The Forum:Emotion and the Feminist IR Researcher emotion and the... · 08/12/2011 · dealing with emotions in academic research and writing, it is usual for feminists in International

The Forum:Emotion and the Feminist IRResearcher

Edited by Christine Sylvester1

School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Editor’s Note

This forum addresses a neglected issue in feminist IR research: the question ofwhether and how emotions should enter our scholarship. Feminist theory andpractice have long maintained that politics comes into and can shape the perso-nal realm of all social relations. There is no sharp division between the privateand the public, and liberal efforts to demarcate the two can sequester peoplecalled women in the private, away from the privileged political and economicsphere associated with public agency (see, Elshtain 1981; Enloe 1989; Tickner1988). One long-standing philosophical reason given for partnering women andthe private sphere is that women supposedly suffer unique bodily passions thatbring on mental weaknesses, like an inability to think straight (Rousseau).Indeed, states could be ruined on account of women and their ways (Machia-velli), or would have to be run by men in any case because women would be con-quered in the war of all against all (Hobbes).

We are ostensibly way beyond those gendered understandings of women andpolitics, all of them based on Western political theorizing. Yet when it comes todealing with emotions in academic research and writing, it is usual for feministsin International Relations (IR) to keep their emotions to themselves and some-times even the emotions of their subjects out of the picture. Not to do so couldreinforce the old gender stereotypes; it would also fly in the face of social sciencerules of research distance and objectivity. That such rules are often quietlyadhered to, even when a feminist researcher questions the scientific epistemol-ogy that insists on those rules, can be puzzling today. At this moment in thefield’s history, IR is fragmented into numerous camps, each with its own favoritepersonages, writings, methodologies, topics, and even journals (Sylvester 2007).It is a liberating moment to write of emotion and IR research in general and infeminist IR in particular.

These short essays come out of a workshop I organized at the University of Con-necticut in 2010 on the subject of Emotion and the Feminist IR Researcher. TheUConn Political Science department and the Women’s Studies program spon-sored it, and we are all most grateful for their generosity. The sense that the work-shop should focus on emotion came from Megan MacKenzie and Swati Parashar,and I thank them for that suggestion. Both were awakened to the emotion prob-lem that was not speaking its name when they were asked by one of my Masterssupervisees at Lancaster University—Sandra Marshall—whether she could inter-view them about what it is like to conduct feminist field research in difficult war-time circumstances in Sierra Leone (MacKenzie), Sri Lanka, and Kashmir(Parashar). Marshall’s write-up was so insightful on the problematic of feminist IRand silences around emotion in its research that it received one of the highest

Sylvester, Christine et al. (2011) The Forum: Emotion and the Feminist IR Researcher. International Studies Review, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2011.01046.x� 2011 International Studies Association

International Studies Review (2011) 13, 687–708

marks possible in the British system. It also inspired MacKenzie and Parashar (anda third feminist IR scholar Marshall also interviewed—Elina Penttinen at the Uni-versity of Helsinki, Finland) to dig into this problem. They suggested devoting theworkshop to the tricky situations that feminists doing IR research face when theytry to include emotions in their research or try to leave them out. Marshall, Mac-Kenzie, and Parashar attended the workshop from Britain, New Zealand, and Ire-land, respectively, joined by Heather Turcotte at UConn and her coauthor, ShirinSaeidi, a PhD candidate at Cambridge University, who also flew in to be there. Wegathered on a cold February day, with a number of doctoral students also in atten-dance, and contemplated the ins and outs of emotion as feminist researchersdoing IR. These papers are the result of those contemplations.

There are a number of ways one could analyze emotion as an aspect of, andalso as a topic within and beyond, IR. This forum, however, focuses tightly onthe contradictions and opportunities associated with using distinctly feministideas to study emotion in international relations research. Entry points and per-spectives differ among the contributors. Marshall tells specifically of the feministinspiration for her interviews on emotion and what those interviews suggested toher about gaps in feminist IR. Parashar and MacKenzie address the emotionalimpact of doing feminist fieldwork when there seems to be no outlet for theexperiences of those interviewed and the interviewer herself. Saeidi’s and Tur-cotte’s essay lays out the limits of conceptualizing emotion as a personal qualityor as a matter of private ⁄ public transgression instead of as a global power prob-lematic. Laura Sjoberg, who had planned to attend the workshop, writes abouther research on violent women in IR, which is controversial in feminist IR cir-cles, and about organizing a special issue of Security Studies on feminism andsecurity, controversial for other reasons. I end by discussing ways I write emotioninto professional publications based on fieldwork in Zimbabwe and on research-ing art museums and IR more recently. Where emotion lies and what feministresearch on emotion and IR can and should strive to achieve emerge as the keyissues that animate the forum.

