Paige Sweet Week 10

Miriam Ticktin’s (2001) Casualties of Care made me think about genealogy, especially in her chapter about the “New Humanitarianism.” Is genealogy a method or a methodology here, or perhaps both? In addition, how can feminist methodologies be mapped onto or used in conjunction with genealogy as a method? In Ticktin’s use of genealogy, I understand it as a way of analyzing ideology not as a “thing,” but in terms of the historical conditions (“conditions of possibility”) that give rise to that ideology. Early in the semester, we talked about feminist ethnography as being about context, temporality, multiple identities, and silences. It seems then, that Ticktin does an excellent job of combining the feminist methodologies with genealogy, as her analysis pays attention to the political, racialized, and gendered conditions of possibility that give rise to “suffering bodies.” I loved thinking about Ticktin’s methodologies as I was reading, because they gave me feasible suggestions for how to conduct a project like this myself. Part of what she does is to investigate ideologies of humanitarianism for their disguised silences, which seems to me a like a feminist genealogical method. Perhaps the philosophy underlying the genealogy is one of postcolonial feminism and transnationalism, which would make genealogy the method itself.

In my own work, I hope to excavate certain conditions of possibility as they relate to violence against women – namely, the rise of trauma discourses as explanations for battered women’s suffering. Ticktin’s methodological strategies seem instructive for my project – she asks what the landscapes of meaning are that produce certain bodies as deserving of recognition and voice. When I investigate the landscapes of meaning that underlie particular discourses in my own work, I will want to be similarly attentive to national politics and history, to the medicalization of politics more broadly. However, there are two things that recede into the background when I reflect upon Ticktin’s methodology – her own positionality or experiences as an ethnographer and the voices of those who she talks about as being compelled to give testimony to their suffering. Is positionality part of a methodological orientation, or this is a separate research decision? Additionally, what are the implications of theorizing the “silencing” of subjects while not necessarily putting the story in their own words? This leads to my other question: how is methodology implicated in the narrativization of research? In other words, is methodology part of the story-telling that the research does, or is this too, a separate choice?