Paige Sweet Week 9

The various discussions of what Naber (2012) refers to as “anti-imperialist feminism” throughout these readings shed light on how to do the methodological (and narrative) work of linking identities with power structures. Shohat talks about axes of inequality such as race, class, and gender as “permanently interwoven relationalities,” in the sense that they each depend on the others for their operations. Naber and her activists make a similar argument, showing how imperialism is bound up with heteropatriarchy and sexism, interwoven into a type of necropolitics. Naber’s analysis takes this relational co-constitution of power a step further by investigating it from the level of identity. In my work, I struggle often with how to write a proposal or a narrative that links up people’s identities with power structures without making these seem like separate, “micro” and “macro” perspectives. As Naber argues, this is one of the benefits of ethnography, as it allows the researcher to witness both of these levels of social life in tandem. However, I struggle with how to write these levels in tandem, both at a proposal stage in which I justify my methods, and at the stage in which I am building a narrative through data. Perhaps my question has to do with how we can approach writing identity as “bigger” than just the individual.

Naber uses “life stories” as part of her “de-Orientalizing” method because they allow for showing the actor’s creation of his or her own “life-world.” As the activists’ stories show, it would be impossible, even silly, to suggest that identities could ever be apolitical, could ever exist separately from the imperialist and heteropatriarchal structures that structure them. However, I wonder how much this clarity is affected by the fact the Naber’s interlocutors were activists themselves, who engaged conscious, structural critiques of power. How can we, as researchers, demonstrate these connections, these “interwoven relationalities” between identity and structure, without going too far as analysts, without supplying too much of our own interpretation of people’s intimately-held identities? In other words, when people hold individualistic understandings of their own identities, how can we as researchers supply those “macro” connections without disrupting the integrity of our participants’ “life stories”?