Fictions of Feminist Ethnography - Ezra

Kamala Visweswaran opens her collection of essays Fictions of Feminist Ethnography with an attempt to untangle the relationship between the writing practices of fiction, autobiography and ethnography. She describes each field of representation as embedded within a complex of power investments and strategic positionings. As part of a decolonial project Visweswaran proposes methodological cross-pollination and emphasises points of proximity that undo traditional conceptions of these literatures' boundedness. She interrogates the rhetorical devices, authority and positionality deployed across each mode and identifies the dangers harbored within their pretensions. Of particular interest for her is how the legacies of positivism continue to diminish the perceived value of confessional narrative and collective world-building. She also brings into relief the tensions between the unitary project of ethnography which seeks to incorporate ‘the other’ and the skepticism of feminist anthropology which posits a series of antagonisms.

Similarly, she criticizes feminism’s desire for synchrony and sameness which undermines the articulation and self-determination of disparate heteroglossic subjects. In light of this dilemma, Visweswaran advances, “a series of experiments not programmatic solutions” (10).  She considers how a feminist epistemology may be capable of challenging and enriching the method of experimental ethnography and vice versa through a “hermeneutics of vulnerability”, or an incessantly self-reflexive anthropology equipped to render a type of “self writing about like selves”(29).

This latter problematic begs the question, if we are asked to engage in these intersubjective operations from relatively privileged stand-points, how can we trust ourselves to construct a rubric of recognition that is not inherently structured by betrayal? How can we avoid digesting ‘silence’, 'resistance' and ‘recalcitrance’ in the service of a perverse ventriloquism? Can the ideals of a community, rather than authority, and collaboration, rather than disaffection, be achieved when researchers continue to inhabit the context of materially inequitable institutions?