First of all, McKenna and Kirby talk about unmasking or uncovering what we think we know or understand already but can't really see clearly. What we want to see may be hidden completely. Or, it may be disguised, named as something else. So I have a sense of women uncovering, of moving things aside, of seeing some things in a new way, through our own eyes.

Second, they talk about creating stories that tell others what we have discovered, what we come to know and understand more clearly. By telling these stories, we pull up and pull out different aspects of what we have made visible so that we can look at them more closely. All this time, we must remember where these particular aspects of our experience have come from and where they must go back to. If we don't, any action we take may be completely ineffective because it is out of context. We must always take context into account.

Third, when we uncover what we know and experience, when we pay attention to particular aspects of that experience by telling stories about them, we begin to recognize how and why certain things have seemed invisible or masked in our lives. We begin to affirm our own and each other's pleasure and pain in this discovery. We begin to call out the names of what we are beginning to understand.

And in this way we make what we are uncovering something that others can see and hear and find with us. We share our sense of what we know and what, understand with others. In this way, we can begin to work together to change things.

So, we could be understood as basing our research on these four processes. Through the woman-positive activities we uncovered what has been hidden or silenced. Through reflection and discussion we created our stories, our understandings, and our knowledge. Through our analysis, we affirmed what we found by naming how and why it has been made invisible. Through our documentation we called out and shared our naming and our understanding with others. Then we moved on, using our knowledge to work with others, to change what we can change.