Super-Human Researchers in FeministInternational Relations’ Narratives

Sandra Marshall

Gender Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science

In 2009, while studying for a master’s in Women’s Studies and English at Lancas-ter University, I took a course in Feminist IR. Coincidentally at that time, the Poli-tics and IR Department was involved in a program of events called ‘‘TouchingWar,’’ which included a workshop on ‘‘Women: Armed and Dangerous?’’2 I sat inawe at this workshop, listening to the speakers, many of whom were early-careerresearchers and some of whom had carried out difficult and dangerous researchin conflict zones. I was amazed by them; they seemed super-human to me. I wascompletely new to feminist IR and felt out of my depth. I came away thinking,‘‘I could never do that. I wish I could but I couldn’t,’’ and as I drove home thisbegan to trouble me. Where were these feelings of inadequacy coming from?Nobody is super-human, so what was making me think these researchers were? I

2For the full program of Touching War of 2008-09, see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/touchingwar/.

688 Emotion and the Feminist IR Researcher

pondered these questions on my journey, recalling the researchers’ unwaveringcomposure as they spoke of their research encounters; they seemed unaffected.

Having spent my academic life in the departments of Women’s Studies andEnglish, I was steeped in the research ethics of such feminists as Luce Irigaray(1985), Ann Oakley (1998), and Donna Haraway (1991)—to name just a few ofthe theorists who have called for researchers to include themselves and theiremotions in their research. My feminist alarm bells therefore started ringing.And as I thought further, I realized that the vast majority of the feminist IRresearch I had encountered had left me with a similar impression of theresearchers’ unaffectedness. Were these feminist IR researchers genuinely unaf-fected, or were they just keeping quiet? Was there a culture of silence aroundresearchers’ emotions in feminist IR? If so, what message did this culture send tothese early-career researchers, or indeed to anyone thinking of entering the dis-cipline, about what behaviors are appropriate, what sort of person you need tobe, to be in feminist IR?

After deciding to investigate these questions for my MA dissertation, I inter-viewed three of the researchers who had spoken at the workshop: Megan Mac-Kenzie, Swati Parashar, and Elina Penttinen, early-career researchers who hadrecently carried out research in conflict zones (in Sierra Leone; in Kashmir andSri Lanka; and in Kosovo, respectively). All of these projects involved theresearchers’ engagement with often harrowing stories. Kaethe Weingarten(2003:9) has claimed that such witnessing can produce a response called ‘‘com-mon shock,’’ a trauma response that ‘‘disrupts our fundamental sense of who weare, who others are, and our sense of safety and security.’’ Common shock canskew the ways we perceive the world, the ways we represent the stories we haveseen and heard, and the ways we theorize about those stories. All three of theresearchers I interviewed described experiencing symptoms of common shock.

They each talked of suffering from a disrupted sense of self, saying variously: ‘‘Iwas like, my whole identity is being challenged;’’ ‘‘doing this research was trans-forming;’’ ‘‘I kind of started wondering about who I was.’’ They also talked oftheir disrupted ‘‘sense of safety and security’’ in the field (Weingarten 2003:9).One of the researchers saw a group of local men talking together: ‘‘that unnervedme because I, well I got really scared [...] I broke down because I thought thatthey were probably planning to kill me.’’ She said she was ‘‘imagining fear whereit didn’t exist probably.’’ Another described how she ‘‘often just felt blank;’’ ‘‘Iwas so emotionally numb and disconnected from my everyday reality that I feltlike I wasn’t being as savvy and conscious of my safety as I needed to be.’’ Thishad a very real effect on her research as it forced her to cut the fieldtrip short. Allthree of the researchers also found their views on life and humanity challenged,together with their understandings of their research: ‘‘you kind of want to thinkabout the purpose of life;’’ ‘‘I had feelings of hopelessness in general—sort of like‘‘how can the world be so unfair?’’ I didn’t know how to move forward knowingwhat I knew about the world;’’ ‘‘What was I doing? What did this research meanto anyone? What did it mean to me? What did it mean to the people? Nothing.’’

Through the interviews it became apparent to me that these researchers werenot super-human. They did experience trauma in the field, a trauma that theyfelt unable to express at the time: ‘‘I felt like I was absorbing every single emo-tion around me. [...] I was scared, traumatized, sad, worried but I expressed verylittle during the interviews.’’ And the researchers’ emotional traumatization didnot end when they returned from the field: ‘‘I was completely numb for a verylong time […] I shut down quite a bit;’’ ‘‘I felt depressed and unable to reallyfunction much outside my house for several months (this is very, very unlikeme). I didn’t want to socialize. I had suicidal thoughts.’’ Two of the threeresearchers spoke of how they sought professional therapeutic help on theirreturn from the field. Finding people to talk to about their experiences was vital

689The Forum

to all the researchers’ stories of recovery. They particularly sought communica-tion with other academics, who they felt would understand the specific pressuresof their work in a way that their friends and family could not: ‘‘I didn’t want totalk to family [who] just didn’t understand my research or me, or what I hadgone through.’’ However, they all found it difficult to find a space to talk withinfeminist IR, partly, they said, because such disclosure can be perceived as self-indulgent, and partly because feminists seem generally uncomfortable talkingabout emotions and ‘‘don’t want to be seen as weak women talking about ourindividual, personal thoughts and feelings.’’

