This paper addresses questions of validity, textual authority, and the rhetorical handling of the researcher-as-self by examining current thinking on poststructural approaches in the work of Patti Lather and Laurel Richardson. The first section introduces the idea of inquiry validity as an "incitement to discourse," a view which changes the character of the social science report from a closed narrative with a tight argument structure into a more open narrative with holes and questions and the admission of partiality. The next section focuses on ethos, which is associated with the character of the speaker and how authors achieve textual authority. Lather's and Richardson's approaches to qualitative inquiry suggests a reinvention of the "scientific ethos" which is then applied to a reading of a poststructural educational text by Erica McWilliams. The following section describes the notion of a "transgressive self," one who fluidly positions itself in multiple places in the discourse and thereby constructs a text more radical than an openly revolutionary text could be. In a concluding section, it is noted that McWilliam's dissertation is presented in traditional form with appeals to authority and validity but also with experimental use of a transgressive self. Contains 39 references. (JB)