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- Convenors:
-
Christa Craven
(College of Wooster)
Elisabeth L. Engebretsen (University of Stavanger)
Heather Tucker (Central European University)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-B497
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
Ethnographic knowledge production is a deeply vexed terrain. This two-part roundtable examines queer and feminist approaches to: Part 1) tensions around activism, collaboration & scholarship, and writing choices, and Part 2) epistemology, decolonizing FQE, and contesting categories of analysis.
Long Abstract:
Years after initial debates emerged about reflexivity, objectivity, reductive individualism, and the social relevance of activist scholarship—particularly in the context of ethnography's colonial legacy—the production of queer and feminist ethnography continue to interrogate and produce critical and creative links among method, theory, epistemology, and social justice. This roundtable brings together queer and feminist scholars who have grappled with producing ethnography in different ways, from different social and political locations, and in a range of geographical contexts. Collectively, we explore what opportunities exist for solidarities in queer and feminist ethnography in this particular political moment. How can ethnographic work lift up and amplify voices versus "speak for" potentially vulnerable groups? How can our modes of writing and engagement disrupt the colonization of knowledges, particularly when we interrogate mobility and migration in (post)colonial contexts?
Linked to the conference subtheme Anthropologists as experts: the public uses of anthropology and co-sponsored by the European Network of Queer Anthropology (ENQA) and Network for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality (NAGS), this roundtable seeks to tease apart the role of queer and feminist ethnography through the production of methods, epistemologies, theories and practice that contribute to social justice. Drawing from key debates in the field, this roundtable will consider both the disruptive possibilities and the risks of queer and feminist approaches to the production and distribution of ethnography.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Christa Craven is the author of Pushing for Midwives: Homebirth Mothers and the Reproductive Rights Movement (2010), co-author of a textbook with Dána-Ain Davis, Feminist Ethnography: Thinking Through Methodologies, Challenges & Possibilities (2016).
Paper long abstract:
Christa Craven is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies (Chair from 2012-2017) at the College of Wooster. She received her B.A. New College of Florida (1997), M.A. (2000) and Ph.D. (2003) from American University. Craven's research interests include women's health & reproductive justice, lesbian/gay/bi/trans/queer reproduction, midwifery activism, feminist ethnography & activist scholarship, and feminist pedagogy. She is the author of Pushing for Midwives: Homebirth Mothers and the Reproductive Rights Movement (Temple University Press, 2010) and a textbook with Dána-Ain Davis, Feminist Ethnography: Thinking Through Methodologies, Challenges & Possibilities (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Craven and Davis also published an edited collection entitled Feminist Activist Ethnography: Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America (Lexington Books, 2013). Craven is currently working on a project interviewing lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-, and queer families about pregnancy, adoption, and loss. She has served on the American Anthropological Association's Governance Commission (2005-2007), is the past co-chair of the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (2004-2005; now the Association for Queer Anthropology), and currently serves as the Co-Chair of the Program Administrators and Directors (PA&D) for the National Women's Studies Association. She teaches Introduction to WGSS, Transnational Feminisms, Queer Lives, Doing Feminist Research: Theory & Practice, Feminist Pedagogy in Action, Introduction to Anthropology, Ethnographic Research, Global Politics of Reproduction, and Globalizing Health (with Dr. Tom Tierney in Sociology). Her professional website is: http://discover.wooster.edu/ccraven/
Paper short abstract:
Why doesn't anthropology question textuality and representation? How do patterns of writing reproduce forms of power and authority? Why does't poetry and ethnography interact? How does reflexivity relate to ethnographic poetry? These remain some of the key questions of my ethnographic practice.
