Reflexive voicing: a communicative approach to intersectional writing

Methodological dilemmas in intersectional inquiry

One difficulty around intersectional methods lies in its methodologists’ commitments to retain the political traction of single categories like race or gender while also avoiding the perils of casting them as distinct. McCall (2005) names these approaches intercategorical complexity and anticategorical complexity, respectively. In intercategorical complexity, researchers create an account of reality and strategically ‘adopt existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups’ (2005: 1773). In anticategorical complexity a researcher ‘deconstructs analytical categories’ (2005: 1773) and problematizes identity. Given intersectionality’s political aims, scholars often encounter difficulty when attempting to reconcile these two methodological possibilities. Sokoloff and Pratt (2005), for instance, aim to incorporate varied voices in their discussion of intimate partner violence. Yet they do not want to render the voices so diverse that scholars can no longer use categories of difference at all. Indeed some scholars are concerned that intersectionality washes out gender’s critical purchase, as Berger and Guidroz (2009) detail in their discussion of backlash against intersectionality. In order to both disrupt and retain the viability of categories such as race and gender, several prominent intersectional scholars advocate to balance these two commitments. Crenshaw (1991), for example, argues that intersectionality should not become purely anti-essentialist but instead focus on coalitions. In sum, intersectionality struggles to deploy categories of difference in ways that affirm the reality of people living at varied intersections while not reifying the meanings of those intersections.

This difficulty around how to retain and deconstruct categories such as race and gender is a persistent feature of intersectionality. Phoenix and Pattynama (2006: 189) argue that intersectional scholars engage ‘the difficult balancing act of simultaneously foregrounding specificity and politics’. This struggle is not merely contemporary. Crenshaw (2011) notes that, from the beginning of intersectional scholarship, women of color ‘insisted that the “constructedness” of race did not defeat or render incoherent intellectual projects that sought to recognize, analyse and redress its active role in race-ing the worlds in which we lived’ (2011: 226–7). Intersectionality retains an affinity with identity politics, yet it also draws upon postmodern strands that render ‘identity’ continually in flux and unstable (Brah and Phoenix, 2004; Chun et al., 2013). Davis (2008: 74) summarizes these double theoretical inflections:

[Intersectionality] takes up the political project of making the social and material consequences of the categories of gender/race/class visible, but does so by employing methodologies compatible with the poststructuralist project of deconstructing categories, unmasking universalism, and exploring the dynamic and contradictory workings of power.

Amidst calls to develop and clarify methods, intersectional qualitative methodologists play a tension: on one hand, they preserve the distinctness of categories and often make claims about reality rooted in experience. On the other hand, they trouble and problematize the very categories that produce experiential knowledge.

In addition to this dual commitment to identity politics and deconstruction, intersectionality advances a methodology that rejects received distinctions between different levels of analysis (Anderson and Scott, 2012; Flores, 2006; Winker and Degele, 2011). Intersectional work is

removed from what sociologists have come to frame as the micro-macro theoretical debate […] Theories of intersectionality challenge this often abstract and imagined binary. Unlike other contemporary theories, theories of intersectionality are more fluid with regard to how they interpret the relationship between the social structure and individuals. (Perry, 2009: 230)

Yet what remains unclear is precisely how intersectional methodologists should weave together experiential knowledge with systemic inequality around race–gender and other differences. Christensen and Jensen (2012) posit that intersectionality is less about identity categories than about processes. So how should intersectional methodologists highlight the everyday interactions that create racial and gender identity? And how should we do so while also linking those everyday interactions to laws, institutions, and cultural discourses that work alongside raced–gendered bodies to make raced–gendered meaning systems?

As a whole, intersectional methodologists highlight the reality of intersecting identity categories and processes of difference, and they also deconstruct the meanings attached to those categories and processes (e.g. Cho et al., 2013; Dhamoon, 2011). Simultaneously, intersectional methodologists link interpersonal interactions and daily goings-on with larger social and cultural patterns such that ‘levels’ of analysis are blurred (Ferree, 2011). Though communication studies draws upon a different intellectual lineage than intersectionality, it resonates with intersectionality’s methodological commitments. Namely, as I describe in the next section, communication theory assumes a real world that is subject to social construction and weaves together message and meaning across multiple ‘levels’.

