- Convenors:
-
Rachel Spronk
(University of Amsterdam)
Stella Nyanzi (Ruhr Universität Bochum)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
Can we address tensions among ourselves as anthropological feminists through a deeper understanding of is the issue? What are the tensions and where do they come from? What do they teach us?
Long Abstract
When do you feel uninvited or not understood by your fellow feminist scholars? We try to outline a few tensions here but feel free to add. One is the hesitation or refusal by feminists to engage in queer matters. TERFs are the most prominent group, but there are also other, more subtle, forms of avoidance. A second one concerns the lack of acknowledgement of how different standpoints result in different knowledges or approaches. For instance, non-Western female genital operations are variously called mutilation, circumcision or cutting, revealing differences in how to understand women’s lives. A third one relates to positionality and whether scholars are circumscribed to what and whom they can study. Can scholars study and write about race, sexuality, class, age, ability, and many more positionalities, that are not theirs? A fourth one is more epistemological, overlapping with ethnocentrism, to what extent does the ethnocentrist character of feminist thinking impede or silence other conceptual routes? We believe that many tensions arise from how feminist thinking is invested in, and the product of, liberal emancipatory politics. As such, it articulates values of individualism, egalitarianism, the belief in progress, and universalism, whose goal is to undo heteronormative patriarchal structures. This gives rise to reasoning based on binary oppositions, articulated in notions of freedom versus constraint, openness versus conformity, or choice versus obligations when addressing power, whereas life is usually much messier. For instance, this hegemonic approach endorses notions of liberal subjecthood wherein the notion of identity is enfolded whereas not every positionality is understood as a matter of identity. We are interested in papers that engage with tensions, based on empirical realities as researchers and/ or based on our research. We invite you to think about how your case addresses the theoretical challenge that tensions conjure up.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines epistemological tensions in feminist anthropology around who can research trans lives. Drawing on ethnography with Brazilian travesti sex workers, it reflects on positionality, queer expectations, and the limits of dominant emancipatory feminist frameworks in trans research.
Paper long abstract
This paper engages with current polarisations within feminist and queer theory by reflecting on epistemological tensions surrounding who can research trans lives and under what conditions. Building on Gerard Coll-Planas’ (2011) warning against the colonisation of trans experiences through claims such as “we are all trans”, I examine how non-trans researchers position themselves as feminist allies while studying trans communities.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Brazilian travesti sex workers, the paper addresses three interrelated questions. First, why do non-trans researchers study trans experiences, and how are these motivations shaped by dominant feminist-queer emancipatory frameworks? Second, to what extent do these frameworks project normative expectations of gender disruption onto trans bodies, interpreting their practices through the lens of our own political desires and queer anxieties rather than through sustained ethnographic attention to lived realities? Third, how can non-trans anthropologists navigate concerns of appropriation and misrepresentation without retreating into silence or paralysing guilt?
Situating these questions within ongoing transphobic attacks emerging from feminist and academic spaces, the paper argues that such conflicts are not only political but also epistemological. They reflect deeper investments in particular notions of subjecthood, agency and emancipation that do not always resonate with ethnographic realities. Rather than seeking epistemological purity or moral innocence, I propose embracing the messiness of feminist knowledge production as a decolonising practice grounded in accountability, situated knowledge and relational ethics in trans research.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores ethnographic refusal as epistemologically significant framework in European semi-periphery. Based on ethnographic research in Croatia, it focuses on representational polarisation and argues for ethnographic practice grounded in contradictions and polyvocal modes of knowledge.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores ethnographic refusal as a site of epistemological insight within queer feminist ethnography. Situating my research in the post-transitional European semi-periphery, marked by conceptual and temporal disjuncture in non-Western gender-transformative mobilization, I reflect on a double tension and the practice of refusal surrounding my ethnographic work on queer and gender futurities in Zagreb.
Ethnographic refusal emerged when certain activist interlocutors declined participation after encountering the term queer. Their hesitation and often polarizing reaction to the term was less a rejection of the term's political potential than a critique of its perceived foreignness and its role in academic knowledge production. Concerns centered on how their practices and identities might be represented, extracted, or misread within scholarly discourse. This response pointed to a deeper concern with ontological colonialism as the imposition of conceptual categories over context-specific meanings.
This epistemic unease was also reflected in the Croatian feminist landscape, which, while not hostile to queer or trans* frameworks, lacks established theoretical engagement with them. At the same time, academic emphasis on identity-based authority often narrows the space for ethnographic research, allowing reductions to persist through absence and silence.
These layered dynamics pose deeper questions about the ethics of representation, the circulation of feminist and queer knowledge, and the limits of translation across conceptual, regional and political contexts. By foregrounding the significance of both being refused and navigating partial legibility within academic spaces, I argue for a queer feminist ethnography attuned to contradiction, opacity and the right (not) to be fully known.
