Wild reading: this madness to our method

Abstract

My paper theorizes the possibilities of a qualitative method that engages with promiscuous aspects of human existence and difference foreclosed by established research methods and representations. I locate the not known of knowledge in the unconscious time of the maternal relation where the infant is put upon to wildly and without symbolic resources make sense of others and the world around her. Engaging with the “wild” aspects of interpretation can provide us with an analytical space to forge a sustained inquiry into suppressed desires producing dominant representations of human existence. I look to J.M. Coetzee’s short story, “The Humanities in Africa,” as a text that might support feminist researchers’ unorthodox efforts to commune with the less rational processes of thinking and being driving representation. Reflexive to what remains unthought in our representations of knowledge, we might develop new modes of analysis that are open to unconventional and unorthodox research orientations and methods.