Why communication theory?

To draw out some resonances between communication theory and intersectional methodology, I offer a brief account and history of the field of communication. Like intersectionality, the scholarly conversations around communication embrace paradox. Part of the field conceptualizes communication as information transmission, as moving a message from one point to the next. Work such as Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) mathematical model focuses on interference with message reception and has been widely used in communication technology. A transmission approach to communication assumes that language represents reality, that correspondence between the symbol and the thing signified is mostly unproblematic. This strand of theorizing birthed the part of communication studies that tends to be housed in journalism and mass media programs, that underscores much of public relations work, and that emphasizes message efficacy (in health communication campaigns, for instance).

A second strand of communication theory prioritizes what is often called a ‘ritual’ approach, one that problematizes the idea that language corresponds to reality. Often critically oriented, a ritual approach grounds itself in social constructivism and posits that

A ritual view of communication is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but the maintenance of society in time […] not the act of imparting information or influence but the creation, representation, and celebration of shared even illusory beliefs. (Carey, 2009: 33)

Rather than representation, a ritual approach focuses on re-presentation processes, that is, the play of symbols that are never necessarily attached to things out there. Some of these assumptions are rooted in Ogden and Richards’ (1923) semantic triangle, a model commonly used to assert the perpetual ambiguity of meaning and symbol use. Craig (1999: 125) avers that this second approach, which troubles common sense notions of communication as information transfer, is the ‘central intellectual role’ and ‘cultural mission’ of the field.

As a consequence of the discipline’s dual correspondence/constructivist approaches to communication, scholars in the field write with some ambivalence regarding what communication is and does. In writing, communication scholarship finds itself strangely double: ‘the thing that we study (communication) and the way that we study it (by communicating) converge’ (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011: 284). Some, like Tracy (2012), advance inductive qualitative writing and argue that communication ‘is not just a mirror or representation of reality’, and ‘As such, the way we write our empirical reports fundamentally constitutes our disciplinary knowledge’ (2012: 128). Others embrace the mirror that Tracy rejects, such as Holliday (2002), who argues that qualitative researchers should separate ‘data, discursive commentary and argument’ in their writing in order to ‘add to the validity of the written study’ (2002: 119). These twin – and sometimes contradictory – assumptions operate together in the field.

Because the field pursues questions about what communication does, it centers the problematics of representation. The discipline’s efforts to theorize world and word also implicate a second set of persistent concerns: who or what communicates? Though communication scholars often study the speech of individual humans, Powers (1995) notes that the discipline theorizes the connections between different ‘levels’ of communication. Researchers link the talk inside a person’s head (intrapersonal communication) with other-oriented talk (interpersonal communication) (e.g. Zhang et al., 2014); they show how dyadic and local interaction relates to larger social structures and discourse (e.g. Lutgen-Sandvik et al., 2011). Even micro-level studies of individuals’ perceptions and statements often draw heavily upon dialogism and symbolic interactionism (e.g. Baxter, 2007). This intellectual lineage roots any one voice in a cultural and historical matrix that transcends a single ‘I’. The sounds of talk, while uttered from contained vocal cords, require and depend upon temporal structures that are never here and now. When scholars take up communication as an object of study they must think not only about the troubled relationships between symbolic and material worlds. They must also trace communication across personal, political, and geopolitical boundaries.

In communication theory, scholars routinely assume some ability to reference ideas and phenomena, otherwise each communicator would just be talking to him/her/itself. Similarly, intersectionality retains claims about the real impact of gender on people’s lives, the real impact of race on living. But instability and iterability are also inherent in both communicative and intersectional assumptions. In communication theory, the process of referencing makes the referents. And in intersectionality, an ability to play with and mess up identity categories advances a political project. No intersectional project wants to return to what already is. Intersectionality evokes something different than what is here; it wants to shape shift such that women of color, queer people of color, and queer women of color are not perpetually occupying the same non-space. Although communication theory sometimes demands reliability in qualitative research, it simultaneously requires scholars to assume that each instance of writing makes some part of the world anew. In short, intersectionality and communication theory work to straddle the same uneven terrain. Both utilize and deconstruct systems of meaning as well as the material effects of those systems and meanings.

