topics, narratives, doubts

did i pick the wrong topic?  can i possibly write about what i'm learning?

ok, ok, wrong question - I can certainly write about everything i'm learning.  and i'm going to.  that's already established.  but is a completely open question whether I will manage to write anything good, and that's where I have been worried.

it's not that my interviews haven't been interesting - quite, quite the contrary!  i will confess that I am not sure if OTHER people would (or will) find them as interesting as I am, but I think the women (and man) I've been talking to are absolutely fascinating people.  and they have really interesting and sometimes unexpected answers to the main question of my research - why did you become an activist, and why a woman's activist in particular.  there's definitely a lot to work with.

maybe too much, but it's not that my subject is too broad.  i mean, it is broad - I am talking to activists from a lot of different sectors and ideologies - but there are really basic consistencies in their experiences and stories that would make it not terribly difficult to focus within the subject.  and i could focus on just one person or group as a sort of anchor for my story.

and it's not that my choice of subject is completely arbitrary or anything.  youth activism, women's rights, the global south... those are all not-random topics, right?  and young activists in the philippines are in a fairly unique situation, with the strong history of militant activism that was inspired by martial rule that my generation never experienced.  so the question of what motivates youth activists for woman's rights in this country is not something i totally pulled out of a hat, you know.

and yet ever since I started my interviews i haver been troubled by this nagging fear that I did, indeed, choose the wrong topic.  and I shake it off and tell myself that as long as this stuff is still interesting to me, as long as I enjoy thinking about it and writing about it and reading about it, it will probably all work out.  but i'm not quite convincing myself.

here are the problems:

1. neutrality.  there is no way for me to be impartial on this subject.  i agree way too strongly with what these activists are working for to be able to really step back from the situation and give it a proper critical analysis.  i mean, i think it would be hard for any decent person to say "hmm i'm going to neutrally analyze human trafficking and maternal mortality and look at the pros and cons" but maybe somebody else could, and maybe they would do a better job on this project.

but then I think, would I really want to spend months working on a project I don't personally care about?  like... let's see... well, in the same sort of genre, i could write about development banks and the politics behind where money gets distributed.  i mean, i couldn't actually write about that, because I don't know anything about it and I think it sounds pretty boring, BUT if I were to write about it, I think I could consider both the benefits the money can be used for and the problems in distribution - balanced-like, you know?  but I can't consider the cons of dedicating your life to helping battered woman escape their abusive relationships or providing emergency medical care to teenage girls suffering complications from back-alley abortions.  I feel like I should, like at some point I have to, but I can't.

2.  context.  there is SO MUCH. starting with colonialism, you know?  and now this sounds like one of my lolo's stories - "well, first I was born..."  but then the marcos' and martial law and the first quarter storm and EDSA - and then after that the rejectionists and the reaffirmists, the soc-dems and dem-socs and nat-dems, the Catholic Church, the activist tradition at UP, the struggles of women and feminists within the nationalist/communist movement, the NPA today, the root causes of violence in Mindanao, the pressures causing women to work in call centers or as OFW or to seek foreign marriages... i mean, there's just no way.  I can't fit all of that in anything remotely a decent length without oversimplifying to a criminal extent.  so while my topic itself isn't necessarily too big, everything necessary to understand it... well, that's another story.

3.  general interest.  this is actually the big one.  and while I said above that my topic isn't pulled out of a hat, I think it might seem like it is.  i am trying to imagine writing about this for a mainstream audience, imagining a readership that while not antagonistic ('cuz that's no fun to think about) is, at the very least, very busy and distracted.  because aren't we all.  and the question I am stuck with is, why should they care? I know why I care, but personal curiosity certainly can't be generalized.  i could write on this subject for an activism-oriented publication, or for a global-south oriented organization - and maybe for a woman's rights organization, but probably not, but maybe that's just cynicism talking - and certainly for an academic publication where i'd pretty much assume the reader will be bored and only reading because they have to - but my point is that I haven't figured out how to frame the stories of these activists in a way that is of any evident interest to people who would not be interested to begin with.  except for pulling cheap tricks like starting with a dramatic hospital or street scene and then pulling a fake-out to focus on the activists instead of what they're fighting.  which i guess i might do but i would hope i could do better.

