Poetics, Dramatics, and Transgressive Validity: The Case of the Skipped Line

AbstractThis article presents three social-science writing transgressions: writing an in-depth interview as a poem, writing field notes as a drama, and the article, itself, which deploys diverse genres, personal experiences, and critical analyses. Through these examples, I challenge traditional definitions of validity and call for different kinds of science practices. The science practice I model is a feminist-postmodernist one. It blurs genres, probes lived experience, enacts science, creates a female imaginary, breaks down dualisms, inscribes emotional labor and emotional response as valid, deconstructs the myth of an emotion-free social science, and makes a space for partiality, self-reflexivity, tension, and difference.