from the author of ballast existenz who also vblogs for autistic liberation and disability rights as silentmiaow in youtube.
I am setting up a new research weblog just for the dissertation. Q-sputnik is very much a space set up as an experiment and I like this space to remain as such. I like it to be a writing space where I can contradict myself and change my mind about things as I read and do this and that. Also, the research process is clearly defined whereas my interests in random events and media are not.
[For example right now I am very much nterested in the 'white middle-class' concept-but I ll keep this for the next post]
So soon to announce the research blog.
I have identified the blogs I will be looking at, i have moved from mental health to illness/disability in general. I have listed these blogs under the ‘dissertation’ blogroll category and am now on my way to letting the authors know that I will be looking at their blogs as a researcher.
I haven’t prepared my outline yet which should be in in two weeks so a lot will change during this time.
Meanwhile, summer has settled in Brighton, naked people strech on the grass outside my window so I decided the view and sound were too upsetting for me and moved my desk to another room. While doing that I reflected on my study patterns and habits-I can’t be disturbed, I can’t listen to music while studying, i can’t really study in public spaces, noises can break my nerves completely- and I thought about definitions -where does pathology start and where does idiosyncracy end and where in this continuum is identity?
reading definitions of all kinds of conditions, from vaginitis to depression, from flu to arthritis can be like reading a horoscope: i can find a little bit of me in everything and tend to believe it. which is funny if you think of it as pleasure derived through identification.
I have been looking for sef-narrating feminist blogs from people who experience mental illness but haven’t been particularly lucky, at least in the uk. The latest venture is the Crazy Like Us? blog. It came out of nectarine’s Because I miss my sisters blog who initially posted to see if there would be any interest in a feminist mental health blog. She got a lot of responses but the women who felt happy to contribute in the blog don’t write about mental healt in their own blog. I was actually expecting quite an extensive self-exposure in personal blogs, personal accounts of how women handle their sickness in their everyday life, stories about medication and doctors but I either don’t know how to search or women are reluctant to share this kind of experience and write all sorts of other less personal stuff in their blogs. To be sure, i am referring to feminist only blogs. I have managed to trace diaries of women (for example The secret life of a manic depressive) who suffer from bipolar (manic/depression) disorder or other stuff but they don’t think themselves as feminists but don’t necessarily come out as a feminist in their blog.
This is a dead period, non-productive because it is non-communicative. I am talking about the dissertation planning period, the before. Ιt entails an extensive diving into different materials which makes me feel a bit lost and small, in knowledge and thus sense of self. I have not planned this post and, as always, will not edit it afterwards. It has however a subject which is actually the implications of creating an ‘about me‘ page. This is a personal problematic that has underlied my publishing since I created it and may be formulating (itself) as an academic question. I’ve been reading Liz Stanley’s ‘From self-made women to women’s made selves: audit selves, simulation and surveillance in the rise of public woman’ in Cosslett et al. (eds) ‘feminism and autobiography’ (2000).
Writing the ‘me’ page has actually taken me a longer time than other posts. I wrote and deleted. Unable to define my readership but assuming they are not steady (except for a few people whom I know in my off-line life), I made a profile that rather resembles a CV for a -surely alternative- job. I define myself there in terms of my education and academic interests, in terms of my NOW rather than my THEN, of locality and interests. I provide a web-camera snapshot I myself took but not at the time I was writing the resume. I also give contact details. Even though this is a public profile which I obviously approve, it contains a whole lot of personal information which I only feel comfortable of giving because of the assumptions I have already done about my readership.
