The Torture of Dissertating

I had set a goal of finishing my chapter 2 before the spring semester began because I thought it was the easiest one to do, but I ran into trouble. The obvious difficulty was revisiting something that I had written 3 years ago only to find that I don't agree with what I wrote. Of course, a newly revised and stronger argument that ties my research together changes everything that preceded it, but it's a chore, and somewhat embarrassing, to reread and revise old chapters and old thoughts. I am not throwing out everything, but I am trying to save as much as I can while incorporating my new argument. And that's where my problem lies. I was so excited to write my new section that when I came to my old chapter, I suddenly became myopic.

I tried to write.

And rewrite.

I tried to weave my new argument through the sections I wanted to save.

But it didn't look right.

My original chapter was 42 pages. 13 pages were discarded and a total of 8 new pages were written. It wasn't flowing as I thought it would and I was getting frustrated. The feeling was like jamming a square peg into a round hole. So I did what any good writer would do, and that is to ask another pair of eyes to take a look. I asked my partner to generally read over what I have thus far.

And that added another level of complexity. She does film studies. I'm in political science. She's properly trained in the humanities. Me? In the social sciences. She talks about the "state" in the abstract; I was specifically referring to the federal government. She points out that sexual orientation is already regulated as heteronormative, while I was talking about sexual orientation as an actionable classification (i.e., protected status). We were talking past each other before we finally figured out what was the problem. We are definitely products of our training even though we may use some of the same terms and objects of analysis, but we do talk about them in fairly distinct and different ways. So our remaining time was spent clarifying our terms and talking about what I wanted to do and how to go about it. We laughed in the end because even though both of us have a vested interest in cultural studies research, we are still very much situated in a mode of analysis that is central to our respective projects. I can imagine how a discussion like this could spiral out of control; it does raise an interesting question about interdisciplinarity that I was thinking about for some time now, but that's another post.

Despite the miscues, I decided to stop working on Chapter 2 and start from the very beginning with Chapter 1. In hindsight, I should've done that first since the introductory chapter will not only define the current state of the research (literature review), but also define my terms, the parameters of my research, and my argument so that all the subsequent chapters will fall into place. I thought I could knock out my chapter quickly since I had a fresh argument, but maybe as a productive mental exercise, and an act of prudence, I need to lay out the map of my dissertation first.

Back to the beginning I go then.