What I Called a Limitation
- Indhira Udofia
- Apr 16
- 6 min read
Mapping the Tapestry — Entry 01 | April 2026
Mapping the Tapestry is the archive in practice. Each entry begins with an unedited artifact — a paper, a note, a fragment — retrieved from the years before the methodology had its name. The Anancy Webwork trace that follows is not commentary on the artifact. It is the web reading itself: Aunt Nancy sitting at the center, feeling what the old thread was already carrying.
The Artifact
Methodological Analysis, WGS 490 — Women & Gender Studies Senior Seminar
Indhira Udofia | 13 March 2012 | Undergraduate, age 23
And from the same semester, six weeks earlier:
'Thinking Critically about the Discipline' Response Paper, WGS 490
Indhira Udofia | 17 January 2012
In approaching the subject matter of faith and feminism as it relates to domestic violence against African American women, I understand my position to be extremely strained. Considering myself operating on the margins of both institutions, religion and feminism, I understand that there are various limitations in my project. — Methodological Analysis, March 2012
How do feminist scholars produce knowledge in academic institutions without replicating the oppressive forces that exist within traditional academia? More importantly, the question remains: who has the authority to create such knowledge, and who is being represented in the knowledge being produced? — Response Paper, January 2012
I was twenty-three years old. I was trying to write about faith and intimate partner violence in African American communities, and I was already inside everything I was trying to study — the Church, the feminist academy, the Black community whose ‘culture of violence’ the scholarship kept framing as pathology, and the tension between those institutions that nobody around me seemed willing to name.
I called all of this a limitation.
That is the artifact. And the trace is what Aunt Nancy sees when she picks that thread up now.
The Trace
The academy taught me to treat my position as a liability.
This is how the lesson arrives: you are required, in formal scholarship, to disclose your relationship to the subject matter. Then you are required to demonstrate that you have managed it — bracketed it, triangulated around it, found enough distance to produce claims that can travel beyond your particular, compromised vantage point. Positionality is something you confess and then quarantine. The goal is knowledge that looks like it arrived from nowhere in particular. The goal is a researcher who does not appear to be inside the web.
In March of 2012, I was following that grammar. I named what I could feel — the strainedness, the margin-dwelling, the double belonging and double suspicion — and then I framed it as something to be navigated. I understand that there are various limitations in my project. I was twenty-one and writing in the only register the academy had given me. I was trying to do valid scholarship. I was trying to sound like I had enough distance.
What I did not yet have language for was this: I was not limited by my position. I was positioned. And those are not the same thing.
Anancy Webwork — the methodology I have been building for the last decade, drawing from the Akan spider-trickster tradition as it was feminized and carried forward in the Gullah Sea Islands — names the thing I was circling in 2012. The spider at the center of the web does not arrive at a neutral field site and begin gathering data. She is already inside the web. She has always been inside it. Her authority to read it comes not from the distance she has managed to achieve from its tensions, but from the years of feeling them — knowing what a vibration in one thread means for the whole structure, knowing where the web bears weight and where it is fragile, knowing which strands are carrying obligation and which have been cut.
The researcher who studies an institution she is embedded in does not acquire positionality when she enters the field. She arrives already positioned — already holding obligations, already sensing the tensions, already registering in her body what the institution's official language cannot say. The question is not whether she is inside the web. The question is whether she will treat that interiority as a liability to manage or as a form of methodological standing to claim.
I spent fourteen years learning to call it standing.
The response paper from January of the same semester is the other thread. I was reading Najmabadi on the unavailability of certain intersections in feminist scholarship, Lee on the politics of dispersal versus collectivity in women of color studies, Salamon on the misrepresentation of transgender identities in feminist discourse. I was twenty-one, watching the academy strain to produce knowledge about bodies and lives and communities it was not shaped by, using frameworks that kept forcing connections that didn't exist or missing the ones that did. And I wrote:
Who has the authority to create such knowledge? Who is being represented in the knowledge being produced?
I wrote it as a methodological problem — a question about institutional representation. What I did not yet understand was that I was also writing a question about myself. About what it meant that I was sitting in that classroom, reading those articles, and feeling the gap between what the scholarship could hold and what my own body already knew.
The question I was asking — who has the authority? — is the question Aunt Nancy answers. The one who is already in the web has the authority. Not because of credential. Not because of professional training or institutional affiliation, though those matter. But because of what fourteen years of embodied reading produces that no course of study ever could: the somatic knowledge of where the web's obligations have been violated, the body-level understanding of what institutional harm feels like before the academy develops language for it.
I had that knowledge at twenty-three. I called it a limitation. I kept moving.
Here is what the archive is already carrying, which the trace is for:
In March of 2012, I wrote that the Black Church serves as a regulatory site within community — drawing on Toinette Eugene's argument that the Church's position in Black life makes it both the source of harm and the most legible site for repair. I wrote that to change the framing of intimate partner violence in Black communities, we have to change the language that surrounds the framing — not treating violence as cultural defect but as systems of oppression working together. I wrote that the Church cannot be engaged from outside its own idiom. You have to speak the language the community can receive.
This is the entertain-instruct-explain structure of Anancy Webwork, which I would not name for another decade. The Akan tradition holds that a story serves three functions simultaneously — entertainment, instruction, explanation — not sequentially, not separately, but in the same breath. The analysis must be legible in the community's register. It must name the governance system. It must account for the genealogy of the harm without exonerating the institution. All three at once.
I was already doing this in 2012. Trying to write about the Church and intimate partner violence in a way that didn't pathologize the community, that held the institution's regulatory power and its potential for repair simultaneously, that kept faith with the people inside the web even as it diagnosed the web's structure.
I called it a strained position. I called it a limitation.
Aunt Nancy calls it home base.
The methodology does not begin in the dissertation. That is the first fact Anancy Webwork asks you to hold. The Harm in the Hush Harbor study — the mixed-methods investigation of spiritual trauma in the Black Church that became the origin study for the method — began not when the IRB protocol was filed but years before. In the somatic intelligence of someone who had been shaped, governed, loved, and in certain ways harmed by the same institution she was studying. In the body that knew the web's grammar before it had scholarly language for it.
Fourteen years. That is the span between the undergraduate papers in this entry and the peer-reviewed methodology that is their heir. Fourteen years of being inside the web and slowly, slowly learning to call that interiority a methodology rather than a problem.
The archive is not just evidence of what I knew before I knew I knew it. It is evidence of what the academy asked me to do with that knowledge — quarantine it, distance it, frame it as limitation — and what I was already beginning, even then, to resist.
What I called a limitation was already the method. The position was always the standing.
Anancy Webwork is the subject of two articles in development: “Anancy Webwork: Reading the Haints within Aunt Nancy’s Web” (methodology article) and “Sitting at the Center: Anancy Webwork in Practice” (methodological case study). Inquiries welcome.
— Church Gworl Maroon
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