The researchers all felt that they had been largely unprepared for the emo-tional effect of carrying out their research: ‘‘I was completely naıve. I knewI would hear some very emotional material, but I really felt like it was THEIRemotion and that it wouldn’t impact me’’ (emphasis in original). As well as theinterviews, I also carried out an analysis of published feminist IR literature andfrom this, their lack of preparation was unsurprising, as I found many indica-tions that researchers’ emotions were silenced, or at best marginalized, in femi-nist IR research narratives. Open discussions of researchers’ emotions wereextremely rare, particularly when compared with the numerous explorations ofresearch subjects’ emotions. Occasionally I was surprised, on a second or thirdclose reading of a text, to discover indications that a researcher had experi-enced some symptoms of trauma and common shock when carrying outresearch; on first reading, these hints had passed me by as they appearedmerely as hauntings, to be hunted out beneath the surface of the text. Thissuggested that while researchers’ emotions were not overtly described in thesetexts, they had been present, affecting the research and its presentations (forexample, D’Costa 2006; Kotef and Amir 2007). Almost all of the descriptionsof researchers’ emotions that I did find were concentrated in introductionsor conclusions and absent in the main body of the literature (for example,Sharoni 1995), or they were found in marginal sites, such as the ‘‘conversa-tions’’ section of a journal, separate to the more academic pieces, whichhelped to construct them as inappropriate to ‘serious’ scholarly work (forexample, Bahramitash 2008). Researchers also regularly depicted their emo-tions in opposition to notions of objectivity (for example, Butali 2000) andrationality (for example, Gluck 1994); these old dichotomies still reignedsupreme. And there was considerable evidence that the conventions of aca-demic writing (which go hand in hand with publishing constraints and the pro-fessional pressure to get published) caused many researchers to struggle toknow how to bring their emotions into their research representations (forexample, D’Costa 2006; Jacoby 2006).

In conclusion, it seems that feminist IR researchers are not as super-human asI had thought. Common shock appears to be pervasively present within feministIR scholarship, hidden within a culture of silence around researchers’ emotionalresponses to their research. This silence contributes to a feminist IR communityidentity that does not admit the existence of this traumatization. By allowing itsnarratives to be constructed in this way, feminist IR effectively silences itsresearchers and fails to provide the frameworks that could help them to makesense of their experiences in order to heal. If feminist IR can find a way to breakthose silences and be more open about its emotions, the discipline’s narrativeswill start to change and it will begin to construct itself as a caring, willing audi-ence. This could not only allow feminist IR researchers to continue to engage inemotionally demanding sites in a safer, healthier way but also allow them tounderstand their research more fully, and to uncover some of the untold storieswithin that research, stories which could enrich feminist IR and improve its theo-rizing. And maybe I, and others like me, would not feel we have to be super-human to find our place in feminist IR.


Their Personal is Political, Not Mine:Feminism and Emotion

Megan H. MacKenzie3

Department of Politics and IR, Victoria University of Wellington

The need to understand the relationship of emotions with scholarship becameinescapable during a research trip to Sierra Leone in 2005. From the minuteI landed in Freetown until the day I departed, emotions completely hijacked myoriginal, concise and ‘‘rational’’ research plan. I distinctly remember, upon return-ing to Canada, sitting and staring at the piles of research documents, transcribedinterviews and notes. Each statement, statistic, and interview segment scribbledroughly on scattered papers was hardly representative of the people and interac-tions involved in the research. Absent were the conversations that occurredbetween the ‘‘official’’ research questions, including the lengthy debates that tookplace on a six-hour bus ride regarding whether women should enter politics; asenior United Nations staff member’s reflections on the pressures to encourage hisdaughters to undergo female genital mutilation; or a local researcher whisperingto me that ‘‘the guns have not been put away, they are under the table, waiting.’’ Itseemed to me that any attempts at translating my ‘‘data’’ into publishable scholar-ship required me to create—as Christine Sylvester puts it—stick figures, not only ofthe women, men, and children that I spoke with in Sierra Leone but also of myself.

Instead of writing about the experience of my field research and how itimpacted my overall approach to IR, I consistently wrote this out of my work.I was initially encouraged to rethink this approach of ‘‘writing out’’ emotionsthrough email conversations with Swati Parashar. Sandra Marshal’s recent mas-ter’s thesis on emotions and feminist IR moved this discussion further. From myreading of this thesis, two points became clear. First, it became obvious that forthe three researchers she interviewed, including me, the obstacles and challengesto writing in emotions were shared and systemic. Second, it became clear thatwriting emotions out of our research was unrealistic, explicitly anti-feminist, andultimately resulted in dishonest and fragmented research outputs.

