Reflections and resources
On this page:
What I am reading and want to read.
What I am doing in class (exercise I have developed for my students)
What I am reading and want to read.
What I am doing in class (exercise I have developed for my students)
From outline to essay.
Dear students,
In this post I describe my writing process by laying out the different steps I used in a recent writing project.
I recently had to write a book review for a journal and I had very little time to do it. Here is how I went from outline to essay in 2 days.
Step one- the outline.
First, I wrote a very basic outline that looked like this:
Step two- adding flesh.
Then, I needed to go back and look at the notes and highlights I had made inside the book. But I wanted to make sure that I didn't waste time going on tangents. So, before I looked at the book, I fleshed out my outline a little bit more. I was trying to create parameters for myself, so I would be focused during my re-reading. This is what I came up with:
Step three: adding more flesh and some skin:
Then, I went through the notes I had made inside the book and hunted for the questions I had set for myself in step two. This is what my outline looked like after step three l
Now that I had my outline and knew what each paragraph in my review would look like, I began to write sentences. This is what my first draft looked like, I first wrote a paragraph that I thought would be the introduction. Notice that when I can't immediately think of the word I want, I just write x, and then I come back later and fill in a word or I rewrite the sentence. The idea in this stage is to just get some ideas down on paper, because once I have some ideas down, I can read them, look at them, and evaluate them and think about whether or not they work. The punctuation and grammar here is also not great, to be honest, I wrote this in the notes app on my phone while I was out on a walk.
Draft introduction
The study of intimacy is an important x for globalisation scholars. Although scholars have pointed out that globalisation is not = modernisation. Many have shown that sex is an arena that is strongly affected by globalisation. Some of the ways globalisation shapes sexuality include commodification, Etc.
In this arena, xxx book contributes. Focuses on ways that marriage patterns have changed—commodification xx, xxx. But reflects also on ways that they haven’t—caste remains important. A key suggestion she makes is that changes lead to not conflict but concern for togetherness.
There’s a great deal of interest here. The history chapter is useful to show undergrads. We learn about Sri Lanka
But while I was writing this above paragraph, I realized I didn't like it. It was too vague, I thought. I wanted my review to be more focused. The opening is too general, its talking about the entire field of globalization, not the particular part of the field that this book intervenes in. So then, I wrote the following, also on my phone :)
Whether I’m teaching a gender and sexuality course or an inequality one, I’m always on the hunt for scholarship that focuses on intimacy and globalisation. Such work allows me to address xxx
Methodological nationalism.
But also because intimacy is an important arena and a lens for the construction and maintenance of inequalities. Rules about who we can and can’t partner with.
Moreover, seeing global dimension of these patterns and mechanism of inequality provides students with xx
Consequently, I read xxx with a great deal of excitement. Here’s a book that promises xxx. And indeed in the history chapter it delivers. The theoretical framework seemed a little xx for a sociologist- focuses on self. But the book also discusses commodification, tradition, inter generational conflict, and the struggle to xxx single women. Also useful, exposure to categories, coastal versus. Xx. Useful for students.
Readers may also enjoy learning about Sri Lanka.
Step 5- creating lots of threads
In this step, I already have a strong sense of where things will go in the paper, meaning I know what I want to say, and i know where each of those pieces will go. So, I started writing various pieces down. I didn't necessarily write things in order. It didnt matter that I didnt write from beginning to end. I can write para 4 before para 2 because I already have an idea about where each of those bits will eventually go. The next stage will look a bit confusing and crazy because I wrote it out by hand on a notebook. This is just my process. I like to work in different media, as I feel it helps me think through the ideas. Also, at this stage I was writing down stuff directly from the book to remind myself of the author's argument, and I was also writing down my own thoughts. I tried to do this in different colours, so that later on I would know which was which at a glance.
In this post I describe my writing process by laying out the different steps I used in a recent writing project.
I recently had to write a book review for a journal and I had very little time to do it. Here is how I went from outline to essay in 2 days.
Step one- the outline.
First, I wrote a very basic outline that looked like this:
- Intro: why care about this book
- Summary: what the book is about
- Theoretical framework:
- Strengths: what the book does well
- Weaknesses: What does the book not do well?