Paper short abstract
By exploring how non-Catholic Polish women reclaim the figure of Holy Mary, this paper approaches the awkward positioning of the second world in the admittedly problematic, yet prevalent first/third world binary as an opportunity to nuance feminist understanding of women’s agency beyond resistance.
Paper long abstract
In many contemporary feminist readings, self-authorising female subjects are juxtaposed to positions of oppression, whose only path beyond subjugation is resistance. As demonstrated by the wide misinterpretation of 2012 Pussy Riot’s performance, the attempts of ‘cultural translation’ of women’s practices in post-socialist societies into this North/Western binary fail to understand how women can use religious markers to speak back to religious authorities (Wiedlack & Neufeld 2014). Furthermore, the epistemological favouritism towards the liberal, secular subject results in mischaracterization of post-socialist societies as ‘lagging behind’ sibling of the so-called first world. This paper approaches this awkward positioning of the second world as an opportunity to nuance feminist understanding of women’s agency, via the practice of reclamation. Drawing on the case of non-Catholic Polish women who engage with the figure of Holy Mary through art, performances or tattoos, I explore why she remains meaningful to them. Rather than understanding these alterations of Holy Mary’s figure as rupture from religion, I focus on how these women’s ability to recognise themselves in her allowed them to take her figure with them when leaving the Church behind. By reclaiming Holy Mary and becoming agents of what she signifies, these women begin to rearticulate their gendered sense of self, which allows them to reimagine their womanhood in Poland and connect with each other. Reclamation thus provides an approach beyond viewing women’s actions as resistance in reaction to oppression and offers an alternative path for enabling female subjectivities in heteropatriarchal environments of the post-socialist landscape, and beyond.
Paper short abstract
Mahmood profoundly shifted the feminist discussion of agency. Using my research on bride abduction, I query the idea of the “autonomous individual” underdeveloped her text, arguing that selves are complexly intertwined in bonds of love and power that belie liberal ideas of individuals and choice.
Paper long abstract
Nearly 25 years ago, Saba Mahmood critically engaged the feminist discussion of agency which, so firmly rooted in the liberal project, she argued, could only conceive of it as resistance. In response, she put forth a notion which had to do with “the capacity for action” including the willed desire to modesty. Mahmood mobilized the Butlerian critique of the autonomous individual in her work to understand how domination and desire are cultivated in the process of subjectivation. Yet beyond a reaffirmation of Butler’s subjectivation, Mahmood left the question of the individual rather unexplored. In this presentation, I pick up the idea of the “autonomous individual” not worked out in Mahmood’s text, to explore agency once again. I do so using my research on bride abduction in Kyrgyzstan, a topic which has been treated by feminists as little other than grounds for an analytical and political debate on (liberal) agency, just like veiling was when Mahmood wrote her article. I critically engage with the feminist literature on the self/individual to argue that the complex relationships of love and power imbricated in familial and wider kin/social relationships mean that that a woman’s “choice” in bride abduction cannot be thought of as a (liberal) individual’s decision or desire; the women involved are much more complexly intertwined and emergent than that. Choice, for these 'intertwined-selves' in Kyrgyzstan, stands in direct tension with the liberal feminist conception premised on an imagined total autonomy, forcing a further rethinking of liberal ideas of agency.
Paper short abstract
The application of feminist and queer theory, from an anthropological perspective, raises issues at the cosmological and social levels. This paper explores clashes arising from encounters between these global political movements and other ontologies, and the consequent anthropological reflections.
Paper long abstract
For decades, debates have emerged around the need to decolonise feminism and various sexual dissidence movements. The social critique initiated by Black Feminists since the 1960s, along with subsequent critiques from other culturally subaltern and indigenous groups, is further enriched by an epistemological critique of Western philosophical ideas that underpin Global North feminism. Feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements are today global phenomena, but their reception varies depending on the ontological and social positionality of the individuals involved. Many tensions and contradictions arise in the feminist analysis of various patriarchal systems when they intersect with different human geographies.
From ethnographic research in Bolivia and interactions with militant indigenous Aymara groups, it emerges that hegemonic feminisms and LGBTQIA+ movements, rooted in Western ideological frameworks, both serve as social catalysts for various political struggles and are identified as new forms of colonisation. The racialisation of bodies and cultures of the Global South, perceived in the dominant narratives of these ideologies, fosters alternative class consciousnesses. Meanwhile, assumptions of mainstream Feminism and the LGBTQIA+ movement conflict with some fundamental ontological principles of indigenous cosmovisions.
This paper explores how these tensions emerge at ontological, political, and material levels during fieldwork, and how global ideologies are rejected or renegotiated from a decolonial perspective, leading to a deconstruction of the ethnographer's positioning. It also reflects on how the involved individuals configure as liminal subjects at an epistemological level and considers the implications for the anthropological view on these issues.