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<p>In this paper I look at activist affects, discomforts, and complaints through the prism of engaged collaborative ethnography and autoethnography as a feminist scholar activist and disabled rape survivor. Drawing upon experiences of feminist solidarity and resistance in the ethnographic field in the UK, Spain, the Basque Country, Greece, Latin American diasporic communities, and transnational activist clusters, I follow affective articulations of activist complaints against intersecting violences, vulnerabilities, and their institutional denial. Attuning to lived experiences of multiple marginalisations in volatile contexts, personal and collective testimonies expose the ways in which such complaints are undermined; from court rooms and doctors’ surgeries to physical and digital spaces, structural violence and its ideological amplification of existing harmful discourses operate against them. These activist affects are articulated in contexts of disbelief, challenged for their validity and devalued in importance. Further complicated by hostile environments and attacks on so-called ‘gender ideology’ by both extreme-right and ‘progressive’ intellectual circles, the expression of marginalised lived experiences of discomfort, anger, pain, disappointment, and mistrust are depoliticised and discredited in their urgent quest for accountability. This paper calls for meaningful listenings and engagement with these unsettling affects as valid embodied knowledge of the operation of violences rendering lives unliveable.</p>
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In this paper I look at activist affects, discomforts, and complaints through the prism of engaged collaborative ethnography and autoethnography as a feminist scholar activist and disabled rape survivor. Drawing upon experiences of feminist solidarity and resistance in the ethnographic field in the UK, Spain, the Basque Country, Greece, Latin American diasporic communities, and transnational activist clusters, I follow affective articulations of activist complaints against intersecting violences, vulnerabilities, and their institutional denial. Attuning to lived experiences of multiple marginalisations in volatile contexts, personal and collective testimonies expose the ways in which such complaints are undermined; from court rooms and doctors’ surgeries to physical and digital spaces, structural violence and its ideological amplification of existing harmful discourses operate against them. These activist affects are articulated in contexts of disbelief, challenged for their validity and devalued in importance. Further complicated by hostile environments and attacks on so-called ‘gender ideology’ by both extreme-right and ‘progressive’ intellectual circles, the expression of marginalised lived experiences of discomfort, anger, pain, disappointment, and mistrust are depoliticised and discredited in their urgent quest for accountability. This paper calls for meaningful listenings and engagement with these unsettling affects as valid embodied knowledge of the operation of violences rendering lives unliveable.

Encountering Discomfort and Negotiating Vulnerability as a Feminist Activist Researcher

Borderlands Journal

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

In this paper I look at activist affects, discomforts, and complaints through the prism of engaged collaborative ethnography and autoethnography as a feminist...

Encountering Discomfort and Negotiating Vulnerability as a Feminist Activist Researcher

Publié en ligne: 22 déc. 2022

Pages: 69 - 92

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21307/borderlands-2022-013

Mots clés
Feminist activism, gender violence, complaint, affect, transphobia

© 2022 Athanasia Francis published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Encountering Discomfort and Negotiating Vulnerability as a Feminist Activist Researcher

Publié en ligne: 22 déc. 2022

Pages: 69 - 92

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21307/borderlands-2022-013

Mots clésFeminist activism, gender violence, complaint, affect, transphobia

© 2022 Athanasia Francis published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Mots clés
Feminist activism, gender violence, complaint, affect, transphobia