- Conclusion: Who would like to read this book
Step two- adding flesh.
Then, I needed to go back and look at the notes and highlights I had made inside the book. But I wanted to make sure that I didn't waste time going on tangents. So, before I looked at the book, I fleshed out my outline a little bit more. I was trying to create parameters for myself, so I would be focused during my re-reading. This is what I came up with:
- Intro: why care about this book?
- Summary: what the book is about: what methods does it use and what was the author looking for
- Theoretical framework: what theories/literature is the book anchored in
- Strengths: what the book does well-
- Weaknesses:
- Conclusion: Who would like to read this book- Professors who want to diversify their syllabus/ scholars of globalization/scholars of South Asian
Step three: adding more flesh and some skin:
Then, I went through the notes I had made inside the book and hunted for the questions I had set for myself in step two. This is what my outline looked like after step three l
- Intro: why care about this book? Its about globalization and love- so what?
- Summary: what the book is about- broadly- how women narrate agency in romance/love
- Theoretical framework: what theories/literature is the book anchored in- linguistic anthropology/pyschology
- Strengths: what the book does well- interesting finding: people say they don’t care about caste anymore but the author notices that they actually give it a lot of thought
- Weaknesses: The argument is predicated on not believing women- which is problematic when women are talking about violence or abuse
- Conclusion: Who would like to read this book- Professors who want to diversify their syllabus/ scholars of globalization/scholars of South Asian
Now that I had my outline and knew what each paragraph in my review would look like, I began to write sentences. This is what my first draft looked like, I first wrote a paragraph that I thought would be the introduction. Notice that when I can't immediately think of the word I want, I just write x, and then I come back later and fill in a word or I rewrite the sentence. The idea in this stage is to just get some ideas down on paper, because once I have some ideas down, I can read them, look at them, and evaluate them and think about whether or not they work. The punctuation and grammar here is also not great, to be honest, I wrote this in the notes app on my phone while I was out on a walk.
Draft introduction
The study of intimacy is an important x for globalisation scholars. Although scholars have pointed out that globalisation is not = modernisation. Many have shown that sex is an arena that is strongly affected by globalisation. Some of the ways globalisation shapes sexuality include commodification, Etc.
In this arena, xxx book contributes. Focuses on ways that marriage patterns have changed—commodification xx, xxx. But reflects also on ways that they haven’t—caste remains important. A key suggestion she makes is that changes lead to not conflict but concern for togetherness.
There’s a great deal of interest here. The history chapter is useful to show undergrads. We learn about Sri Lanka
But while I was writing this above paragraph, I realized I didn't like it. It was too vague, I thought. I wanted my review to be more focused. The opening is too general, its talking about the entire field of globalization, not the particular part of the field that this book intervenes in. So then, I wrote the following, also on my phone :)
Whether I’m teaching a gender and sexuality course or an inequality one, I’m always on the hunt for scholarship that focuses on intimacy and globalisation. Such work allows me to address xxx
Methodological nationalism.
But also because intimacy is an important arena and a lens for the construction and maintenance of inequalities. Rules about who we can and can’t partner with.
Moreover, seeing global dimension of these patterns and mechanism of inequality provides students with xx
Consequently, I read xxx with a great deal of excitement. Here’s a book that promises xxx. And indeed in the history chapter it delivers. The theoretical framework seemed a little xx for a sociologist- focuses on self. But the book also discusses commodification, tradition, inter generational conflict, and the struggle to xxx single women. Also useful, exposure to categories, coastal versus. Xx. Useful for students.
Readers may also enjoy learning about Sri Lanka.
Step 5- creating lots of threads
In this step, I already have a strong sense of where things will go in the paper, meaning I know what I want to say, and i know where each of those pieces will go. So, I started writing various pieces down. I didn't necessarily write things in order. It didnt matter that I didnt write from beginning to end. I can write para 4 before para 2 because I already have an idea about where each of those bits will eventually go. The next stage will look a bit confusing and crazy because I wrote it out by hand on a notebook. This is just my process. I like to work in different media, as I feel it helps me think through the ideas. Also, at this stage I was writing down stuff directly from the book to remind myself of the author's argument, and I was also writing down my own thoughts. I tried to do this in different colours, so that later on I would know which was which at a glance.
