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- Convenor:
-
MeTooAnthro Collective
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- Formats:
- Roundtables
- Location:
- STB 1, Science Teaching Building
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 3 December, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
The #MeToo movement has centred on revelatory moments. Whilst at its core, the movement is intended to offer increased visibility and empowerment, it is important to acknowledge and address why some voices remain unheard or ignored, and illuminate that which continues to be structurally hidden.
Long Abstract:
Since its emergence in late 2017, the #MeToo movement has centred on revelatory moments. Calling out and naming perpetrators of sexual assault and harassment, exposing predatory practices, or simply sharing a 'me too' without context has provided a mechanism for disrupting silence and challenging salient power structures. As a movement that has entered everyday, public discourse, #MeToo has now come to permeate academic institutions and professional associations. Whilst at its core, the movement is intended to offer visibility and empowerment, it is important to acknowledge and address why some voices remain unheard or ignored, and illuminate that which continues to be structurally hidden.
Structural invisibility and representation can be found in the question 'can the subaltern speak?' (Spivak 1988) and intersectional critical race theory (initiated by Crenshaw 1991), and frameworks of activist anthropology. Taking cues from these critical modes of analysis, we aim to think beyond #MeToo as the mobilisation of collective action, and examine what creates the conditions for silence within the academe.
This roundtable is concerned with the limits of this movement and how 'exposure' can be reoriented towards those who have been (both historically and contemporarily) removed or silenced from anthropological conversations. The roundtable encourages provocations that address the following, and beyond:
• Queering knowledge
• Indigenous lifeworlds
• The precariously employed
• Disability in the field
By critiquing affordances of visibility and notions of academic authority, this roundtables commits to returning epistemological space to those who are underrepresented, or catalogued, rather than given voice.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 3 December, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Debates about sexual propriety sparked by the #metoo campaign invites anthropology to reflect upon the discipline's core methodological domain—'the field'—as a liminal space in which neophytes may be particularly vulnerable to abuse.
Paper long abstract:
Reflecting established themes in feminist and queer literature, #metoo deals in the ambiguous and the intersectional, providing a public space for a discussion of the grey-areas of sexual propriety between heteronormative men and women. For many, particularly women, this discussion has been liberating and empowering, allowing the exploration of hitherto unspoken experiences ranging from uncomfortable exchanges, micro-aggressions, cat-calls, arse-grabs, to coerced, forced, transacted and unwanted sexual acts.
In this paper we take the opportunity and courage provided by the #metoo debates to explore the idea of 'the field' in the context of anthropological training in Australia. We argue that the liminal space of fieldwork is tacitly regarded by those in the academy—and neophytes themselves—as one in which contemporary debates and developments around sexual and gendered propriety have made little headway. Further, we argue that this places some PhD students—particularly female, and LGBTIQ—at an enhanced risk of sexual violence. We invite academic programs in Australia (and elsewhere) to revisit 'the field' as a conceptual, performative and inherently gendered domain.
Our paper is informed by a historical critique of anthropology methodology, theoretical insights from Bourdieu and Turner, as well as fieldwork vignettes from the authors.
Paper short abstract:
This discussion piece explores unmutings within the #metoo movement, and tensions within anthropological spaces between (un)muting and insights gained from the #metoo movement.
Paper long abstract:
Edwin Ardener's 'Belief and the Problem of Women' suggested that women were a 'muted group' within most societies. While his concept of mutedness has since been applied to many other social identities, the #metoo movement offers a textbook case study for Ardener's concept of gender-based muting. This paper will explore two tensions in #metoo unmutings for anthropologists. Firstly, as Henrietta Moore articulated in her discussion of layers of viricentrism (in 'Feminism & Anthropology'), one of the ironies of Anthropology as a discipline is that we work within spaces where misogyny and viricentrism are rampant, while at the same time offering powerful tools for analysis, disruption and change. Secondly, while cultural relativism is supposedly foundational to our discipline, feminist anthropologists have often been slow to embrace insights offered by discourses of intersectionality, with anthropology often a particularly vulnerable space for women of colour (Behar pun intended).