Knotting it together, cultural production across difference

grantor: University of TorontoThis thesis draws its inspiration from my history as a feminist cultural worker who has been engaged in collaborative ventures in the arts. In that work and in this thesis, I raise questions about collaboration and difference as spheres of struggle. I want to trouble notions of, and desires for, harmony as the goal and outcome of collaboration across difference. I argue for a consideration of how cultural production across difference is negotiated through contradictory, uncertain, and disputatious social relations. Difference is investigated as a matter of gendered and racialized discursive practices which shape how relations are sustained and constrained and which organize advantages and disadvantages for differently positioned subjects. I foreground the salience of race for understanding how difference shapes the possibilities, contestations, and unassimilabilities of collaborative cultural production. I also propose that collaboration across difference may be understood through practices of friendship which may make the risks and tensions of negotiating difference possible and worthwhile while simultaneously underlining fragile and fractious boundaries and the potentiality for ruptured relations. This investigation is explored through a feminist poststructuralist analysis of in-depth individual and group interviews with three women of one collaboration focussing on film production and with two women of another collaboration focussing on theatre production. The participants in this study produce critical, publicly recognized cultural work concerned with issues of representation. In their interview narratives, the women examine the possibilities, pleasures, boundaries, and limits of their collaborative relations. With the recognition that my research becomes an instance of collaboration across difference, I work with the complications of the practice of doing research. I surface the entanglements of the social relations of the research process, including my relational investments in the research participants. I draw from feminist and educational methodological theorizations to examine and embed ethical issues of responsibility in qualitative research and to problematize the social and power relations which accompany the knowledge-making practices of the research. The writing is produced as an engagement with the ethical and political dilemmas of representational and analytical practices and with the implications of developing narrative strategies for composing a research text.Ph.D