Patti Lather

I retrieved this great read today after coming across its reference in a methods book. I wanted to see what a feminist interview analysis had the potential to become. I instantly fell into deep admiration for the researchers, the women, and the pages that captured the story of U.S. women living with HIV/AIDS in the early 1990s.

The women...the researched, in academic terms (a term deliberately meant to sound and feel extraordinarily impersonal)...are co-producers of the book. The result is unique and topples the typical researcher/researched division and hierarchy, leaving in its place a literal literary tapestry. It is a rich, touching, evocative, textured narrative whereby each page weaves sectioned segments of the overall story. The top portion of the page leaves the interviews of the women intact, in the womens' own words, categorized into major chapter themes then incorporating sub-themes, as needed. The authors then use auto biography and qualitative analysis in ticker form (running along the bottom of the page) to provide explanation for their choice of method and structure, and to inform the reader of relevant background information to the dialogue taking place above. This prevents the authors from overburdening, loosening, or losing the womens' voices, thus obscuring what is important to the study, while mirroring the vulnerability that the women bring forward. The page is then again interrupted throughout with text boxes that provide additional richness to the dialogues taking place. It is a structure that others too entrenched in notions of "proper" may vilify. In the end, it is a magnificent breath of fresh poststructuralist, postmodernist air that can only enliven the means by which we accomplish academic discourse.

As for the women themselves, living in the midst of a rising epidemic in the early 1990s with nothing but experimental medication that did little to prevent the acceleration from HIV to AIDS, and living with extreme public fear that lead to extreme discrimination and isolation, I wish to say, "Well done!" Knowing that HIV/AIDS was primarily considered a "gay man's disease" during this time, it remains a sad commentary that the question that always must be asked within any situation is, "Where are the women?" At least within these pages, the women are here and I have heard them. I remain hopeful that medicines advanced enough to keep most of the women with us for a very long time. I cried over those who were lost to us before the book was published. I am honored to have had the privilege of knowing a little about them all.… (meer)

I had heard Lather speak at a conference and decided that Getting Smart would be a good place to start getting better acquainted with postmodernism. I'd found too much of the academic writing associated with postmodern theory to be dense and stylized. I kept wanting to grab the writer and ask, "What is it you're trying to SAY?"

While Getting Smart isn't exactly easy reading, it is more accessible that a lot of "postie" material. Lather positions herself theoretically as a poststructuralist/feminist/ neoMarxist and explains how that all works. I'd spent too much time with critical theory to be quite ready to give up emancipatory missions in education and was happy to find critical theory doesn't hold a monopoly on them. Oh, and my advisor's adviser Michael Apple of the University of Wisconsin wrote the books introduction.

I'm having a heavy duty writing semester here which is likely to be reflected in My Books. I'll turn back into my novel-guzzling self in May with some not-serious-at-all beach reading....… (meer)