To illustrate more concretely the ways in which communication theory could inform the writing associated with intersectional methods, I next consider two central themes in qualitative methods: voice and reflexivity. By discussing the ways communication scholars write about (and with) voice and reflexivity, I draw out how communication theory, when used as a backdrop for qualitative research, already prompts intersectional work.

Voice

Voice is a recurring theme in qualitative intersectional and communication research (Jackson and Mazzei, 2009; Rakow and Wackwitz, 2004; Zhang et al., 2012). Because failures to listen can reproduce relations of domination, many critical scholars attend to the voices of groups at the intersections of marginalized identities (e.g. Ashby, 2011; Dutta, 2014). Yet because ‘voice’ often signals a stable human identity, it is a contested concept, particularly among scholars with poststructuralist and post-human affiliations (e.g. Lather, 2007). In my reading, voice in intersectional communication research is often conceptualized along two lines: as the manifestation of a human inner core and the marker of authenticity (Wood, 1992), or as an always-in-process call and response to multiple others (Brown, 1992). These two approaches are not entirely distinct: I draw out their overlap to invite intersectionality and communication theory to become more intertwined.

In the first approach to voice, authors often rely on standpoint theories (e.g. Mackinlay, 2003; Olesen, 2005). Scholars drawing upon this tradition assume that voice differs based on a person’s social location, experience, and group membership (Harding, 2004). Accordingly, centering the voices of those less often afforded space for speaking can disrupt dominant and hegemonic epistemologies (Weis and Fine, 2005). Many researchers, and particularly those grounded in critical race theory and LatCrit, ¹ incorporate counter-storytelling and testimonio in their qualitative studies (Espino et al., 2010; Solórzano and Yasso, 2002). In this kind of writing, voice is treated with a communicative hope: that it can reflect some human essence, even when that ‘essence’ is a strategic reduction.

In the second approach to voice, because scholars assume that identity is unstable and incoherent, a multiplicity of voices works through us all (e.g. McWilliam, 1997). Rather than an attachment to an authentic, real self, voice is evidence of unfinalized, shifting, hybrid identities. Intersectional and critical communication scholars who hear voice in this way are troubled not by the absence of a particular voice, but by the notion that voice can be particular at all. Buitelaar (2006: 273), for instance, argues that dialogic assumptions are important for intersectional work because they highlight ‘dialogues between various voices within the self’ thus avoiding additive identity models while also linking those voices to larger structural phenomena. Frank (2005), drawing on Bhaktin, suggests that dialogic researchers assume that voices are always formed in anticipation of and response to other voices. Any one voice, then, is never its own. Adopting these assumptions, Braun et al. (2003) consider their participants’ accounts to be not only of their own design but also reflective of the discursive resources surrounding gender and sexuality in some contemporary western cultures. Rooted in metaphors of ruin, this approach to voice emphasizes concurrence rather than continuance, productive failure, inheritance, and present futures; it ‘decenters’ voice (St Pierre, 2008).

These two approaches to voice – as essence of self and as interwoven selves/others – often remain separate as writers make methodological choices. Given their somewhat different theoretical lineages, sometimes the two approaches do not mix in communication theory. Yet in many spaces, because of the theoretical doubling that characterizes the field, authors in communication studies write voice such that it is simultaneously individual and collective. Goodall (2000: 140) says, ‘Singularly and multiply, voice is the sound of a character speaking […] It is a pattern of heard recognitions, and of differences, that convey to readers the self that is textually constructing other and contexts’. In this passage, voice is both one’s own unique presence (a singular character) and also the outcome of multiple others. Further, Goodall suggests that any writer’s voice accumulates interactions from which an author construes differences between self and other. Madison (2012: 221) similarly notes a reciprocal and relational process in communicative writing that

emphasizes the relational dynamic between writer and reader in a spirit of caring about the dialogic and communicative quality of the connection. […] We do not write purely as individuals. We live in a world with others, and their imprint is upon who we are and what we write.

