Desirable Difficulties: Toward a Critical Postmodern Arts-Based Practice

Prior scholarship on collaborative writing projects by women in the academy acknowledges sustained attempts of intraracial and interracial collaboration/divides. Interracial collaborative scholarship, while noble in effort, may result in unacknowledged tensions surrounding racial identity politics. In these collaborative environments the problematics of race cannot be denied, with Black women often drawing upon their racialized identities, while White women emphasize their gendered identities. An unawareness and/or invisibility of Whiteness as a racial construct of privilege further problematizes feminist postmodern discourse. This polyvocal text focuses on responding to and working within the tensions of identity politics encountered in interracial scholarship among four women academics. What follows is an attempt at describing an arts-based project, emerging from concentrated efforts to develop an approach to collaborative scholarship aimed at identifying and inhabiting the divides rather than only navigating around, over or under them

Graded structure in sexual definitions: categorizations of having “had sex” and virginity loss among homosexual and heterosexual men and women

Definitions of sexual behavior display a robust hierarchy of agreement regarding whether or not acts should be classed as, for example, sex or virginity loss. The current research offers a theoretical explanation for this hierarchy, proposing that sexual definitions display graded categorical structure, arising from goodness of membership judgments. Moderation of this graded structure is also predicted, with the focus here on how sexual orientation identity affects sexual definitions. A total of 300 18- to 30-year-old participants completed an online survey, rating 18 behaviors for how far each constitutes having “had sex” and virginity loss. Participants fell into one of four groups: heterosexual male or female, gay male or lesbian. The predicted ratings hierarchy emerged, in which bidirectional genital acts were rated significantly higher than unidirectional or nonpenetrative contact, which was in turn rated significantly higher than acts involving no genital contact. Moderation of graded structure was also in line with predictions. Compared to the other groups, the lesbian group significantly upgraded ratings of genital contact that was either unidirectional or nonpenetrative. There was also evidence of upgrading by the gay male sample of anal intercourse ratings. These effects are theorized to reflect group-level variation in experience, contextual perspective, and identity-management. The implications of the findings in relation to previous research are discussed. It is suggested that a graded structure approach can greatly benefit future research into sexual definitions, by permitting variable definitions to be predicted and explained, rather than merely identified

Tumbling from Embodiment to Enfleshment: Art as Intervention in Collective Autoethnography

We, the four authors, found ourselves swept into the tenure process, tumbling as we inquired into what this transition meant to each of us and to all of us. Through a methodological grounding in collective autoethnography – and expanded by art intervention, we came together in our inquiry to explore key experiences as new professors, asking how we individually, collectively, and aesthetically move(d) through our transitions into tenure track assistant professorship. We found it was through the embodied acts of listening, attuning, and responding with/in our flesh as women and as researchers that we felt the friction of Tenure as another body in our collective. Tenure provoked our poems, tears, arguments, victories, aches, paintings, tenderness, stitches through fabric, movements, and identities. This article serves as a methodological unpacking of our arts-based research process that used Tumblr, individual and collective artmaking, and visits to each other’s homes. While our collective work seeks new potentialities of understanding our tumbling selves as women, artists, and researchers new to the academy, we also see this work as opening our stories to the world in order to create new possibilities beyond our project

Methodology in the Afterglow

Abstract My dissertation study seeks to understand how artist-teacher renewal may be nurtured through aesthetic experiential play in a Masters of Art Education degree program, and beyond, as my former students/participants and myself experience finding ourselves in its afterglow. Aesthetic experiential play could be described as a playful, curious, questioning, artful engagement with the world; an engagement that sparks an aesthetic swell, which moves us in surprising, unanticipated ways from play to its afterglow. In this sense, afterglow may be the unfolding answer to an open question, and the open question may be a place to pla