#diss tag

[thequeensthroat]

all academic writing is either addison rae reveals the meaning (see fig. 1) or a genre I call the "troubling industrial complex" where you identify something that engages hegemonic power in a way that is ambiguous and incoherent and instead of arriving at a coherent reading of it via the work of your thinking and writing (you know like the job that academic writing is supposed to do) you make a really emphatic but essentially contentless claim that it "troubles" that power structure. and often you start reading academic writing and you're like is this addison rae reveals the meaning or is it troubling industrial complex and they're like I don't understand and you pull out a diagram explaining what is addison rae reveals the meaning and what is troubling industrial complex and they laugh and say "it's good academic writing sir" so you read it and it's troubling industrial complex.

fig 1.

[gradling]

Trying to write a dissertation and encountering subfields you've never even thought about before

[eatpraydig]

notes from a diss writing workshop

*As promised, here are some notes/main takeaways i got from the dissertation writing workshop that i attended at my university yesterday! if you have any questions about any of it, i can do my best to answer - i’ve already been through the prospectus-writing process so i’m more personally familiar with that process*

~

why is it (i.e. graduate level argumentation) so hard???

making sure that you’re engaging with previous scholarship; carving out a space for yourself within pre-existing scholarship

committee is pulling you in different directions

trying to organize large amounts of information in a coherent and effective way

the dissertation as argument: types

exploratory arguments: doesn’t bother making pronounced claims, only suggesting possibilities; the “maybe, i don’t know” approach; this is generally what most people do at the beginning of the process of writing the dissertation or at the beginning of their graduate career; it is still a generative approach even if it doesn’t “pan out” (these are usually your seminar papers - because they are so exploratory (i.e. a process of familiarization), we often write them and then forget about them)

additive arguments: takes a corpus or method (or combination of the two) and pushes it further; what’s being generated is a new focal object or a deeper interpretation of a new focal object; this is what the majority of graduate-level writing is; if it doesn’t pan out it’s because something has been misapplied

elaborative arguments: modifying the thing you’re applying by adding not new material, but a new critical apparatus; bringing things together that were previously unrelated; main advantage is that if it works, you’re generating a novel approach and leaving behind a model that can be used by others (can be your conference papers - in writing such a paper, you have to bring something other than your interest to the table; think: in what way might this be interesting to someone other than me?)

corrective arguments: you think someone has done something wrong and you have identified the problem; you need to convince people why it’s wrong and need to provide a solution; high risk (you better be right), high reward (attention-getting) (also often conference papers; can also be journal articles - be aware that writing for a journal is a different animal because the lack of face-to-face interaction means that everything relies on the writing itself)

transformative arguments: transforming a topic so that no one can think about it in the same way ever again; if you can do this then “you’ve won the game of scholarship”

main takeaways:

most students are uncomfortable with elaborative arguments because we’re too focused on content, on telling the reader what we know about a specific topic - we need to take a step back and think about whether you’ve created something that someone can apply to something else entirely (usually you have, but can’t readily identify it)

don’t resist the possibility that you are capable of producing transformative arguments! there’s no guarantee that it will happen, but it also isn’t unlikely to happen; try considering what your conclusions might mean more broadly for your field of study

literature reviews + prospectus

function of a lit review = providing background and summarizing previous literature; often narrativized and related to your argument

people often reproduce in narrative form their own reading process, which seems intuitively sensible, but almost never works to your advantage argumentatively; if you do this, your narrative will ultimately appear convoluted and hard to follow

optimal form of a lit review: make a map for your reader so they don’t get lost; think about where you want to position your reader by the end of the lit review, and think about the path you would have taken to get to that point; think about where your reader would have to begin in order to get where you want them to go

warning: committees are most anxious about a sense of fear - if they feel like you don’t know what you’re doing or where you’re going with your argument, they will intervene and try to help by filling that vacuum with their own expertise which will lead to them “pulling you in different directions”

the lit review is the most underutilized tool for showing your committee that you’re in control of your material; by doing all of the argumentative work in the lit review, you ease pressure off of the prospectus, which should focus on justifying why your work is worth doing

knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing the way that you’re doing it = argumentative authority

dissertation writing tips (aka how to juggle a ton of information)

decide which chapter(s) need to serve an additive function, rather than thinking that the chapter should serve as a representative, microcosmic version of the entire argumentative superstructure; chapter only plays a role in the overall argument

how to make your novel data do more work for you - either you can use scaffolding method, which provides structure to guide the reader where you want them to go - OR - you can simply ask the reader a question and answer it for them; if you can’t formulate and answer a question, how can you expect a reader to do it?

boil your work down into a set of questions rather than a set of claims; we as graduate students are driven by questions but we rarely verbalize them!

if you have all the pieces but don’t know what the overall takeaway of your work is yet - make a list of exclusions, or things that you could do with your data/ argument, but that you don’t want to do - what you’re actually trying to achieve may snap into focus as a result of this exercise

[bellumcatilina]

My dissertation is officially DONE! I may look excited but I have never been more stressed about an assignment in my life!

