Book dossier

Kaleidoscope notes

by Stacy Linn Holman Jones

Striving to express the lived experience of women's music at The Club, Stacy Holman Jones has created a text that is itself performative, and the reader cannot resist playing a starring role. Her evocative narrative slips in and out of prose, dialogue, and poetry. Field notes and song lyrics are staged as inseparable parts of the events of social meaning occurring between ethnographer and field site, between reader and text. Jones is haunted by the specters of Reliability and Validity, motivated by the goals of multivocality and multiple truths, and driven by the music. She is also driven by the mystery and complexity of women's music; a category which is impossible to capture, tame, or pin down. In exploring dynamics of race and gender in the club as an organization, Jones refuses to reduce the richness of her observations to simplistic, categorical statements. This innovative ethnography is an important move toward turning the postmodern critique into a lyrical and complex expression of social experience.