Troubling Clarity: The Politics of Accessible Language

In this article, Patti Lather addresses the call for accessibility and plain speaking within academic writing. She argues the non-innocence of transparent theories of language, and explores the relationship between academic theoretic authority and feminist practices of writing, a relationship that contributes to social change. In the first section, Lather focuses on the politics of language. She grounds her arguments in feminist and postmodern theory, including the ideas of Derrida, Spivak, Benjamin, and Nietzsche, particularly Nietzche's concept of a text that constructs an audience "with ears to hear." In the second part of the article, Lather reflects on her own experimental approach to writing up research. She discusses the process of creating her book, Troubling Angels, a multiply coded text on women, AIDS, and angels. Lather opens up possibilities for displaying complexities through her experiments with multivoiced text that moves through different registers and that speaks to multiple audiences.