Fictions of Feminist Ethnography-- Hashim Ali

Fictions of Feminist Ethnography disarticulates the historical trajectory of trends in the field of ethnography and establishes a personal project of a post-colonial feminist ethnographer. Kamala Visweswaran’s collection of reflective essays perfectly encapsulates the primary goal of this course: articulating the distinction between method and methodology. As we discussed last week, “Methodology in its simplest definition generally refers to the theory of method, or the approach or technique being taken, or the reasoning for selecting a set of methods; context in which research problems are conceptualized” (Discussion GWS).  In particular, she lays out the problems of subject retrieval in her own particular context and how she addressed them?

The two issues that struck me the most included Visweswaran’s critiques of feminist theory and the notion of “field.” She problematizes feminist theory that only centers gender as an object of analysis and instead recommends inter-sectionality. Secondly, she complicates the notion of what constitutes as “field” in anthropological canon by drawing on her own multicultural background—a method she terms hyphenated ethnography. In relation to this phenomenon, she also describes the turn in anthropology known as “self-reflexivity” and the basic question she poses: “What are my own sites of privilege and loss?”        

This book made me think about my own project in multiple ways. My topic of interest is sexuality in post-colonial Pakistan. As a historian, I am primarily interested in studying the legal, medical and intellectual history of sexual minorities in Pakistan. My biggest dilemma has been the denial of the sexual category in the official archives of the post-colonial Pakistani nation-state. Using Viswewaran’s optic, I can turn this “failure” and silence into a “pivotal site of practice.” The second dilemma I faced includes the “field” sites for my oral history interviews. I wanted to interview gay Pakistanis in Chicago but I was hesitant as that might be the realm of diasporic studies. Visweraran’s approach helped me complicate the notion of “field” as along as I explain it in my positionality.

Questions:

As an historian I am conflicted by the lack of official archival records on the question of sexuality in the Pakistani context due to the nature of my subject. 

How does a historian reconcile with using mostly oral histories as an object of analysis?