I gotta say the bone she specifically has to pick with “the colonialism of sources” feels like she learned the wrong lesson from her experience being unable to cite her own grandmother.
Either Bolivian academia has different standards than their American counterparts or these guys made up rules to fuck her over specifically, either way I know for a fact that you can actually cite individual testimony in western academia, because I literally did it not too long ago, citing an interview I conducted with my arabic teacher on Wasta (the culture of business in the Arabic speaking world) and her experiences teaching western business people on how to best engage with it.
Not to mention how, especially anthropological studies like feminist study, have become especially sensitive as of late to how to incorporate oral histories into academic writing as the margins push into communities and societies that have either not developed or rejected the written word for a variety of possible reasons, and also to account for spaces where written sources aren’t available.
Like seriously she has an overall good message but the details of her story about abandoning her thesis over that source requirement feels incredibly distracting, like as if she’s omitting what the full issue was, like if her grandmother was her only source for the entire paper or something. Also if she was able to get an entire academic book published about her theories, why couldn’t she use the sources she must have cited for that to write her thesis?
I agree. Somehow it feels as if if goes deeper though. There are people who are deeply traumatized by society and then turn to completely oppose this perceived threat. I know this from trans spaces or from people who are deep in the Israel/Palestine conflict. There is a strongly moralizing factor dividing the world into good and bad. Speaking from my own perspective, I could also divide the world into evil cis people and good trans people. And this certainly seems appealing sometimes. But there are people, and I would put Adriana Guzmán in this category, who go through the world identifying all the hardships with this threat, this evil. Your thesis didn’t work out? It was the hegemonic science who didn’t let me. I really don’t mean that in a mean way. But it is very frustrating to interact with people like this. (I know I have my own issues that heighten my frustration even more though.) It is really hard to withstand this eternal conflict that we all are trapped in this complex world of power struggles, microaggressions and discrimination. It certainly feels easier to position yourself on the side of “the good” fighting against the evil. However, if you anyone is really honest with themselves we have to admit that we are really all helping perpetuate the hegemonic standard in some way. We can only really strive to do our best. But this doesn’t appeal to everyone I guess and so there are people like the interviewee who divide the world into good vs bad…
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