Book review: Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Western Feminist Theory

The French feminist contribution: Humanizing organizations through esthetically informed, philosophical modes of representation

“…Pullen (2018) confronts this conundrum in her "Writing as Labiaplasty" text, where her explicit engagement with the female body allows her to forge an empowered intersubjectivist mode of writing, and in the process, reveal the political underpinnings linked to acts of representation. Donna Haraway, cited in Withers (2012), refers to the contrasting approaches to knowledge production as "optic-haptic" perceptions. Optic relates to the knowing-things-from-a-distance tyranny, whereas haptic, in contrast, reflects a "culture of touch" bodily engagement where there is a connection with matters that deeply matter: Haptic engagement conveys an encouragement for knowledge and action to be crafted in touch with everyday practices… [allowing for a] deepened attention to materiality and embodiment [creating] an invitation to re-think relationality and its corporeal character, as well as a desire for concrete, tangible, engagement with worldly transformations (Withers, 2012, p. 244…”

“…Haptic engagement conveys an encouragement for knowledge and action to be crafted in touch with everyday practices… [allowing for a] deepened attention to materiality and embodiment [creating] an invitation to re‐think relationality and its corporeal character, as well as a desire for concrete, tangible, engagement with worldly transformations (Withers, 2012, p. 244 emphasis added) 1…”

“…Responding to Cixous' reflections, in this paper, the main author (name abbreviation N) briefly outlines the historical context in which similar challenges to restrictive academic modes of representation began in the 1980s, in order to set the scene for an in‐depth contemporary feminist interrogation of what a substantive “Haptic” (Withers, 2012) reimagining of an “affective wisdom” writing approach might look like. This entails one of the author's senior practitioner leadership ex PhD student's (name abbreviation J) joining N in an exploratory “participatory consciousness” (Heshusius, 1994) writing approach.…”