Step 6. First draft.
Next I wrote a first draft of the paper. Here's what that looked like. After this stage, I actually sent the essay to a friend and asked her for feedback.
Whether I’m teaching a gender and sexuality course or an inequality one, I’m always on the hunt for scholarship that comes at issues surrounding intimacy (love, sex, marriage) from a global perspective. Qualitative research in this genre tends to do two things very well, both central to my pedagogical goals: 1) They excavate the specificities of the local; exhuming the distinctive ways that a particular setting, with a particular history and a particular set of hierarchies has been moulded by global processes and connections. 2) They cast light on the shady underbelly of globalization by revealing the part transnational processes play in producing and reproducing various kinds of inequalities— gender, class, race, caste and national. By including such work on my syllabi, I hope to help students get past long-running and problematic dichotomies that segregate the Global South and re-animate vexing issues like methodological nationalism. Consequently, I was very excited to read Abeyasekera’s recent offering, which promises to unravel the “tangled relationship between marriage, morality, and the desire for modernity,” for middle-class Sri Lankans, for whom, these issues are tied up also with class, caste and status concerns.
Abeyasekera draws on 51 life history interviews, conducted over a period of 18 months, as well as her own recollections of weddings she attended as a child growing up in Sri Lanka, to draw a portrait of the transformations this society has experienced. The bulk of the book meditates on the narratives about love and marriage produced by three generations of women—mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and aunts as well as a few husbands and brothers. She spoke not only with married women but also single women, divorced women, and those who had experienced “failed marriages.” Through these data, Abeyasekera was concerned primarily with agency— how women narrate it and how it is revealed or concealed in their presentations of self. She finds that for middle-class Sri Lankans, it is choice rather than love that makes marriage modern. So, being modern is about being able to make the “right choice.” This concern with choice, moreover, is a cohesive force, one that serves to connect older and younger generations. While globalization of love scholars have sometimes considered the transformation of intimacy in modernity to implicate people in duty versus desire dilemmas, that force young people to choose either love or familial ties in Sri Lanka, a broad focus on the importance of “making the right choice” involves family members in a collective effort to project modernity by shoring up the image of their daughter as a rational, responsible person capable of making good choices. Since a projection of modernity is a family project, women feel accountable to their families in their choices. The pressure to make the right choice combines with broader pressures to display respectability to make agency feel to women, not like a form of freedom but as a burden.
The book is anchored in narrative psychology, linguist anthropology, and critical discursive psychology, frameworks that will appeal more to sociologists with a strong interdisciplinary bent. Yet, there is much in the empirical portions of the book for a broader sociological audience, those interested in learning about how globalization shapes class aspirations, modern subjectivities, and structures of inequality. On this point, Abeyasekera shows how structures of class and caste have shifted under pressure from globalization. She finds, for instance, that although her participants claim to no longer care about caste, they appear in practice to give it a lot of consideration. The ongoing resilience of this structure in the face of modern discourses that problematize it requires explanation. Abeyasekera, who sees caste through a Bourdieusian lens as connected with habitus, and providing a form of distinction, suggests that the resilience of casteism is shaped by the transformations to traditional structures of hierarchy wrought by global processes. Amidst the transformations heralded by modernity, low caste people, she tells us have been able to acquire education, move to urban areas, find professional jobs, and move gradually into middle-class locations. While improved access to wealth, education and even political power has allowed low-caste people to “shed their traditional caste-bound identities,” the resulting churn in status hierarchies has created an anxiety amongst families, who worry about the authenticity of a prospective spouse’s status claims. Consequently, Abeyasekera argues, caste has become a way of asserting a distinction that is “irrefutable.” The finding about the ongoing importance of caste is fascinating, and although the author’s explanation does help us understand how globalization shapes and reshapes structures of inequality, the conflation of class and caste leaves probably obscures some of the deeper dynamics at play here. At one point in the discussion, for instance, Abeyasekera uses the word “stock” a term that seems to reveal an immutability and an inescapability that makes caste unlike class, and perhaps more like race. Still, the finding that under pressure from globalization, caste has intertwined with class to create new barriers for subordinated groups, is an interesting one, and the discussion of these dynamics is certainly one of the strengths of the book.