Though Madison does not abandon a humanist orientation, she centers any voice’s intersections with others. In this sense, privilege and marginalization operate in any writing along the lines of difference that feminist, critical race, disability, and post-colonial theorists care about. To illustrate more fully how this double approach to voice manifests in communication scholarship, I discuss two exemplars. In each, I show how voice is written such that the individual, relational, and intersectional dynamics of gender, race, and nation are foregrounded.

In a study based on interviews with Black men, Orbe (1994: 292) says his interviewees engage a ‘dialectic of “playing the part” and being yourself’. Working from muted group theory and co-cultural theory (both grounded in feminism and critical race theory), Orbe highlights how Black male participants alter their voices in social situations. The men describe ‘snapping’ between different race–gender performances based on whether they interact with other Black men or with White men. Although the ‘dialectic’ is explicit in Orbe’s discussion of his participants’ voices, I read it also in his approach to writing. Orbe intends to ‘reveal the essence of African American communication’ (1994: 289). He claims that phenomenology allows researchers to be ‘active in becoming a medium for the voice of their co-researchers without manipulating, altering, or reshaping’ (1994: 289) their accounts. Yet Orbe’s argument belies these assertions: the essence of voice, in Orbe’s study, lies in alteration. The text mirrors these claims. Orbe includes four lines of co-researcher statements, on average, on each page. The shift between Orbe’s voice and his participants’ voices happens rapidly. Even as Orbe argues for the essence of voice, his constant interweaving of multiple participants’ accounts reminds readers that voices form through interaction. Voices are never unaltered.

Nakayama (2005), too, writes with a hint of longing for essence. In a meditation on the relationships between voice and language, Nakayama draws upon not only multiple languages (English, French, Japanese) but also multiple voices – authoritative, theoretical, personal, anecdotal. He incorporates the voices of Anzaldua, Derrida, and various communication scholars. Throughout, Nakayama suggests that in order to speak, any voice must follow the rules of a language, and those rules always exceed the individual voice. Nakayama says, ‘Je veux dire and “I want to say” are not parallel at all, but I can’t bridge that difference. I acquiesce to the “signifying chains of all kinds” and my voice is taken where I would not have gone’ (2005: 67). I see Nakayama playing with the same tension that Orbe engages: he suggests that ‘I’ would not have gone somewhere with my own voice, yet also argues that voice is always embedded in ‘signifying chains’ that exceed any ‘I’. Intersectionality, in this piece, is figured between voice and language. In other words, communication operates at the intersections of an individual’s signature – voice – and the imprints of history and nation on that voice. As Nakayama writes, the shifts from English to French and from narrative to syllogism highlight the multiple locations from which he speaks and the locations that speak through him.

In both examples, Orbe and Nakayama write such that speech – at the origins of communication theory – emerges from a stable, individual self whose identity lies at the intersections of race, gender, and nation. Yet true to communication theory’s dialogic spirit, both highlight the ways in which that voice is formed through interaction – with members in and outside of one’s racial–gender cohort, with the voices of theorists and past experience, and with a language that accumulates historical–cultural orientations not of one’s own making. Though neither explicitly sets out to do intersectional writing, both writers’ communicative impulses lead them to write voice such that identity categories are both retained and also troubled. Further, particularly in Nakayama’s piece, the authorial voice necessarily implicates not only personal, but also interpersonal and cultural currents. Because of these features, these two pieces offer ways to grapple with the methodological dilemmas that haunt intersectionality. This same doubleness from communication theory shows up in communication scholars’ writing regarding reflexivity.

Reflexivity

Reflexivity, as I discuss it, is an invitation to reflection. Macbeth (2001) distinguishes authorial reflexivity from textual reflexivity. In the first mode, writers expound upon their own position, and in the second, authors invite readers to muse about the construction of the writing and representation. Regardless of approach, reflexivity is important for intersectional methodologists because it locates reader and writer and calls both to account for the impossibility of distanced, wholly objective, apolitical knowledge (Hesse-Biber and Piatelli, 2012; Pillow, 2003). Just as they do with voice, communication scholars approach reflexivity by assuming that authors have stable selves and also fluid/multiple selves. These dual approaches again set up communication theory’s utility for intersectional writing.