4.  narrative. i'd like to have some sort of arc that I can use to make my project seem less like an assortment of individuals and more like a part of some sort of pattern or story.  and i can pull a story out of these interviews... i can pull out lots of stories, in fact, and take my pick.  but none of them are very honest.

for instance:  after the fall of marcos, filipinos thought the need for activism was over, and now that the younger generation is seeing the problems still plaguing society and returning to activism - but through new, tech-savvy methods.  or: after the fall of marcos, activism - in the traditional, rallies-and-demonstrations sense - remained strong, but it is only now that modern technologies are distracting the youth and they are turning to weaker "armchair activism" and the social movements are flagging.

or: after the fall of marcos, the tradition of women's rights activism strongly linked to the communist movement began to go out of favor, and the new women's rights activists are more politically diverse - and young activists represent a wide range of views.  or they don't.  or forget history, i could just tell the story of how the new generation of activists is motivated by what they witness in others, not by their own experiences.  or i could say the opposite.

and they are all supported by the interviews i have.  what do I do?  how do i pick?  it feels very wrong to just choose my favorite - i should be trying to write something true, right?  but how do I stay honest to what i'm seeing and hearing when it's all too damn complicated?

that was long.  you don't care about this.  but it's what i've been spending a lot of time thinking about (although this hastily-written post probably doesn't seem like it - what can i say, i got four hours of sleep and walked about fifteen miles today, don't hate)

i am beginning to formulate a plan - i've been working on it for a while now.  i keep having interviews, focusing on my main topic, but also diving more deeply into a few of the issues women's rights activists are working on - specifically rep. health (and the bill thereof), sex ed (and the controversy over an education official's decision to incldue it in the schools), and VAW (and the law that was passed a while ago).  and in those discussion talk not only about what youth activists are doing/thinking, but what trends they observe in their peers.  and then also talk to some non-activists (which i have already done a little bit).

i still feel like it will take some squeezing to make a coherant story out of it - but i'll wait and see.  so far there are some definite patterns in what i've been hearing on the subjects.

what would those stories look like?  youth activists try to motivate their peers - who support the RH bill but are not very vocal about it - into pressuring politicians to support it.  (problems with this story... i'm not quite sure yet if youth activists actually are working to mobilize their peers.  they don't bring it up unless i ask about it - obviously problematic).  or: young people, with new sexual practices (in call centers) as well as old ones (young pregnancies) have a high demand for sex ed, which is being denied them by the cath. church and gov't.  as the gov't pressures the education ministry to go back on its plans to teach sex ed in elementary schools, young volunteers both petition for sex ed in schools and provide it on the streets themselves thru various youth RH groups.  (this one has some serious class issues - access to contraceptives and info is readily available for the middle class, not for the lower classes.  but middle class kids are the ones who are more comfortable talking about sex - and therefore, i am thinking (need to hear more about it) more likely to actually petition for sex ed).  or: while the phils have a long tradition of silence about abuse within families (b/c of the shame it brings on a family to discuss it) young women who have experienced abuse themselves are fighting to educate their peers to help end the culture of silence.  (sounds good, huh?  pity it's way more complicated than that).

anyway.  those are my working ideas.  my strategy right now is in my interviews, after asking about motivations (and talking for like an hour), i throw out - "so, how bout that RH bill?"  i try to keep the questions open-ended at first (to avoid just completely making up a story) but after a while push a little more on the intergenerational question.  repeat this for a few more weeks and then look over it all and see if a less-troubled, more-true story pops out at me.

not sure if that's what i should be doing, though.  this is all rather new to me.  and rather overwhelming.

good thing it's also really interesting!

AHHHH I NEED TO SLEEP