Encountering Discomfort and Negotiating Vulnerability as a Feminist Activist Researcher

Francis, Athanasia ORCID: 0000-0002-9140-3774 (2022) Encountering Discomfort and Negotiating Vulnerability as a Feminist Activist Researcher. Borderlands E-Journal: new spaces in the humanities, Volume (2 (Dec). pp. 69-92.

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	affect, Basque Country, complaint, Feminist activism, gender violence, transphobia
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Histories, Languages and Cultures
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	20 Jan 2023 08:14
Last Modified:	15 Mar 2024 15:16
DOI:	10.21307/borderlands-2022-013
Open Access URL:	https://sciendo.com/article/10.21307/borderlands-2...
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3167175