Writers who engage authorial reflexivity often disclose personal information (Jorgenson, 2011). This iteration of reflexivity is a corrective – a way to disrupt the privileged knowledges that go unmarked in academe. It develops what Harding (2004) calls strong objectivity – located knowledge that cannot be impartial. Reflexivity troubles the personal/professional dichotomy, and the resulting intimacy between writer and reader is imbued with an intellectual hope that revelation enhances knowledge. To the extent that writers assume some personal essence can be revealed, they retain political identity categories.

Yet conceptualizing reflexivity only in this way is risky for intersectional politics. In reinforcing the idea of an essential and real identity, authorial reflexivity – when practiced alone – is at odds with intersectionality’s poststructural inflections. Additionally, authorial reflexivity operates with the assumption that language reflects experience (Webster, 2008). Although communication scholars sometimes subscribe to that assumption, it risks undermining the constructivist bent that animates the field. Further, the qualitative imperative for authorial reflexivity can reinscribe essentialized expectations regarding White US femininities (Bondi, 2009). Though potentially transgressive, these norms can also be regressive.

Consequently, reflexivity can also show up as playfulness, as a leaning into ambiguity (Butler-Kisber, 2010). This kind of writing invites readers to reflect on the text’s construction. In this sense, reflexivity becomes part of communication as re-presentation, the continual flux of meaning woven through dynamic identity positions (e.g. Goltz, 2011). But like the debates over intersectionality itself, writing with radical textual reflexivity can negate the stability upon which much of the intersectional political project depends. It can lapse into endless reference and arrive at the oft-criticized position Derrida (1997: 158) made pithy, ‘there is nothing outside of the text’. I suggest that communication scholars can write a version of reflexivity that draws together both approaches. In so doing, they advance a writing style commensurate with the aims of intersectional methods. In what follows, I use a few exemplars to illustrate this case.

Brewis (2005) reflects upon readings of her work on sexuality and organization. She points toward many readers’ assumptions that, because she is a woman writing with male co-authors, she has participated in some of the practices she studies. She highlights the heteronormativity that underwrites the assumptions people make about her and readers’ tendencies to assume that researchers study topics and problems present in their own lives. Brewis suggests that these assumptions lead people to two conclusions: either her knowledge claims are more valid because she has insider knowledge and first-hand experience or her knowledge claims are less valid because she must be biased by her own (supposed) experiences of the phenomena she studies. Rather than resolve the questions around her work, Brewis refuses (and dissolves) an imperative to write toward the personal. She suggests that when authors simply meet that imperative, readers can render work on marginalized identities, positions, and topics unimportant or less than rigorous. In these ways, Brewis plays reflexivity through communication theory: She nods toward the assumption that authorial disclosure represents and reflects something real about the world while also laughing at readers’ desire for that textual intimacy. She reminds readers that they are often ‘reading other inferences into the traces of authorship within and (I would add) outwith the work’ (2005: 494). In an intentional wink, Brewis marks the kind of reflexivity she is doing:

I have deliberately (albeit perhaps unsuccessfully) avoided providing answers to the question of who I ‘really’ am as an author in an attempt to throw into relief some of the issues associated with the ways we seek to pin each other down to static and immutable identities. (2005: 506)

Brewis chooses what information to include about herself by not only anticipating the retorts of others, but also by asking readers to reflect upon their own assumptions at the intersections of gender and sexuality. I dub this technique ‘reflexive voicing’.

