Last year, I had a wonderful conversation with Georgina Green who runs Calliope’s Writers. We discussed the process of writing MILK, finding my voice after hiding for so long within the structures of academic writing, how ADHD impacts my work, and much more besides.
At one point we were discussing the hybrid nature of MILK, which blends memoir with history, and how the former is often omitted from academic writing or ‘proper’ history writing. The kinds of knowledge favoured by the academy were traditionally almost always produced by white, male researchers who laboured under the illusion that their position was dominant, paramount, but also objective. There was no need for self-reflexivity or questioning how their research intersected with their wider lives. Students are still wary of including self-driven perspectives or even the use of the first-person in their writing.
There have been great leaps towards acknowledging the researcher’s positionality and placing value on research-methods that combine self-analysis and biography. Still, when writing MILK I was often haunted by the spectre of Proper Intellectual Work. As Sarah Menkedick writes, ‘there has long been an assumed dichotomy between research-driven and personal writing, with the former understood to be rigorous and intellectual and male and the latter frivolous and easy and female’.
In my conversation with Georgina we discussed this spectre that still finds us drawing our own anxious distinctions between academic writing and ‘other’ writing. What I’m really interested in, I blurted out, is the possibility of auto-theory, the kind of thinking/writing that blends the personal with theory and
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