One implication of a socially-situated perspective of literacy and mothering is to locate the researcher, and the researched, as “embodied” subjects. This can take place, as described earlier, through the method of multi-vocal analysis, attending to possible subject positions across gender, culture, and class. But it also refers to the ways in which my own situated experiences as a mother shaped my analysis and interpretation of literacy advice texts.
While the social location of the researcher is considered an important feature of and interpretive lens in qualitative research methodologies, this issue is somewhat overlooked in discourse analysis research (Rogers, Malanchuruvil-Berkes, Mosley, Huie & O’Garra, 2005). There is a general feeling that because textual analysis does not involve “human subjects,” the political relationship between researcher and researched falls away. However, while this relationship may be abstracted through the distance between and within texts, time, and space, it is nonetheless salient in shaping research interpretations — after all, it is a foundation of discourse analysis that texts are political, and the casting I make of the writers and readers of advice texts is no less so.
While writing this thesis, I gave birth to my second child and my oldest child
started Kindergarten. My own stance as I analyzed advice texts was shaped not
only by the research interests that emerged from my experiences with Maya that
I describe in the introduction, but my own desires as a mother as I experience
moments in the practice of the discourse of mothering. I want to do a good job,
to raise happy, “successful” children who do well in school, who
are well liked and secure, whose language develops normally, and whose “early
brain” is duly stimulated. My stance as a reader of advice texts was shaped
by this desire (as well as self-doubt and guilt as I dedicated considerable
time to writing this thesis) as much as it was by skepticism and critique. These
ambivalent feelings shaped my understanding of advice texts as constitutive
as well as constituted by everyday mothering and literacy practices. In this
way, I shared with Peyton Young (2000) the tension as my personal and academic
lives merged (p. 332). While I engage throughout this thesis in a critique of
mothering discourses that promote social inequality by normalizing and privileging
“what counts” as good mothering and appropriate literacy practices,
I also found myself participating in these same mothering discourses. I worried
about my daughter’s report card, compared with parents the learning experiences
and the performance of other schools, moved my daughter to what I though was
a better school, even though it meant more parent participation and certainly
more driving. I researched the best pre-schools and daycare in the city for
my son and pay the extra fees so he can attend these. These practices promote
educational inequality in a context in which education for children has become
a market commodity. But like Peyton Young (2000) who found herself promoting
masculinist discourses even as she encouraged boys to challenge them through
critical literacy pedagogies, I too found myself caught in the contradictions
between the intent of critical discourse analysis, which is to reveal and challenge
social inequalities, and the “living” of discourses as socially
situated mothering and literacy practices which are shaped as much by social
context and my personal and family history as they are by texts. I return to
the issues of social location in critical discourse analysis in Chapter Eight.
Table 1 summarizes the key concepts and tools adopted in this study.