Gajjala (2002) engages a similar practice. In a post-colonial feminist cyber-ethnography, she studies talk on a South Asian women’s listserv and meditates on the intersectional, ethical tangles that arise. She suggests that cyber-ethnographies can reinforce colonialism because western researchers can appropriate readily available accounts of ‘native’ informants. Indeed the women on the listserv explicitly discuss this possibility. When both Gajjala and another researcher mentioned their plans for writing about the listserv, its members explicitly forbid such publications. This ‘refusal’, as Gajjala dubs it, becomes the impetus for the entire piece. Writing about how her own position shaped her ethnographic work, Gajjala recounts her own shifting intelligibility at the intersections of classed and colonial identities. Gajjala was considered an insider until the group discussed a second researcher – considered an outsider – who wanted to publish about the online forum. At this point, Gajjala’s classed status, connected to her academic identity, became especially salient and suspect. In the resulting article, Gajjala uses authorial reflexivity to analyze how the gendered and diasporic aspects of her own identity make her both connected to and disconnected from her research participants. Further, Gajjala uses textual reflexivity to frame the article: she notes that the group refuses to be studied because they anticipate the representations Gajjala would create, and they recognize those representations to be a part of the colonialist–gendered dynamics that Gajjala both critiques and embodies. Gajjala repeatedly emphasizes that her ‘attempt at studying the group failed’ (2002: 177), that the research was interrupted, that the group felt betrayed by their own member. The article that could have been written – if the women had not refused to be studied – haunts the article published, and through that haunting Gajjala draws attention to the difficulties of speaking about and for those who are (not) other.

In a third example, Allen (1998), in a critique of organizational socialization literature, draws upon standpoint theory to illustrate the ways in which the intersections of gender and race have been written out of this domain of inquiry. In the style and format many qualitative researchers use for interview excerpts from participants, Allen incorporates self-interviews. By introducing two of her own voices in the text – both academic writer and personal research participant – Allen models a move from social location (experience based upon identity categories) to standpoint (critical, political reflection on those experiences). She uses reflexivity to correct for the missing intersections in existing organizational literature. She simultaneously uses reflexivity as play by inviting readers to reflect upon how others’ voices are positioned in qualitative research reports. Allen writes reflexivity in the service of intersectionality.

In their approaches to reflexivity, these researchers adopt communicative disciplinary tenets, and their writing engages intersectional methodological dilemmas. On the one hand, they reflect upon their own positions to dismantle their own privileges or point out mechanisms of marginalization. In so doing, they assume a stable identity to be reflected upon. On the other hand, these scholars also invite readers to note how they, too, are inside and outside the text and, indeed, how authors’ voices are never their own. Further, in both these approaches, communication scholars reflex with and against the individual (micro) and that individual’s networked location (macro).

Reflexive voicing: communicative intersectional writing

The structure of subheadings in this article could suggest that I conceptualize voice and reflexivity as distinct. On the contrary, I suggest that both concepts, when operating together through communication theory, offer a rich space for intersectional writing. I read reflexive voicing, for instance, in Broadfoot and Munshi’s (2007) work. They use postcolonial theory to illustrate how nation, territory, and gender collude to regulate academic knowledge. The resulting strict disciplinary boundaries exclude particular voices and modes of speaking such that heart sentiment can rarely be articulated in the context of western epistemologies. To make their argument, Broadfoot and Munshi use a single voice, a ‘we’, in which neither author is distinct. In between these segments, however, they include dialogues between them in which each author is identified separately. Through this technique, Broadfoot and Munshi use voice singly and multiply in their writing, and they show the development of their voices in response to each other. As they switch between shared and distinct authorial voices, they do reflexivity too: they remark about the operation of voice in a colonialist context. They allude to Bakhtin’s term heteroglossia – multiple voices – and state that they want to ‘rearticulate [heteroglossia] as a site of struggle for the legitimacy of subjective realities derived from the experiences of working from different cultures, disciplines, and worldviews’ (2007: 249–50). In this way, voice and reflexivity are joined. Broadfoot and Munshi point not merely to the presence or absence of particular voices, but they also highlight how politics and power differences shape the call and response of voice.

