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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.