Militz-Frielink blog #1

Sarah Militz-Frielink

GWS 502

Dr. Nadine Naber

1/28/2014

I felt that Visweswaran’s chapter Refusing the Subject was useful in that it introduces strategies of resistance—lies, silence, and secrets—as a research subject’s innocent defense against an ethnographer’s attempt to study the subject. Visweswaran’s description of her interactions with subject M, who ran an orphanage in India and her refusal to participate in an ethnographic interview, made me rethink research and the history of the feminist struggle in new ways.  A provocative question this particular chapter raises: “How might we destabilize the equation of speech with agency by staging one woman’s subject refusal to speak?” reminds me of the importance of rethinking agency and what it means to be an agent. 

As a scholar/activist committed to social justice work, who has taught school and worked as a journalist, I realize how my attempts to create an empowering space for the people’s voice (one I assumed as empowering) could also be a site of oppression.  Silence, lies and secrets can also be powerful tools for agency.  What is left unsaid as Foucault once posited can be more harmful or helpful than what is said.  This leads me to question stories untold and how marginalized groups and individuals can use silence as a powerful form of resistance and justice.  When researching and writing, I am always concerned about getting the truth out there, not privileging certain voices over others, and encouraging my students and subjects to tell their stories. Yet, counter-storytelling especially about highly contested topics such as immigration and prison abolition for example, can be a dangerous endeavor indeed.  I think about the human rights work I have done on the U.S./Mexico border and the great measures we took to protect our subjects’ identity—some subjects, especially the labor organizers, face possible assassination attempts on a daily basis.  They could be immediately killed if their names were released in the stories we wrote, yet they wanted their stories to be told as an act of subversion.  I take protecting my subject's and student's identities very seriously, but how much counter-story telling (for example) is worth the risk of a human life? How can we be sure our subjects are protecting and more good than harm will come out of our research?

Limitations

I believe Visweswaran’s work is limiting because her discipline anthropology is not the discipline that contributes directly to my dissertation—which will be employing qualitative and humanities-based methodologies.  I wonder if the broad scope of my studies at UIC is compromising the depth of my dissertation topic.  However, I believe the first book we read in this class contributed to my area of study and should be a requirement for all doctoral students. Decolonizing Methodologies does a thorough job of critiquing various disciplines—one of them being anthropology—and reminds us of how dangerous anthropological research can be with its reliance on White missionaries and other colonizers who mine, exploit and perpetuate conditions of subjugation.  To that end, reading a book about anthropology, immediately after finishing Decolonizing Methodologies, made me wonder if Visweswaran’s research left a bad taste in her subjects’ mouths especially after chapter 4.  How did she project her subjects?

How might you apply it to your real or imagined project? 

           Visweswaran’s work inspired me to stay focused on my chosen area of study—African American Feminist Spirituality and Pedagogy—and reminded me of how much Kathy E. Ferguson’s conceptual framework—mobile subjectivities—is useful to my project.  Ferguson shatters the academic assumption that scholars have to pick one conceptual framework (i.e. cosmic feminist, linguistic feminist, etc.) to ground their dissertation with the introduction of her mobile subjectivities theory.  The binary nature of dissertation methodology means each body of work falls prey to the weaknesses of the conceptual framework employed and its accompanying assumptions.  I think humanities-based research appeals to me because it allows various standpoints, theories, and works of literature to be a part of the final product.  I also believe dissertations utilizing other types of (decolonized) methodologies can accomplish the same thing, as long as we continue to ask ourselves, what does this mean, and so what?