Each time I tried to write in emotions, I felt that I faced two roadblocks. Thefirst roadblock came from the field of IR. For young feminist scholars already con-cerned about being taken ‘‘seriously’’ by the field, it can seem that any attempts toincorporate emotions or discuss emotions as part of our research process couldevoke criticism of our research objectivity, paint us as weak, or raise concernsabout our capacity to do field work. Even though there is growing research anddiscussion on emotion within IR (Pain 2009; Bleiker and Hutchison 2008; Edkins2002), much of it is fixated on the lack of methods available to study emotions.The concern lies not in how thinking about emotions might alter the epistemolog-ical foundations of IR but how appropriate methods could render emotions rele-vant to current research projects—or how to appropriately ‘‘add emotions’’ tocurrent IR scholarship. The question avoided by this concern relates to the episte-mological bias within IR, which values rational, objective research and assumesthat ‘‘distance’’ between the researcher and the research subject is essential.

3Joining the Department of Government and International Relations, Sydney University, Australia, from January2012. Faculty Affiliate, Women and Public Policy Program, Harvard University, USA.

691The Forum

Surprisingly, the second roadblock to a discussion of emotions and theresearch experience came from feminist IR. Feminist scholars have written aboutthe importance of emotion and ‘‘the personal’’ to their research for decades;however, questions remain about how to produce and publish scholarship thatincorporates this aspect of our work. There is no consensus among feminists onthis; however, Ann Tickner (2005) contends that feminists have led the way inencouraging research focused on individuals, using hermeneutic, ‘‘sociologicallybased,’’ ‘‘historically contingent,’’ ethnographic, narrative and cross-culturalmethodologies that often involve intimate interaction between the researcherand ‘‘research subjects.’’4 These approaches seem to move us closer to the Otherand to the struggles, power dynamics and exploitation that ‘‘research subjects’’face; yet feminists all too often remain silent on our position in this exchangeand the power relations that we are implicated in.

By silencing ourselves in our work, feminists are implying that our position asthe objective researcher remains unaltered by the intimate and highly interactiveexperiences of research itself. As such, feminist scholarship that omits theresearcher completely, yet aims to speak of Other’s emotions, falls into the impe-rialist, patriarchal, and modernist trap of assuming that there is some idealobjective social science researcher and that legitimate scholarship on IR is objec-tive and rational. For both feminist and non-feminist scholars within IR, writingexperience and emotion out of research is encouraged and rewarded, and it isat the heart of what I see as the ‘‘problem’’ with emotions and IR. In order toadvance research and debate on emotions and IR, it is necessary to encouragescholars to write themselves back into their scholarship.

To clarify, locating yourself in your work is not about narcissism or personalbiography. As Shirin Saeidi and Heather Turcotte note, there is a fine linebetween reflexivity as witnessing and reflexivity as voyeurism or self-subjectivity.Reflexivity as witnessing is not simply about locating oneself in the research out-put or reporting on the difficulties and personal challenges of field work; rather,reflexivity should place emphasis on the ways in which the consumption,exchange, and witnessing of emotions through research alters and affects theresearcher and the research process.5

My own attempts at reflexivity provide an example of the challenges associatedwith writing in emotion and witnessing. In one of my first articles on wartimesexual violence in Sierra Leone I reported:

It is estimated that between 70 and 90 per cent of females abducted during theconflict were raped. The majority of the incidents of sexual violence reported toPHR (68) occurred between 1997 and 1999. (MacKenzie 2009)

In another forthcoming chapter I tried to present largely the same informa-tion while locating myself:

Standing at the back of a classroom at a training centre for former female sol-diers in Makeni, Sierra Leone, I was unable to stop myself from conductingmathematical equations in my head…According to my own data, as well as otherreports and estimations, 70-90% of female soldiers, and close to the same

4Examples of other researchers who have emphasized this include Sandra Harding (1987), who wrote exten-sively about the relationship between the inquirer and his ⁄ her subject. Joyce McCarl Nielsen (1990) stated that fem-inist inquiry is a dialectical process that encourages listening to women and attempting to understand their ‘‘livedexperiences.’’ In addition, Shulamit Reinharz (1992) has written on the value of knowledge building through con-versations either within texts or between researchers and research subjects. The point is to encourage researchersto listen to and interact with research subjects so as to better understand not just broad political trends, but individ-ual experiences and emotions.

5Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True have developed what they call a feminist research ethic that prioritizes,amongst other practices, reflexivity. See Ackerly and True (2010).


percentage of abductees, were raped during the conflict. The numbers associ-ated with wartime rape are staggering; the reality that most of the women in aroom with you have experienced rape is indescribable.

I initially saw the latter example as a success. I had located myself and givensome indication of the intense emotions involved in the space and practice ofcollecting information on sexual violence in Sierra Leone. After further reflec-tion, I realized this piece still had significant limitations. First, it only mentionedmy own emotions briefly, leaving out all details about the expressions or senti-ments of any of the women being spoken about. Second, in both versions, theempirical data about sexual violence remained at the center of the writing ratherthan the interactions that shaped this information. Third, there is no acknowl-edgment of how the conversations and interactions with these women impactedthe larger research project or inspired new approaches or thinking. Specifically,I wrote out how the interactions made it increasingly impossible for me to simplylook for statistical trends, empirics, and replicable data in my work, or to writeabout these women as statistics and stick figures rather than human beings.Clearly, the process of writing in emotions is not always instinctual or easy.

