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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: April 26, 2004
Latest Update: April 26, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Feminist Horizontal Style

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, April 2004.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay reviews a chapter in Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, edited by Dale M. Bauer and S. Jaret McKinstry. State University of New York. 1991. ISBN: 0-7914-0770-5 (pbk): "Style and Power," by Josephine Donahue.

Donahue recognizes that Mikhail Bakhtin was relatively untouched by the issue of women's literature and women as writers. He largely ignored them. But he was concerned intensely with thehegemonic control of the society (Russian) in which he lived. Much of his work revolved around his critique of the novel as a "locus of a counterhegemonic resistance to the centralized authority of official disciplines." Bakhtin saw dialogue as a tool with which the silenced could answer.

Just as today we are struggling with the visual as a tool to enable anserability for those who have been silenced, Bakhtin saw the novel as such a tool for those who were learned, but were nonetheless silenced by the regime under which they lived. It is this political perspective of using alternative means to enhance the skills needed for governance that is addressed in Photo Elicitation techniques.

In discussing some feminist writers, Donahue notes:

" . . . As in folk art, events, people, and landscape all exist on the same unsubordinated plane. Again, Fiennes's [Celia Fiennes, JourneysBackup] paratactic, non-judgmental structure may derive from her lack of education, her lack of perspectives through wfhich to judge. Or it may reflect the worldview of an oppressed group that has little knowledge of the causes of events. As Paul Fisher suggests in his study of the Amnerican sentimentalist novel, for the oppressed there are few temporal or cusal explanations for events; they just seem to happen suddenly. (fn. omitted) The only perceivable order is that they happen one thing after another without subordinating, explanatory conjunctions." (Bauer and Mckinstry, at p. 88-89.)

What I am going to suggest is that parataxis, seeing things as happening one after the other, in no particular order, and not necessarily as "caused" by precedent events is a perfectly normal way to experience and to interpret the world. Children, women, oppressed peoples, may know the male hypotactic reasonable explanations for their experiences, but they also know that the male hypotactic interpretations have almost always been wrong at some point and in need of constant correction as we learn more about our world. I should be more comfortable if we were told that there were paratactic (unsubordinated, on one plane) perspectives AND hypotactic (hierarchical and causal) perspectives, AND that these two kinds of perspective were pretty much unsubordinated on a plane with one another.

More on this later. But don't forget to think about what this means for social and criminal justice!!!

"Parataxis derives from the Greek paratassein, 'to place side by side,' while hypotaxis stems from hypotassein, 'to arrange under' . . . . Clearly paratxis is closer to the real world, if experienced relatively naively, without a pre-existing organizational schema; it reflects the associative, random connections of consciousness in immediate response to its environment, where hyptaxis distances the thinker or writer from material reality." (Bauer and Mckinstry, at p. 87-88.)

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