Paper long abstract:
After completing my two- year fieldwork in Athens where I worked with queer and feminist groups and conducted life history interviews with queer feminists (cis& trans) on sexual desire, femininity and identity politics, I left the "field" and came back to London to write my ethnography. However, I felt incapable of approaching life and femininity through a strictly academic and anthropological style of writing. Influenced mostly by Eve Sedgwick's approach on queer as a peculiar literary figure, a trope that can have a disruptive effect on discourse, but also by early French feminist writers, and mostly Helene Cixous, who supported an ecriture feminine, that is, the art of "singing the abyss", I tried to develop a form of political lyricism while working on the edge of theory, personal diary and political manifesto. In this paper, I wish to open a discussion on "feminine writing" and ethnographic poetry as feminist forms of writing the passageway, the dwelling place of another in me, the other that I am and am not, the gap between us, the other that gives me the desire to know, and finally the other of academic knowledge that possesses me by dispossessing me of myself. I will draw from memory, poetry, academic theory, along with extracts from my field notes, and interviews to support a method of writing that is questioning empirical approaches to knowledge and treats the text as something daring, "feminine", where the wonder of life, the "field", academic research, vulnerability, and turmoil are expressed.
Paper short abstract:
In this round table, I aim to contribute to the debate on queer activism and solidarity by questioning the ways in which the desired invisibility of fieldwork participants may reflect upon our ethnographic research practices.
Paper long abstract:
The PhD thesis I am working on addresses the arenas of transgender YouTube vlogging, adult camming and BDSM image-practices. My PhD project focuses on questions of social marginalization and aims to explore how digital visual practices may help social actors/communities grapple with the intricacies of social invisibility. Conducting online and offline fieldwork, I engage with actors exposed to stigmatization on the basis of their non-normative embodied understandings. My interest is to explore how queer studies can help us gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of power in the context of digital visuality. Recently I have also developed an interest for queer posthumanism as a framework for rethinking questions of agency and identity politics in increasingly technologized contexts of life.
Inspired by the writings of Lewin (2016) and Weiss (2016), who believe the political activist ambition of queer anthropology is often rather a sought-after aspiration on the side of the researcher, I have begun to question my own assumptions. This has led me to interrogate the extent to which 'social visibility' is, in fact, a desired condition for my interlocutors. The desire of visibility expressed by my interlocutors in the context of YouTube trans* vlogging is indeed countered by the desire of invisibility expressed by the BDSM practitioners I have worked together with. These political issues have implications for the way in which I conduct ethnographic research. In this roundtable I hope to be able contribute to this debate by questioning the taken-for-granted notions of solidarity and activism.
Paper short abstract:
How can queer/feminist ethnographic knowledge-making challenge borders between knower and known; or anthropologist-subject and object of knowledge? My talk focuses on the forms of connection that arise in ethnography and modes of "thinking with" that are less collaboration than political solidarity.
Paper long abstract:
In my work, I have sought queer, feminist, left modes of "thinking with" that disrupt borders inadvertently reinscribed between subjects and objects, knowers and known. For instance, my book, Techniques of Pleasure, suggested that part of what is troubling about BDSM is its imbrication in late capitalism—that sex cannot be separated from the politics of consumption (circuits that connect purportedly "separate" spheres of public/private, economic/intimate). This project sought to make ethnographic knowledge not about a "them," but an "us," an immanent cultural critique. In my current book, Queer Otherwise: Making Knowledge at the Boundaries of Academia and Activism, I think alongside queer left activists in North America, exploring activists' intellectual work and what we can learn juxtaposing activist and academic knowledge practices and desires, given linked crises of the nonprofit industrial complex and the neoliberal university. This project has entailed collaboration in several forms, including a jointly authored research article (Hollibaugh and Weiss 2015) and several ongoing activist/research projects. For me, critique is a site of political solidarity when it moves across—disrupting and deconstructing—boundaries we often take for granted between academic/activist, abstract/engaged: showing how activists do theory (cf. Hale 2006) or analyzing shared grounds of complicity beyond the "suffering slot" (Robbins 2013) and those who might speak for her. Rather than collaboration, I understand and theorize these connections across borders of academia and activism as sites of solidarity: of fundamental interconnection, commonality in struggle, recognition and obligation--rather than neocolonial noblesse oblige.
