The Kirsch-Ritchie article, “Beyond the Personal: Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research,” reminds me, like Ben, of female writers like Gloria Anzaldua and Sndra Cisneros. These two female writers give a voice to a specific location and provide a “ new emphasis on the personal [and] on validating experience as a source of knowledge ( 7). In Anzaldua’s work, Borderlands, we see that she is “examining [her] experiences as reflections of ideology and culture, by reinterpreting [her] own experiences through the eyes of others, and by recognizing [her] own split [self, her] multiple and often unknowable identities” (8). In her text, Anzaldua explores the problems of identity along with the problems of a rhetoric that has generated due to her location. Cisneros’ work, like that of Anzaldua, deals with what Kirsch and Ritchie call the “politics of location” in the title of the text, House on Mango Street. Like Anzaldua’s Borderlands, this text is establishing a location that is central to the contents of the inside pages, and it is dealing with feminine as well as race issues. And I find these “politics of location” to be a fascinating read, and quite difficult to overcome when it comes to research. I mean we lie in ideology and it is all around us, and having to take on the role of self-moderator when conducting research seems to be asking too much, especially when most researchers are too busy in trying to prove a point and willing to ignore anything that challenges that point. As for the “ethics of care” that the article is promoting, I think that this would be a great idea, but I do not see it being applied to research for the same purposes that I stated above. Researchers are focused on the main goal, and research is mainly a means to an end, where the point is to come to a conclusion that has already been established. As for those studies where one is looking for the outcome, ideology comes into play and gets in the way of an unbiased conclusion.
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