“The gravel is my place”: writing policies and resistances

Abstract

The problem addressed in this article is how we can produce fissures in the normatized model of academic writing with which we are historically familiar. Considering this question, we present a theoretical essay and a writing experience that lies on the idea of us confronting the formula objectivity-neutrality-universality that has plastered our scientific practices for centuries. We seek to follow the trails of the different voices that constitute us, so that we can perform polyphonic and decolonized self-writings. Supported by female writers and theorists and by women with whom we share our day-to-day lives, we defend the assumption that the hegemony of a narrative monoculture – north-centered, masculinist – inside the academy, has as final purpose to mute the voices of the women who produce knowledge. In this essay, we emphasize the erased trails of those voices and writings, decreasing the distance between the green academic lawn and the tortuous gravel tracks of the everyday life. We conclude stating that counter-hegemonic epistemologies, constituting writing and narrative policies and the production of knowledge that are welcoming to the polyphony of life, must be therefore radically non-disciplinary and insurgently undisciplined.