Paper Short Abstract:

What are the political and personal implications of ethnographic research in a field where the notions of intimacy and love meet the deadly realities of sexist violence and gendered death? Witnessing and denial can form complicated realities of feeling and understanding such social phenomena.

Paper Abstract:

In a field where the fantasies of the “good life” (Berlant, 2010) that surround heterosexuality meet the fatal economies (Bronfen, 1996, in Salecl & Zizek, 1996: 70) of intimate-partner femicides, multiple questions about how communities and subjectivities are witnessing these social phenomena, arouse. Drawing from my ongoing research project on intimate-partner femicides in Greece and based on preliminary ethnographic material, I aim to explore the ways that social witnessing can simultaneously involve the concealing of facts, legitimization of violence, and denial of its existence. In the dominant atmosphere of "unbelievability" that surrounds the discussions of femicides, communities that are witnessing femicide in their proximate cultural and social environments, seem to witness the case, while denying the event. Recognizing the undeniable "shock" of the incident, while legitimizing its roots; agreeing on the specific characteristics of the perpetrator, and relativizing the sexual and gendered culture where he belongs. These complicated forms of "seeing something" while being "blind" to something, draw their symbolic architecture from the psychoanalytic apparatus of "Oedipal syndrome". As a result, we can witness these forms of witnessing as they are emerging in the ethnographic field, aiming to critically understand the ways that they belong to wider "regimes of truth" and broader affective economies of meaning-making. Finally, the building of a queer political horizon, against heteropatriarchy and its Oediapalized subjectivizations, demands a more nuanced understanding of how subjects and communities are feeling and coping with violence and murder, especially in the cases that these, are coming from the safe "inside".