, these groups are essentially determined to reestablish the label of woman as exclusive to those assigned female at birth. Individually, these shared ideologies risk misinterpreting texts from prior decades by focusing primarily on the language of modernity rather than the persistence of the underlying institutional frameworks. Collectively, they reveal an apparent thirst for a tidy truth that neatly aligns with a unifying, shared experience in relation to prior time periods. One that Hemmings believes paradoxically unravels the reflexive praxis offered by feminist theory in the first place. ### Feminist genealogy project The main goal for my project is to conduct a comparative intertexutal exploratory analysis on a handful of academic journals invested in publishing feminist theory. I will use Clare Hemmings' analysis to guide my own, highlighting in particular her use of amenability and citation tactics to look for trends in three of the six journals used by Hemmings herself: - *Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,* (1975 - 2016) - *Feminist Review*, and (1975 - 2022) - *Feminist Theory.* (2000 - 2022) It seems the entire published archive of each of these journals in the time periods above is available on JSTOR's Constellate project [here](https://about.jstor.org/whats-in-jstor/text-mining-support/). In my next post I'll download the relevant archives and attempt to read them into R Studio to see how much useful information they contain. ### References Hemmings, C. (2011). *Why stories matter : the political grammar of feminist theory*. Duke University Press.