Despite the book’s strengths in mapping the ways that marriage, morality, and modernity come together in globalizing Sri Lanka, I found myself quibbling with some of the author’s analytical choices. In some portions of the book, the argument rests on the author’s reluctance to believe her participants’ narratives. Certainly, ethnographers do encounter this xxx. Participants do sometimes stretch the truth for various reasons, often in service to self-presentation goals. Indeed, such moulding of the “truth” is itself a kind of data (see Pugh 2013). Abeyasekera uses her discovery of this possible glossing of facts to make an important argument, the women are leaving out some details or representing them in particular ways, she says, because they are concealing their agency. In this way, these women differ in important ways from other women Abeyasekera interviewed, who go out of their way to project an agency that allows them to assert choice and modernity. The argument is certainly important and compelling, yet there are points in the book when the reluctance to accept women’s narratives felt uncomfortable to me. For instance, when participants narrated the helplessness, they felt in the face of coercion or abuse. When it comes to such subjects of abuse, it is harder to go along with an argument predicated on disbelieving women.
Despite these analytical issues, or perhaps because of them, I do consider this a useful text for teachers of globalization/inequality/sexuality and for scholars. Those interested in the now decades long and growing literature on love, sex and globalization will find much to interest them in this finely textured portrait of a class group buffeted by globally shaped change. Scholars and students of South Asia, especially those interested in gender, will similarly find the book interesting. The book can also be useful for those professors, who like me wish to diversify their syllabi with more voices and perspectives from the Global South. For instance, the book will illustrate for students how social categories (e.g., class, gender) are contingent on context. In Sri Lanka, other ways of sorting, “low-country”, “Kandyans”, Indian/Sinhala are in play.
Finally, this is what my final draft looks like:
In the final stage, I made revisions based on feedback, cleaned and polished the text, formatted everything, added in my references and I was done.
The Weight of Choice.
Making the Right Choice: Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lank, by Asha L. Abeyasekera. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021. 214 pp. $34.95 paper. ISBN: 9781978810303
Fauzia Husain
University of Waterloo
[email protected]
Categories: Globalization, Sex and Gender
Word Count: 1189
Whether I’m teaching a gender and sexuality course or an inequality one, I’m always on the hunt for scholarship that comes at issues surrounding intimacy (love, sex, marriage) from a global perspective. Outstanding works in this genre tend to do two things very well, both central to my pedagogical goals: 1) They excavate the specificities of the local; exhuming the distinctive ways that a particular setting, with a particular history, and a particular set of hierarchies has been moulded by global processes and connections. 2) They cast light on the shady underbelly of globalization by revealing the part transnational processes play in producing and reproducing various kinds of inequalities— gender, class, race, caste, and nationality. By including such work on my syllabi, I hope to help students get past long-running and problematic dichotomies that segregate the Global South from the metropole and that help re-animate vexing issues like metrocentrism in our curriculum. Consequently, I was very excited to read Abeyasekera’s recent offering, which promises to unravel the “tangled relationship between marriage, morality, and the desire for modernity,” through an examination of middle-class Sri Lankans’ marriage practices.
Abeyasekera draws on 51 life-history interviews conducted over a period of 18 months, as well as her own recollections of weddings she attended as a child growing up in Sri Lanka, to draw a fascinating portrait of an emerging Sri Lankan middle-class, produced and tempered by global forces. The bulk of the book meditates on the narratives about love and marriage produced by three generations of women—mothers, daughters, grandmothers and aunts, as well as a few husbands and brothers. In parsing these data, Abeyasekera was concerned primarily with excavating new knowledge about women’s agency— how they narrate it and how it is revealed or concealed in their presentations of self.
