A. Kopit - Fictions of Feminist Ethnography

Alison Kopit – Fictions of Feminist Ethnography: Silence as Resistance

Throughout Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, Kamala Visweswaran examines the role of silence in ethnography from multiple angles. In Chapter Three, she begins by asking, “How do we arrive at what we call the ‘truth’? And conversely, what is the truth produced by a specific kind of epistemology?” (48). She continues to preference Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledge” (48) over absolute Truth, examining silence and gaps in communication as fieldwork data. This discussion and personal case study sets her up to continue discussing silence through a potential subject’s refusal to be a “subject,” and how this refusal becomes a subject in and of itself in Chapter Four. This chapter presents a case study in which Visweswaran considers the way that silences create meaning in an ethnographic context.

Visweswaran questions herself about whether the feminist anthropologist is replicating a colonial gaze in the desire to learn and inscribe meaning into even that which is purposefully withheld. Contrasting with Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (68), Visweswaran considers a lack of voice as not the absence of agency, but the presence of resistance. In this context, silence is thus a way of claiming space and power, albeit minimal. Visweswaran writes, “M’s refusal to participate in the recording of her past problematizes our own assumptions about the relationships between memory, experience, historical record, and written testimony. I want to argue that it is in rethinking such relationships that refusing the subject becomes indeed the ground of a feminist ethnography” (67). What does it mean, then, to take that silence away by continuing to interpret and attribute meaning to it? Are we replicating the same patriarchal and colonial structures that feminist ethnography strives to distance itself from? If feminist ethnography seeks to read alternate meaning into the silence, what other re-framings should we be including in our methodologies? How do we do it without maintaining the colonial gaze?

I identified Visweswaran’s reframing of silence as particularly salient to ethnography that comes from the disability community. In his Disability Oppression and Resistance course, Jim Charlton often talks about spaces of resistance. These spaces are often unsuspecting, and the subjects are often unsuspecting as well, because of the expectations that society holds for disabled people. In the case of the disabled subject, silence is sometimes the only resistance the subject is able to access. Places such as nursing homes, institutions, and hospitals, become spaces where people resist to survive through creating underground networks and modes of communication in secret, feigning ignorance, keeping quiet to protect other disabled people, and refusing to engage with authority. These can all be considered mechanisms of self-preservation and resistance. I have seen this played out in disability spaces where I have worked, such as group homes and schools, and have come to reframe opposition and refusal as ways of claiming space.

I also often think of my own experiences navigating the mental health system. I have often conveniently left certain symptoms out of the conversation, taken up a specific persona in the psych doctor’s office, and left certain experiences unsaid in an effort to get what I need. Through my experiences, and comparing notes with others, I have come to a place where I believe that disabled people—especially women—are usually better off being skeptical of medical authority. I have considered interviewing other people about their experiences circumnavigating the healthcare system. However, I have often come up against the same questions that Visweswaran asks about wanting to respect the silence—and through it, low level of power—that we have garnered. Why continue to make disabled person subject? If our silence is so valuable, is there also value in interrupting it? How do we share advice in navigating a system that is not made to benefit us while also respecting each other’s right to this silence, or low level of resistance?

Works Cited

Visweswaran, Kamala. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. University of Minnesota Press, 1994.