Fictions of Feminist Ethnography -- Minjeong Kim

Fictions of Feminist Ethnography raised a question about feminist ethnographic positioning and subjectivity. Unlike a number of pioneer women anthropologists who used third-person objective accounts, Visweswaran considered the first-person narratives created by women ethnographers, “often writing in a novelistic or fictive voice about culture” (p. 22). The book was published by the early 1990s when paradigms were conflicted; postpositivists, constructivists, and critical theorists talked to one another and had a war against positivism (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). Her arguments reflected a tension between critical theories and qualitative research (ethnography or autobiography).

For instance, feminist epistemologists claimed that feminist ethnographers often ignored the political complicity of a research stance and displayed naivety in their depictions of cultural order. Visweswaran also suggested that there is “an equality and power differential” between ethnographers and their subjects (p. 42). This detached ethnography work not only fails to problematize dominant arrangements, but also may perpetuate oppression. Indeed, some scholars pointed out that feminist researchers often find themselves in dilemma of conducting critical qualitative research because they seek out methodologies to simultaneously do social justice and to offer meaningful critiques of social realities  (e.g. Gallagher, 2008). 

Thus, I wonder whether some rigid critical agendas can be inappropriate for the conduct of ethnographic research. Because ethnographers put their political agenda on their analysis of cultural and social action, and the analysis is based on data created by engagement and relationship between observer and observed and on the identification process of subject (p. 78); so I wonder if the operations of power in cultural practices can be oversimplified due to the process of identification. Also, I wonder whether it would be possible to "abandon and forfeit the authority" of ethnography and how we confront subjectivity, self-reflexive mode or "the power in our process of interpretation"  (p. 79).



References

Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2011). The Sage handbook of qualitative research. Sage.

Gallagher, K. (Ed.). (2008). The methodological dilemma: Creative, critical and collaborative approaches to qualitative research. Routledge.