Jumping to Conclusions

So I should be working on Chapter Seven, but my mind just hasn't been there--it's been on the Conclusion. Perhaps speaking to my strong desire to end this process. But rather than staring blankly on Chapter Seven, I'm working ahead on the end--just to be sure I'm working on something.

Yesterday I studied five different versions of book conclusions and I believe I'm somewhere between two of them. But I did not that a number of my favorite books in my collection opted for short epilogues and I'm wondering if I can get away with that for the diss. But here are the five approaches I focused on--

Simply Topical: A Hard Fight for We, one of my favorite histories, does not have a chapter of final conclusions or implications. Instead, the last chapter of the text discusses the consequences of "freedom" during the Reconstruction era on Black women's families. In many respects it is the next logical topic to discuss after talking about work and labor--how did this work affect their personal lives. But while on one level it is simply the next topic, it works as a final argument to say that the transformation in women's work DID have an impact on their lives and their families. There really is nothing simple about this last chapter as Schwalm also uses the last chapter as an opportunity to discuss how White authorities attempted to mold Blacks into a subservient working class. Implications for diss--the way my diss is organized, focusing on single individuals rather than topics, there is no one person who should/could come next to close the work so this method is out.

Conversation + Coda: Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture edited by Jacqueline Royster and Ann Marie Mann Simpkins probably isn't the best model for a diss since it is multi-authored. The book ends with comments from the contributors on each other's chapters and the work as a whole. It is a neat way to end a book and won't work for my diss for obvious reasons; however, it did get me thinking about what the figures in my book would say if they had the opportunity to comment on each other's work. So although there won't be such a conversation in my conclusion, it did encourage me to make sure the voices of all the women in the study appear in the end as well.

Being a Part of the Solution: In Beyond the Double Bind, Kathleen Hall Jamieson argues that women in politics face a number of Catch-22s or rhetorical binds that argue women have no place in politics (that's the quick and dirty--I'm not doing her argument enough justice). So her final chapter is both a caveat--how women can place these binds on other women--and a picture of the solution--how women can shatter, reframe, move around these binds. I think this type of "activist" ending works well for a theoretical work like this. The theory is about a problem and so you end by proposing a solution. Not really helpful for my diss I don't think.

Writing Yourself In: Roxanne Mountford's The Gendered Pulpit is another favorite book of mine because she performs an ethnography in a rhetorical study. Pretty cool. As a result, the first person voice is an important part of this work which I love. To introduce the text, Mountford discusses her personal experiences in the text and she does the same in the conclusion. But she really uses her experiences as a child, and as a researcher in the various churches she attended to answer one question: How do you know that the rhetorical strategies these women used have anything to do with their gender? This is critique that all of us who work in race or gender studies face, and in my case, I get this a lot for studying race AND gender--in particular--I have to answer repeatedly an underlying question of--Why are Black women a relevant/important enough group to study?? I would like to write myself into the conclusion, but because there is no first person presence in the study, I believe it would sound funny. I open with a portrait of Condoleezza Rice and the plan was always to return to her in the conclusion, but I haven't come up with a satisfactory way to do that.

Against Conclusions: The last piece of Cheryl Glenn's Rhetoric Retold is subtitled just that--against conclusions. This is another case of the author writing herself into the work, but her presence is more subtle than Mountford's. In the end, however, Glenn makes her presence known and discusses how many thought she would not be able to find women in rhetorical history and that she at best could hope to write a negative history (that is a history about the places where women were left out). But she makes it clear that she was able to find women where she wasn't supposed to and that this work should be a beginning rather than an end (hence against conclusions). The final word is about the role of silence in women's rhetorics and becomes in many ways the foreword to her next book Unspoken (which I blame for my hesitation on Chapter Seven because I'm thinking about changing it to highlight silence as a rhetorical strategy--sigh). I love this ending but I think it works largely because it is a book and not a dissertation. But I do want to also be able to speak to the beginning nature of this work and how it fills important absences in scholarship that many seem to have a hard time acknowledging even exist.

So there are my models--I'm somewhere between Writing Yourself In and Against Conclusions with the addition of the usually dissertation stuff (like future research/limitations of study). My diss avoids sounding like a typical study--there's no literature review chapter, no "discussion" section--so I want to make sure the conclusion flows with the overall narrative tone. I think these models are helping me get in the right frame of mind to do that. We'll see.