Paper short abstract:
My ethnographic work in three sites in Peru--an indigenous community, a highland city, and the migrant stream to Lima--seeks to decolonize knowledge regarding the intersection of gender and race in the Andean region. This paper traces my approach for advancing a decolonial feminist anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
In Andean Peru, ambivalence related to individuals' geographic and social origins results in deeply contradictory attitudes and practices that can be understood only if we decolonize our thinking about what it is to be Andean. My feminist reexamination of racial and gender inequalities as well as other enduring injustices in Peru will offer insights into questions of inclusion and exclusion, national belonging, and citizenship in the Andean region. Historically, there has been great social and economic interdependence across various zones of the Peruvian Andes. Today, social standing is often measured in inverse proportion to the altitude of one's origins, with Lima at sea level holding the greatest prestige. The paradoxes of perceived differences whereby Andeans frequently will assert that those who are "more Indian" or "authentically Andean" live "más arriba" or higher up are on wide display. When Andeans migrate to nearby cities or to the urban coast, they often "upgrade" their status by claiming to be from somewhere other than their rural home. They may reject ethnic labels for themselves just as they project them on others, in an effort to show they belong in a society that often shuns them. At the same time, national-level desires to embrace Andean cultural heritage are in dramatic evidence as Peru builds its "brand" for global consumption. Ambivalent racial and gendered practices in three diverse research locations are the threads I trace in this paper as I seek to advance a decolonial feminist anthropology.
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to discuss the global circulation of medical discourses about trans people and the Brazilian singularities. I explore the connection between anthropologists and activists in the construction of a cultural notion of travesti as a way to decolonize trans global e colonial discourses.
Paper long abstract:
My work is at the interface of the anthropology of science and gender and sexuality studies. In my post-doc research, I investigate the production of knowledge around "trans people" through the controversies surrounding the right to body- and sex-transforming medical procedures. I am especially interested in the transnational circulations of categories and how these categories take on different meanings in different global contexts. One of my main research concerns is the use of international conventions from International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in Brazilian national public policy that governs body and sex transforming medical procedures in the public health system. There are several controversies and critiques in Brazilian academic literature and social movements regarding pathologization as a guarantee of rights to body tranforming medical procedures. These critiques point out the particularity of the term popularly known as travesti, emphasizing the exclusionary, ethnocentric and colonial approach in using medical-psychiatric notions, primarily constructed in the USA context. Anthropology had a particular interest in travestis. Many ethnographies have been produced since de 1990's arguing that Brazilians travestis would have an exteriority in relation to the European and American medical definitions, representing, in some cases, a Brazilian form of understanding gender and sexuality, especially when contrasted with the transsexual category and gender identity disorder. In this presentation, I explore the connection between anthropology knowledge and activists in the construction of a Brazilian cultural notion of travesti as a way to decolonize trans global e colonial discourses.
Paper short abstract:
Short Bio: Kathrine van den Bogert has an MA in Gender & Ethnicity and is PhD-candidate in Cultural Anthropology. She sees feminist and queer ethnography as an opportunity to challenge and open up the academic and intersectional categories (e.g. "Muslim girls") where people find themselves stuck in.
Paper long abstract:
LongBio:
Kathrine van den Bogert has an RMA in Gender and Ethnicity and is currently PhD-candidate in Cultural Anthropology. Her dissertation on Muslim girls who play street football in an urban, working-class, multicultural neighbourhood in the Netherlands is based in interdisciplinary gender studies and feminist and urban anthropology.
Having moved from anthropology to gender studies, and back to anthropology, I have always been asking myself what the specific contributions of feminist and queer ethnography are to both disciplines (Abu-Lughod 1990).
In the Netherlands, anti-racist, feminist, and intersectional scholars take up the task to criticise constructions of Muslim women as "other", structural oppression, homonationalism, etc. However important that work is, for me the real challenge is how to do justice to the daily life experiences of "Muslim" girls and women themselves, without getting them "stuck" in the persisting category of "Muslim women". The experiences of the girls in my research could not only be described in an intersectional way with categories like "Muslim", "girl", "Moroccan-Dutch". Even more important were the categories of "footballer", "winner", and "players" in their daily lives; precisely the domain of feminist ethnography.
Next to feminist and queer ethnography as self-critical and self-reflexive ways of conducting research for social justice; in my perspective feminist and queer ethnography also poses challenges to the (intersectional) categories that are used in gender studies and anthropology, and that not always "do justice" to the rich daily lives of women and men, and girls and boys (see also Valentine 2004; "The categories themselves").