She Embodied: A Materialized Collective

Abstract

This collaboratively written piece materializes the collective experiences of 14 students and an instructor in a graduate-level feminist research methods class in the United States. Instead of writing a traditional seminar paper, the class decided to continue our weekly discussions, during which we wrestled with both theory and practice, in text in a final paper. It just seemed like the best way to end our time together. In so doing, the she embodied collective furthers feminist writing practices that embrace uneasy collectives of varying viewpoints. This particular collective acknowledges our she, but recognizes, listens to, and celebrates all the powerful pronouns that create a collective. The collective offers a brief introduction and lengthy appendix to situate the piece. We do not adhere to a singular feminism in the piece. Consequently, our collective is a way of doing unity differently, of attending to and residing with the frictional thought within feminisms and finding that frictional thought as generative. We invite readers to join our collective, to think together across differences without reducing those differences to similarities.