Emilie Glass - Blog Week 3 – Fictions of Feminist Ethnography

Emilie Glass  - Blog Week 3 – Fictions of Feminist Ethnography

Throughout her book, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, Kamala Visweswaran argues “for the convergence of two distinct epistemological shifts, on where gender ceases to hold the center of feminist theory, and one where the field fails to hold the center of anthropology. One shift signals the failure of feminist thinking, and the other, the failure of ethnography” (Visweswaran 1994: p 113). Her book focuses on key components that make up what feminist ethnography might look like, using both her own field notes as well as works from other A/anthropologists.

Visweswaran uses the actions of both subject and researcher in order for the reader to envision what a feminist ethnography might look like. Possibly the most compelling aspect of her work, for myself, is the way in which both subject and researcher are given power in the ethnographic process. I found it refreshing that not only did Visweswaran hold the researcher accountable in the ways in which they engage with their subjects and report their findings, but also that she recognized the ways in which the subject holds power – through betrayal and refusing the subject, for example – and the importance of these actions of power are in the ethnographic process.

Visweswaran describes how “a woman emerged out of a series of performances and positionings” and warns “not to render the category ‘Woman’ intelligible through recourse to sociological variables as abstract descriptions of reality” (76), and she also stakes the claim that, “insisting on the primacy of class puts us back at the elementary critique of what maintaining class at the center of materialist analysis excludes when other categories are subornidated to it” (92 – emphasis the author’s). In other words, Visweswaran pushes the researcher/reader to take into account positional identity instead of any social indicator at the heart of what makes up a person’s identity.

In my own work, I interview both white people and people of color as a white cis woman. I am particularly cognizant of the position of power my race and gender place me in when I speak to my respondents, and as such, Visweswaran’s work is relevant to my own. The fact that my respondents mostly identify as women, or as midwives, or as doulas, does not make them “the same” – I am unable to compare groups of my respondents to men, or doctors, for example. The heart of my analysis comes from the comparison of my respondents to each other because the “ways in which identity is sandwiched between home and community, homogeneity and comfort, between skin, blood, heart” that makes up who my respondents are, rather than being “women” (104).

Although Visweswaran doesn’t provide a “blueprint” on how to “do” feminist ethnography, her theories around failure and what not to do are helpful in my work. Through recognizing that “the displacement of the very epistemological center of feminism (gender) means that we can no longer describe women as women, but as subjects differently and sometimes primarily constituted by race, class and sexuality,” I must move beyond the feminist fallacy that the women in my study are a group that simply exists separately from men, making them the same (99). Rather, I will work to recognize the other factors that play into their social location and make their lived experience what it is beyond their gender, or even race and class.

Discussion Question:
What is the nature of the feminist project? What does feminist ethnography look like - what is its blue print, if you will?