She finds that for middle-class Sri Lankans, being modern is about being able to make the “right choice.” This concern with choice, moreover, is a cohesive force, one that serves to connect, rather than tear apart older and younger generations. While some globalization-of-love scholars have argued that modernity implicates young people in a duty versus desire dilemma, compelling them to choose between romantic love or filial responsibility, in Sri Lanka, Abeyasekera tells us, modernization involves women in a different kind of quandary. In this context, a broad desire to appear modern involves younger and older family members in a collective effort to project their daughter as a rational, responsible person capable of making good choices. Since a projection of modernity is a family project, women feel accountable to their families for their choices. The weight of this accountability combines with broader social imperatives, which require women to display respectability, to make agency feel to women, not like a form of freedom but as a kind of burden.
Theoretically, the book is anchored in narrative psychology, linguistic anthropology, and critical discursive psychology, frameworks that will appeal more to sociologists with a strong interdisciplinary bent. Yet, there is much in the empirical portions of the book for a broader sociological audience, one interested in learning about how globalization shapes class aspirations, modern subjectivities, and structures of inequality. On this point, Abeyasekera shows how structures of class and caste have shifted under pressure from globalization. She finds, for instance, that although her participants claim to no longer care about caste, they appear in practice to give it a lot of consideration. The ongoing resilience of this structure in the face of modern discourses that problematize it, requires explanation. Abeyasekera, who sees caste through a Bourdieusian lens as a kind of dispositional issue, involving something like a habitus and providing distinction, suggests that the resilience of casteism is shaped in part by the transformations globalization has wrought upon traditional structures of hierarchy. As low caste people became better able to acquire education, move to urban areas, find professional jobs, and move gradually into middle-class locations, the resulting destabilization of status hierarchies created an anxiety amongst families, who worry about the authenticity of a prospective spouse’s status claims. Consequently, Abeyasekera argues, caste has become a way of asserting a distinction that is “irrefutable.”
The finding about the ongoing importance of caste is fascinating, and although the author’s explanation does help us understand how globalization shapes and reshapes structures of inequality, the conflation of class and caste may have obscured some of the deeper dynamics at play here. At one point in the discussion, for instance, Abeyasekera uses the word “stock,” a term that seems to reveal an immutability and an inescapability at the heart of caste structures, that make these sound less like class, and more like race. Still, the finding that under pressure from globalization, caste has intertwined with class to create new barriers for subordinated groups is an interesting one, and the discussion of these dynamics is certainly one of the strengths of the book.
Despite the book’s strengths in mapping the connections between marriage, morality, and modernity in globalizing Sri Lanka, I found myself quibbling with some of the author’s analytical choices. In later portions of the book, the argument about agency rests on the author’s reluctance to believe her participants’ narratives. Certainly, ethnographers do encounter a verifiability problem with interview data— participants do sometimes stretch the truth for various reasons, often in service to self-presentation goals. Indeed, such moulding of the “truth” is itself a kind of data (see Pugh 2013). Abeyasekera uses her discovery of inaccuracy in her participants’ narratives to make an important argument; some of the women (i.e., older women) are leaving out some details or representing them in particular ways, she says, because they are concealing their agency. In this way, these women differ in important ways from the younger women Abeyasekera interviewed, who went out of their way to project a capacity for choice-making that is a sign of agency and modernity in this context. The argument is certainly important and compelling, yet there are points in the book when the author’s reluctance to accept women’s narratives felt uncomfortable to me, for instance, when participants narrated the helplessness they felt in the face of coercion or abuse. When it comes to such topics as abuse, it is harder to go along with an argument predicated on disbelieving women.
Despite these analytical issues, or perhaps because of them, I do consider this a useful text for teachers of globalization/inequality/sexuality/family— students can benefit, I think, from chewing over the potential pitfalls of analytical choices. Thus, the book can certainly be useful for those professors, who like myself, wish to diversify their syllabi with more voices and perspectives from the Global South. The book should be of interest also, to scholars interested in the now decades long and growing literature on love, sex and globalization.
References:
- Pugh, Alison. 2013. “What Good Are Interviews for Thinking about Culture? Demystifying Interpretive Analysis.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 1:42–68.