Ginger's Amazingly Ambiguous Feelings Toward Her Thesis

It is June, and I have done nothing, and this not merely an exaggeration, towards researching my thesis. It is only my Master's thesis but still I need to have my notes down, and be ready to write by September. I am rapidly running out of loan money, and need to start a Ph.D program by Fall '08. One would think this urgency would compel me into reading the many books on Mormon history that are now residing on my kitchen table. But no....as evident in my current state of blogging instead of reading.

H just asked why I was feeling so bad about my thesis, and I pointed out that ambiguous does not mean bad....it's just a middle ground, a neutral kind of feeling. I don't feel bad about my thesis, nor do I think it's particularly boring, etc. But I am not jumping with joy over the thought of starting it either. I find it very hard to drudge up any kind of emotion for it period. Even the theory part just feels blah to me. Normally the theory stuff leaves in a state of near giddiness.

A lot has to do with the circumstances of last semester. By the end of last December, it was apparent that my original thesis project on Hispanic Pentecostals was not going to work. First, the church I was observing was kind of funky. Whenever you study charismatics, there is the whole issue that they are going to try to convert you. And while they wanted to convert me, they wanted to convert H even more. I guess they figured they'd get my soul along with his? I felt ethically in a very strange place. I knew that they weren't going to convert either of us and felt slightly dishonest going to their church allowing them to continue to think that our souls were going to be "God's" soon enough.

Second, after doing a bunch of reading on ethnography, I started to have doubts concerning my role as ethnographer. Here I was a white woman in a Hispanic church in the South. I had creditability due solely to my marriage to a Hispanic man (and because I grew up in a Pentecostal Chruch of God), and that made me feel like a fraud. No I know I'm not Hispanic, and sure there was a time when I thought that I could somehow become "Mexican" due to my marriage but those romantic notions are long gone. I started to feel uncomfortably like a colonizer, sitting there taking my notes. Needless to say I had to stop this research. I don't know how I feel about ethnography (more ambiguousness). What role does the gaze play in such situations? Is there a way to gaze and not be a part of oppression? I just don't know.

All of that side rant lead to my having to change my thesis project two years into my MA. I had another side project I was working on: Mormon Fundamentalists. It was a piece I did on religion and media concerning Jon Krakhauer's book Under the Banner of Heaven, and it was about how media has an investment in drawing pictures of extremes. This lead to an interest in the stories of women leaving Mormon Fundamentalist groups, and the tropes of violence in these stories. After a semester working on Judith Butler, I thought I had some ideas about how to approach this topic from a more philosophical standpoint. This however lead to the very traumatic experience of leaving one advisor (who I really do like) and moving to another adviser (whom I also really like) who seem to hate each other. It was horrible, and I felt like I was going through a break up. Argh.

Top this off with preparing for my comps, applying for a TA and then learning that my mispronunciation of words was so bad I was being not considered (I did end up with the TA), and well it just all left a bad taste in my mouth. Couple this with some pretty negative impressions of academia in general built up over the last 7 years, and well, I just feel "ugh" about it all. It's hard for me to get excited knowing that so much of the work I do also rests on very superficial impressions of me. And then a lot of it has to do with the ego (super huge egos) of those who are supposed to be guiding us. It just seems very petty, and that makes me sad.

There was a time when I thought being an academic was so important to the world. I remember one of my English professors saying that we were the guardians of culture. And my religion professor said we were priests in the temple of the academy. Those ideas are grand. And really it's anything but grand. Professors act like they're gods because they're self-important not because they really care about knowledge. Everything is a blow to them. I watched friends get dropped by professors because they said the wrong thing. One wrong thing, and bam their whole academic career was flushed down the toilet. I have watched professors sacrifice their health and personal lives in their relentless pursuit of glory. There might have been something noble about this loss had it been in the name of knowledge but I'm not convinced this was/is the case. And it just really makes me ill.

Now that I've purged all that here, perhaps, I can get on my with thesis. I do love knowledge, and if I have to work this is the only work that I want to do. On to Mormon history....