(Yes I am rewarding myself for my year of Cicero research by reading about Cicero and that’s okay)

[cairnon-studies]

3.2.20

Sent off my first draft of my second chapter today! I don’t have class until Friday so I’m spending the week catching up because I’m already so so behind (:

🎵 Losers - Chosen Jacobs

[jenkinsknope]

Please appreciate my study aesthetic: folder balanced on pile of books and empty grape carton, Haim poster (2/3 of them are eyeballing me right now), bottle of rose, orange chilling between my pencil case and hard drive, giftbag full of random things next to notebooks, assorted bits incl: teaspoon, 20p coin, stick from eaten magnum and my Tesco clubcard

[thequeensthroat]

I'm reading and enjoying your post about the troubling industrial complex right now; I couldn't afford to go to college so I don't come across enough academic writing to have noticed this trend. But that excerpt about boy performers' squeaky voices "challenging" gender norms was bizarre. Surely we can take for granted that everyone living in a strictly gendered society is aware on some level that immutable gender dichotomies are an enforced fiction, and so things that seem to flout them like squeaky-voiced boys being acceptable onstage protagonists/lovers are still subsumed into the overarching narrative and allowed to pass without comment. What was her point?

ok so you've touched on what was for a long time a very sticky subject for the field of early modern dramatic literature, which is, basically, the question of how "convincing" the performances of boy actresses were/were supposed to be/etc: in other words, did the early moderns actually take boys for women? my answer got way too long and free-associative so i'm gonna try to do a cut thing.

first off, it's helpful to establish what we mean when we say boys. "how old were the boys" is another question that people don't really ask as much as they used to in this field, in part because the question has now been fairly definitively answered. the boys were apprentice aged, aka between roughly 13 and roughly 22. so when we say the women were played by "boys" we aren't evoking the kind of demographic age-and-gender category that we associate with that word today; we're basically talking about a category that exists to manage apprentice labor. a 21 year old was still a boy if he was not yet freed from his apprenticeship. this means that boys played women well into ages that we now think of as basically post-puberty, and there is evidence that suggests that boys' careers with the playing companies were kind of scaffolded by the repertory system to train them up as they god older. So smaller female roles were probably played by more like 13 year olds, and more difficult/complex leading lady roles were probably being played by apprentices in their early 20s, who in their offstage lives were probably not entirely the gamine androgyne bishies the plays often present them as.

that's a bit of a digression because it's like one half of my dissertation topic and I like to talk about it. but all of this is to say that the kinds of assumptions and anxieties that get voiced about the performance and maintenance of gender on the early modern stage are often deceptively complicated to track and map because it's all being inflected by extremely pre-modern structures of labor, class, proto-racial constructions, etc.

so ok back to your question about whether people didn't all just politely agree that that's how gender works onstage, which is a great question. I think the answer probably varied for different people. there are definitely historical records of theater goers in roughly this period complaining that a boy actor's voice was insufficient or immersion-breaking for his female role. but then there's also all these amazing moments in early modern plays where a female character, played by a boy actor, will basically take her top off, like actively courting the immersion-breaking moment. there's this peter stallybrass essay about this which I really love even though it's like really out of vogue to love this essay rn. but yeah stallybrass argues that basically out of this situation where everyone knows people will rock with a certain level of dissonance between what the play is claiming to show them and what they actually see emerges basically a fetishization of pushing that dissonance as far as possible. which leads to stuff like the mole on Imogen's breast in Cymbeline, where it's like we're invited to experience the breast as described by the play as potentially quite different from the breast we are seeing with our eyes.

and then there's also the really specific level of awareness that gender dichotomies are an enforced fiction you see in the writing of antitheatricalists--puritans who were campaigning hard to get the theaters shut down, in part because they truly did believe that parading these boys around as women was making everyone gay. in the antitheatricalists, we see that the people who are the most invested in claiming an immutable reality of gender are in fact often articulating just how socially inscribed gender is: we wouldn't need to ban theater if gender was actually real and immutable. if that was the case, dress up wouldn't do anything at all, so no worries! the antitheatricalists are not really "aware" that gender is an enforced fiction, per se, although they are accidentally demonstrating that fact constantly. and I think this goes to show that there are also many people in the audience who are rejecting the basic premise that gender norms are socially inscribed, like, so hard that they're writing a million pamphlets about it.

anyways iirc bloom's point (and I have a lot of issues with this book, but she's done other stuff that I like a lot and is also a very nice lady so I don't wanna rag on her too hard) is less that the squeaky voices challenge the gender norms that women's voices are high and men's voices are low and more that the squeaky voices challenge the gender norm that men have mastery over their own voices and bodies. and it gets at a lot of stuff that I only half remember about the status of voice in this period, which was also pretty idiosyncratic. in part due to the fucking obsession in this period with performances of rhetoric. but I think the question you're asking here--like, to what extent is the boy actress's performance accepted as conventional and what aspects of these performances can be kind of comfortably re-inscribed by the audience's collectively held gender norms--is way more interesting anyway. and in fact this is a question that I think the field is really wrestling with finding new way to ask right now. because the established way for thinking about "how convincing were the boys as actresses?" has for so long been this very cis and normative framework of "transvestism," with a real fixation on like ~the body beneath~ etc (this is why many people don't like that stallybrass essay anymore, incidentally). so people in the emerging field of early modern trans studies are looking for new ways of understanding the relationship between socially constructed gender norms and boys who played women onstage.

thank you for asking this awesome question which I answered really badly and at length and without much reference to bloom at all. I love to talk about this stuff yay

[thequeensthroat]

do you dare me to read this