My more recent chapter in Christine Sylvester’s book Experiencing War (2011)hopefully offers a more useful example of how writing in emotions not onlylocates the researcher but also challenges IR’s epistemological biases regardinglegitimate scholarship (MacKenzie 2011). There, rather than ‘‘extracting’’selected interview quotations or highlighting statistical trends, thirteen formerfemale soldiers in Sierra Leone are featured answering the question ‘‘What is themost significant experience you had during the war?’’—with almost no editingand no interpretation. The answers are completely ‘‘messy’’ from a qualitativeperspective; however, in the end, their diversity and randomness provide an inti-mate, honest and revealing picture of women’s experiences of war. The pointhere is that writing in emotions is and should be a continual process thatinvolves rethinking and revising one’s approach to scholarship.

Feminist scholarship has consistently made the case that the personal is politi-cal and has aimed to challenge foundational assumptions about IR. Reflexivescholarship furthers both of these objectives by acknowledging that the emo-tions, reactions and personal reflections of the researcher are indeed political.This discourages scholarship that objectifies the research subjects by constructingthe researcher as a neutral expert observer. Furthermore, reflexivity encouragesa shift within the discipline by challenging the lingering foundational assump-tion that political science is always already a rational and objective field of study.

Politicizing Emotions: Historicizing AffectiveExchange and Feminist Gatherings

Shirin Saeidi

Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University

and

Heather M. Turcotte

Department of Political Science and Women’s Studies Program, University of Connecticut

What are the productive capacities of naming emotions within the disciplinaryconstructions of IR, particularly through a feminist framework? How do we trans-

693The Forum

late affective global political practice within the material frames of knowledgeproduction in ways that open up theorizations of social transformation andrefuse Cartesian traps of splitting thought-feeling, self-other, and theory-practice?We believe the effects of emotional consumption during research challenge ourpsyches as scholars and raise further questions about the role of emotions as alegitimate epistemic terrain of the discipline. More precisely, we consider thecontexts in which power and desire work to co-opt emotions, affective exchange,and people within the projects of IR and feminism.

We consider the feminist IR gathering as an interconnected site of intellectualand political engagement. Importantly, it provides insight into larger politicaleconomies of affective knowledge production because it manifests through multi-ple engagements with scholars and scholarship over space and time. Throughdrawing out the affective tensions within feminist gatherings, we offer a critiqueagainst the current global context of regulated feminist knowledge and the con-tinued backlashes against feminism as a co-opted neoliberal project. Feministtensions and contradictions around affect within IR are not new; rather, they arehistoric processes of struggle, collaboration, activism, and critical theoreticaldevelopment, which suggests feminism is never fully contained within neoliberalprojects.

Feminism is well known for its political interventions with a vital claim: ‘‘thepersonal is political.’’ We support this notion arguing that it should be criticallyexamined within feminist studies of emotions as a way to work against feministappropriations of the personal is privatized. We understand the personal is priv-atized as a political struggle that silences systemic inequities and limits access tothe claims of personal politics; it individualizes the moment of exchange and discon-nects it from larger circulations of power. Such mobilizations of the personaloften lead to divisions between feminists of various political orientations. We sug-gest that a historical grounding of the ways in which the personal has been con-figured within feminist IR needs to resituate itself within explicit structures ofinequality. This demands our theoretical initiations not be determined solely byour individualized personal; rather, our personal is theorized through systemiclinkages to, and within, larger structures of power that connect us to oneanother, especially within the discipline.

With growing IR interest to negotiate and account for affect, we mustground these discussions within the historical legacies that have enabled morefruitful interactions within interdisciplinary and interpersonal contexts. SaraAhmed (2004) explains that ‘‘affective economies,’’ the exchange of feelingsand emotions, are always undergirding the realms of knowledge productionand political practice. Taking Ahmed seriously, we would like to intervene incurrent academic amnesia by explicitly drawing attention to how the questionof emotions as a site of knowledge is deeply embedded within academia. Thereexists a large body of knowledge, a legacy of academic struggles, particularly byfeminist and postcolonial scholars, who have been writing and theorizing thetenuous relationships between affect, academia, and global politics for decades(see, for example, Agathangelou and Ling 2010; Anzaldua and Moraga2002[1981]; Fanon 1967[1952]). These literatures offer critical insights intohow and why ‘‘theories of the flesh’’ are central to the ways in which knowl-edge is produced and regulated within academia. This interdisciplinary workalso elaborates on how scholars both participate and intervene in the falsedichotomies of internal–external, researcher–self, and researched–other withinthe academy.