They accomplish reflexive voicing not only by marking their own voicings as reflexive practice, but also by implicating readers in that process. This piece is written in a non-dominant affective mode, and when I first read their work, I found the introduction to be sentimental. By their conclusion, Broadfoot and Munshi explicitly identify this reaction, one they expect many readers to have. They violate academe’s prized detachment and abstraction, and then identify that value as one connected to the intersections of nation–gender–colonialism and enacted in the intimacies of reading. By coupling voice and reflexivity through communication theory, Broadfoot and Munshi foreground not only their own individual and shared voices, but also the way readers shape those voices. In short, Broadfoot and Munshi invite readers to be reflexive about how they interpret others’ voices and to note how intersectional privilege influences those interpretations.

Through this communicative attention to voice and reflexivity, I am distinguishing good intersectional writing from good qualitative writing. Qualitative writing is often evaluated under rubrics of trustworthiness (Butler-Kisber, 2010) and non-malfeasance (Amis and Silk, 2008): writers are to do ethical research that offers transparent access to evidence and author, and they are also to demonstrate that they have not done harm. Yet intersectional writers offer critiques that, because they disrupt and disallow performances of privilege, may seem to break trust and to surface pain. An example at the intersections of whiteness and femininity may be useful here.

The expectation that US White women always be ‘nice’ is a mechanism of marginalization (i.e. US White women often learn to avoid being assertive, strident, or contrary). When this performance is written in and through an authorial voice, it maintains the status quo in ways that marginalize femininity. That same kind of writing is also, simultaneously, a mechanism of privilege. As Harris (2000) suggests, White women benefit from proximity to White male heterosexuality and use relational maintenance – or niceness – to retain that closeness. This social proximity operates in qualitative writing. For instance, Tracy (2010), in an article detailing overarching criteria for assessing qualitative research, discusses what she calls ‘sincerity’, which

relates to being earnest and vulnerable. Sincere researchers are approachable […] and friendly […] They consider not only their own needs but also those of their participants, readers, coauthors and potential audiences. Sincere researchers are empathetic, kind, self-aware, and self-deprecating. (2010: 842)

Though I do not contest that these are good qualities for many people, not just researchers, I read Tracy’s comments as evidence that a narrow iteration of feminism is mainstreamed in qualitative methodology. Her description of a good researcher sounds very much like a description of White femininity. To whom will a writer sound unthreatening, compassionate, and other-oriented? The answer, I argue, has to do with not only the writer’s own gender–racial–national identifications, but also those of the reader. Am I not likely to judge qualitative writing to be lacking in sincerity if it challenges my own intersectional privileges, of which I am able to remain unaware? Indeed, I can accomplish what looks like kindness and empathy in order to disrupt the hegemonic masculinization of qualitative research, yet never have to undo how that authorial performance of femininity depends upon heteronormativity and whiteness.

Dialogue and difference are at the heart of communication scholarship, and, indeed, are intersectional. Yet dialogue also obscures difference. This is why communication theory offers to intersectionality some methodological resources for writing and why communication scholarship should desire more intersectionality. Communication scholar Rowe (2000) argues that White feminism deflects its own critique and reinforces a White, yet invisible, normative subject. Giving a close reading of Brown’s States of Injury, Rowe shows how Brown elevates White feminisms in her analysis by ignoring that scholars of color are largely responsible for the development of standpoint theory. Further, Rowe suggests that when Brown advocates for public argument, dialogue, and deliberation, she fails to notice these types of communication tend to privilege White voices. The celebration of dialogue – the interplay of voices – can be really the promotion of voices at the intersections of femininity and whiteness, colonialism and masculinity, ableism and emotion.

Without coupling voice and reflexivity, as communication theory can but does not have to do, mainstream qualitative methods do not develop good intersectional writing. Playing both the stability and fluidity of identity, its inherent individualism and relationality, as intersectionality wants and as communication theory needs, is imperative. Thus I return to the two strands of argument with which I opened this article. The play between transmissive and ritual approaches to communication can animate intersectional writing. Creating a metamorphosis at the interstices of sexuality–race–gender requires both pointing toward how things are now and also how they could be. We need accuracy that notices how ‘validity’ may reassert negative manifestations of unequal power. Yet communication theory needs intersectionality, too, precisely because dialogue and deliberation – indeed any interactive mode – are processes through which we fool ourselves into imagining that the playing field is even.