Paige Sweet

In her book, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, Kamala Visweswaran poses important questions about what constitutes knowledge, inquiry, “data,” and “truth” in ethnographic studies. In particular, I was intrigued by her analysis of lies, secrets, and silences as strategies of resistance; following that analysis, she asks how ethnographers can write someone’s silences without inscribing them into a subjectivity which they have refused. Because I study domestic violence, and hope to do interview and ethnography work with women victims of domestic violence, this question of silence is a powerful one. On the one hand, feminist interventions into domestic violence have been about silence, about disrupting the cultural silence surrounding violence against women, politicizing forced silences. On the other hand, when we as feminist researchers ask our interviewees to narrate their experiences of domestic violence, we also usher them into a ready-made feminist subject position, something Visweswaran also cautions us against. Victims become subjects of feminist research, symbols of the recalcitrance of patriarchal control and violence. There are some dangerous assumptions underpinning these modes of investigation: that speaking (confessing?) is always a move toward healing or liberation; that Western feminist discourse is the correct destination for women victims of violence.

            

Visweswaran’s analysis of silence as resistance is instructive for imagining the multiple roles that silence can plan in subjects’ narratives, in a feminist ethnographer’s analytical toolkit, and in politics. For example, Visweswaran forces us to question the equation of agency with speaking, demonstrating how a subject’s refusal of research participation can be read as a refusal to be made into the subject of a particular type of story. This line of analysis leads me to question how I can read and write silences in victims’ narratives. Of course, silence can be oppressive; it can signal a lack of safety or space to be heard. On the other hand, as Visweswaran emphasizes, silence can signal an active refusal to engage in an institutionalized “empowerment” or “survivor” discourse. The question remains, then, how to identify what specific silences mean, in both feminist discourse and in victims’ stories. Moreover, how can we theorize silences without evacuating them of their resistance strategies, without erasing their desire to not be placed at all? Perhaps Visweswaran’s use of “betrayal” in her discussion of deconstructionist ethnography is useful for answering these questions. She argues that an ethnography premised on “betrayal” does not seek simply to identify the power relations that infuse our epistemologies, but to actually subvert those power relations in the way we tell our stories (p. 77). The difficult work here, then, may be to use feminist ethnography to reveal the multiple roles that silences play, refusing to arrive at a single answer for silence, refusing to create silence’s “take-away” point.