While affective knowledge and its exchanges are not new in the academy, wedo want to draw attention to the ‘‘new’’ frames of ‘‘making it felt’’ (Lorde2007[1984]:39). Within feminist and IR frameworks ‘‘new’’ desires have emergedto explicitly centralize affective knowledge. We remain optimistic about the possi-


bilities that surface here. However, the feminist IR position of a personal-emotiveway of making ideas felt is often pursued in isolation from other fields of studyand other kinds of scholars. We find that the politics of emotions raised by post-colonial and women of color feminist scholarship receives cursory discussionwithin feminist IR gatherings. The disengagement with certain scholars raises lar-ger concerns about the kinds of knowledge we are invested in producing withinIR, how are we situated to one another as feminist IR scholars, and whatbecomes the legitimate ground for our feminist exchanges to take place.

A reflection upon the centrality of interdisciplinary feminist studies is neces-sary for investigations of affective politics; otherwise, we risk further isolation. Infeminist IR, emotions are often presented as individualized discoveries of theself through our research. However, as Chandra Mohanty (2003:212–215) sug-gests, the individualizing of struggle erases the systemic. Without historicizinghow global affective economies are premised on capitalist relations, we privilegethe self in such a way that elides unequal relationships of power and our prox-imities to it. While we assert that our personal emotion is importantly informingthese affective knowledge exchanges, we need to be attentive to the ways inwhich our centring of the personal is part of a longer academic legacy of affec-tive and ‘‘discursive colonizations’’ (Mohanty 2003). To avoid such slippages, weneed to connect our emotions to systemic processes of colonization, slavery,and capitalism. As many postcolonial and transnational feminists suggest, suchconnections denaturalize the distance between self–other dichotomies and canoffer new ways of making our work felt and understood. Personal emotions arenever an individualized moment and any discussion of emotions must be clearabout the political stakes of how we realize them and why we desire to writeabout them.

Our spaces of feminist engagement begin with re-grounding the frames of thepersonal in the political that is always part of systemic relationships of power,which requires deeper theorizations of emotions that are attentive to interdisci-plinary labors, spatialities, and temporalities. Such spaces to discuss our feelingsas feminist IR researchers in the ‘‘field’’ necessitate nuanced understandings ofthe field in order to complicate the ‘‘legitimate’’ terrains of IR and feminism.Part of the problem of translating emotions within our research is that we havenot quite decolonized the terrains of where research can be located. Feminist IRcan renew its dedication to the personal by engaging with multiple geographiesof the personal—a process that works to desegregate the interplay of emotions,research, and ourselves. Shrinking the distance that exists between feminists ofvarious orientations requires us to endure temporary sentiments of estrangementand apprehension. We embrace the productive power of anger and uncomforta-bility (Lorde 2007[1984]). Raising the heat—the stakes—and talking throughthese moments can create sites for collaboration.

Deconstructing affective conditions of institutional racism, classism, and sexismwithin IR is overwhelming because we often have to pack our communities andreal feelings away. At the same time, it is imperative to have these complicatedconversations in order to create a different lexicon for political analyses. Femi-nist gatherings demand a remembering of the alternative uses of identity in ped-agogical processes; that is, a remembering of those who refuse pathologizationand individualization of the personal as way to intervene in the core of systemicviolence (Chowdhry and Nair 2005; Davis 1978). Positing the ‘‘personal is politi-cal’’ as systemic connectivity can in turn challenge the critique of feminism as aco-opted space. These encounters should be institutionally supported, with allthe individual and collective struggles that accompany them. Remembering thecontinued political urgency in our difficult tasks for feminist justice may, per-haps, rebuild and mend the frames of feminist solidarity that are committed tothe end of all forms of oppression, even within and amongst ourselves.

695The Forum

Embodied ‘‘Otherness’’ and Negotiations ofDifference

Swati Parashar6

Department of Politics and Public Administration, Limerick University

Emotions have generated some interest among political scientists and IR scholarsas ‘‘affective’’ and cognitive exchanges that can reconceptualize agents andagency in world politics (Crawford 2000; Marcus 2000). Like most political con-cepts, however, emotions are constructed as gendered and ‘‘feminized,’’ with thecaveat that excessive emotionality is a sign of weakness. This, perhaps, explainsthe tendency among feminist IR scholars to consider the ‘‘personal as political’’while leaving the ‘‘personal’’ obtrusively unexplored and (un)emotional. Thislack of engagement with emotions in the realm of the ‘‘personal’’ is intriguing.Feminist researchers’ ‘‘positionality,’’ emotional interactions, and exchanges that‘‘inform’’ the research are often not accounted for, despite feminist epistemolo-gies and methodologies offering spaces for more reciprocal relations betweenthe researcher and researched (Ackerly et al 2006).

