For this week’s special “choose your own adventure” reading, I selected Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Frankenberg was a social scientist by trade and earned her PhD in the History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary field. Her first book, White Women, Race Matters, takes a decidedly interdisciplinary approach to the subject, making extensive use of oral history methodology.
In light of recent class discussion, one of my first areas of interest when reading this work was Frankenberg’s treatment of oral history sources. The book’s interview appendix offers some insight here, as we can see that Frankenberg assigned pseudonyms and omitted details that could trace back to the narrators. There are often significant (and productive) conversations regarding the use of the narrator’s words around challenging subjects. While the pseudonyms and redactions in Frankenberg’s co-authored texts are likely to prevent anyone save close friends (should those friends happen to read the book) from linking the narrator’s words to the narrator herself, I am interested in what the narrators may have thought upon reading the completed work.
Additionally, I believe that, given the class project, much of the discussion around using narrators’ words during their lives on “challenging” subjects revolves around a more surmountable challenge than one many oral historians may face. In Frankenberg’s case, the challenge was righting the course of feminism, now caught in the throes of implicit racism, fundamentally failing to meet its intent. This is no small challenge, so what might the relationship be between the potential injurious nature of using the narrator’s words and the severity of the challenge? I am certain that I have no clear answer to that question, especially since “injurious” has a range of severity as well.
I was also interested in Frankenberg’s grounding of her subjects within her narrative. Are the narrators used only as discourse, or are they embodied within the narrative? I find her methodology in obtaining her narrators important here, since all thirty were chosen with significant deliberation. There is also no doubt that taking a discursive track favors Frankenberg’s argument, which centered on feminist discourse itself.
Missing from the work’s appendix of interviews is archival information, though this was not a universal practice at the time. Sadly, without that archival information, we cannot locate the recordings of these interviews. However, audio recordings seem to become more complex in such a setting as this. The narrators have pseudonyms, and the transcripts are redacted, but how should audio recordings be treated in the modern day? How well should they be protected? Should the audio recording be scrubbed of any potentially injurious information as is done to the transcript? I see a significant area of concern with the interconnectedness of smartphones and smart devices. How could an oral historian even account for the number of digital copies made between downloading the file from the recorder and its final archiving? I do believe that there is additional care warranted in the handling of recordings and, by extension, keeping track of digital copies.
Perhaps the challenge of limiting the distribution of copies would be easier to overcome by investing in more vintage tech–there would certainly be a lower chance of inadvertently sharing an actual cassette tape. Naturally, this particular concern with protecting information in the interconnected world of today resides more so in subjects who could face legal challenges, or even the threat of violence, if connected to their words in a recording or on a transcript.