I started to recognize a lack of engagement with and censuring of my own‘‘emotions’’ in my research when Sandra Marshall interviewed me for her MAthesis on emotions and the feminist IR researcher. While describing my researchwith militant women, I was able to narrate (although not cogently) the emo-tional journey of conducting research with people who affected my sensibilitieson a daily basis. I realized I had ignored my own emotions during the researchand fieldwork, when I was constantly engaged in efforts to normalize the alien-ation I felt from the subjects of the research and contain other negative orambivalent emotions about them (Bloom 1997). I believed that absenting myselfand my emotions from my research was the best way of attaining legitimateacademic insight and credible distance from research subjects. Ironically, whileI wanted to address the issue of silencing of women’s violent politics as a topic, Imight have ended up silencing and censoring myself in various ways, somethingI learned from seeing myself from the perspective of Marshall’s thesis. Based onfield experiences and conversations within this forum, I want to argue thatresearchers are not anonymous bodies ⁄ voices in relation to their research; weare, rather, constructed by desires, emotions, interests and politics while doingresearch. Knowing is intrinsically related to feeling; and yet we are unwilling totake intellectual risks by researching ⁄ acknowledging ⁄ writing the emotional intoour works, as Marshall notes.

I am particularly interested in how research subjects impact the researcher’sproject in emotional encounters that can be uncomfortable and even hostile,owing to clashing identities. The discomfort one experiences in situations of hos-tile fieldwork, where ‘‘otherness’’ is constantly being reproduced, is referred toby Gloria Hull (1984) as being locked in uneasy sisterhoods. Through criticalself-reflection on my own research and the methodology I used of interviews,focus groups, and oral narratives, I have learned that ‘‘difference’’ (ideologicaland political) between the subject and the researcher need not result in ‘‘unnec-essary compromise to bury oneself and produce silences in order to maintainvulnerable bonds’’ (Bloom 1997:116) or achieve research objectives. Borrowingfrom Leslie Rebecca Bloom’s (1997) ‘‘Reflections on Feminist Methodology and

6As of July 2011, the School of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, Australia.


Research Relations,’’ I argue that a feminist methodology of negotiating differencecan be useful in helping us think about inter-relationships of researcher andresearched in more sensitive and meaningful ways.

My research involved interviews and interactions with women in Kashmir andSri Lanka who supported militancy and political violence against the enemy‘‘other’’ and who even participated in the violence. The research topic itselfreflected emotional responses to the violence I lived through in post–Cold WarIndia in the 1990s, when riots, communal violence, terrorism, and politicalassassinations7 caused a great deal of anger, hurt, outrage, and public mourningthat disrupted daily lives. I am quite passionate about my research and writing,and most of my topical online articles are written only when I am sufficientlymoved or provoked.8 It was, therefore, interesting that I used emotional silenceand invisibility as a strategy during my fieldwork. The research in Kashmir andSri Lanka had a deep emotional impact on me as I studied women’s lives andpolitics that were both so different from my experiences. It was quite unnerving.I imagined that our differences were not possible to bridge, and so I rarelyshared my own politics and convictions with the respondents. I often felt upset,insulted and humiliated during the research over being ‘‘othered’’ constantly,not realizing that by not addressing my emotions I was also ‘‘othering’’ the sub-jects and foreclosing spaces for more empathetic politics and interactions toemerge.

The field research was as much an emotional journey as a physical one overtwo continents and three countries.9 At various times, I felt annoyed that myconvictions were being challenged or that I was ‘‘just’’ a subject to those I wasstudying. I reinforced my sense of ‘‘otherness’’ in Kashmir by attempting toblock my identity and views and adapt my self-presentation to the research cir-cumstances. For example, I tried to dress like local women, eat like them, andeven feel ⁄ emote like them. I also adopted their anti-India rhetoric at timesand tried to accept their stories of human rights violations by the Indian state.I was often upset and frustrated by their arguments, because there was no wayI felt I could debate with them or engage them from my point of view.10 Still,it did not seem unusual to hold back, given my small town upbringing inIndia in a strictly patriarchal environment, where the norm for women is tomask all emotions except grief and mourning; hurt, anger, pride, and humilia-tion are traditionally associated with men, and women may not show theseeven in situations that might have life-changing consequences.11 Yet my pos-ture during the fieldwork affected me and did not allow for a meaningful rela-tionship to emerge with any of the subjects across our differences. I was tryingto mitigate ‘‘otherness’’ and ‘‘difference;’’ but in hindsight I might have onlyendorsed these. The following reflections from my PhD thesis illustrate theconundrum:

7Communal riots between Hindus and Muslims have been a common feature in a post–Cold War India. Paki-stan sponsored insurgency in Kashmir; Islamist militant attacks have occurred in the rest of the country; Sikh mili-tancy and insurgencies in the northeastern states have caused a great deal of emotional response. The brutalassassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the hands of her Sikh militant bodyguards in 1984, and the assassi-nation of her son and former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at the hands of a woman suicide bomber from the LTTEin Sri Lanka in 1991 were also moments when the nation responded in strong emotional ways. Political violencehas been part of the nation’s narrative.

8My articles appear regularly on the Web site of South Asia Analysis Group (http://www.southasiaanalysis.org).I have never seen a contradiction between being emotionally affected and being rational and logical.

9Included were interviews with Tamil expatriates in Australia.10Some of the women I interviewed, like Dukhtaran-e-Millat founder Asiya Andrabi, were vehement supporters

of violent jihad against India.11This may seem ironic given the common association of the feminine with the emotional, and thereby irratio-

nal, realm of expression.

697The Forum

However, most political conversations often had me as a patient listener, becauseI was always conscious of the emotions behind what was being said. I contributedlittle as I was not sure what I could say to a people who had no love left for thecountry I belonged to.

In such a political and conflictual environment I struggled to balance my ownnational (Indian) identity as against the unwavering anti-India rhetoric of mysubjects.

I chose to not tell the women I had different convictions and very often pre-sented myself as an ‘‘outside’’ sympathizer of their cause.

I waded through these identity issues, very often having to make a decision aboutwhich identity I could privilege for maximum benefit to my research and mini-mum conflict with my subject. Sometimes, I would willingly adopt the anti-Indiaposition to be on common ground with my interviewees.

All these multiple performances did affect my nerves at times, when I wonderedwhat the real me was.

We enact a certain non-negotiable ‘‘otherness’’ and ‘‘difference’’ in theabsence of critical self-reflection in our research. As Debbie Horsfall (2008:2)says, ‘‘knowing the ‘self’ and knowing about the subject are intertwined.’’ Reflex-ivity is not self-indulgence but reflection on how one becomes part of powerstructures and politics, and how that affects knowledge production. Negotiationsof difference are especially important in feminist research projects such as mine,where I was trying to understand and articulate the politics of violence in thelives of women. Within the conventions of respect, had I expressed my feelingsand views, it might have enriched the research in various ways. Mitigating differ-ence rather than negotiating it diminishes the space for understanding andempathetic politics to emerge. As Bloom (1997:119) suggests, the possibilities ofunlearning silences, prejudices, and fears of conflict are enhanced when‘‘women’s differences are accepted as the foundation of feminist research, ratherthan a disturbing problem of it; when researchers and respondents are placedon the same critical plane…reciprocal, negotiated, honest, and realistic inter-sub-jective relationships are fostered.’’

To conclude, emotions do not corrupt research, but involve a process of own-ing up to being human. If as feminists, we privilege the ‘‘personal’’ as ‘‘political’’and as international, the ‘‘personal’’ must also be (re)presented through a ubiq-uitous set of emotions that govern actions, behavior, and responses. I believethat my research would have greatly benefitted had I accepted the idea of reci-procal subjecthood and engaged a hyphenated set of identities, instead of worry-ing about how the ‘‘I’’ would impact the subjects. Emotional negotiations ofdifference happen on a daily basis during research and it is not easy to writeguidelines for these. But it is important to discuss them as part of evolving femi-nist methodologies through which we can do research and also become it. Wedo not just generate emotions in others but are affected by them. I am not argu-ing that researched and researcher boundaries should disappear, rather that weaccount for our locations and silences. Saeidi and Turcotte in this forum areaptly worried about the power relations and historical contexts (especially in apostcolonial world) within which emotions are ascribed or produced: the ‘‘indi-vidualization’’ that ignores the ‘‘systemic.’’ My concern is that the research con-text can also depoliticize individual experiences and emotions as a researcherand a writer.

In my emphasis on the ‘‘personal’’ as a site of affective politics, I alsodisagree with the aspects of Saeidi’s and Turcotte’s arguments. Drawing on


postcolonial and transnational feminist works, they caution against the ‘‘privati-zation’’ of the personal that can result in ‘‘discursive colonizations’’ and arguefor the denaturalization of the distance between self–other dichotomies. I thinkthey overstate their intriguing argument in ways that render the ‘‘personal’’entirely tied to those discursive colonizations—to the point where there cannotbe personal experience or personal affectivity and politics. Does this not pro-duce the very ‘‘differences’’ and divisive power relations that postcolonial analy-sis decries? I am thinking of the tendency in postcolonial analysis in the Westto sustain the ‘‘subaltern’’ as a subject status that cannot cease to exist, andwhich is peopled by those who cannot have ‘‘personal’’ emotions if they havealso experienced colonization, slavery, and capitalism. That argument can bedepoliticizing and disempowering, and as a colored woman from India workingto understand other colored women (and men) through face-to-face fieldworkexperiences, I find it sweeping and inadequately contextualized. As one posi-tioned to know the colonial nature of power, I also argue for my own subjectiv-ity and emotions as a researcher and for those of the researched. I urge Saeidiand Turcotte to engage with the ‘‘nature’’ of power without assuming anunchanging discursive framework of colonized spaces and affectivity that canend up iteratively reproducing differences instead of also producing differenti-ated agencies.

Perhaps this is the moment to turn to Sahir Ludhianvi (1921–1980), my favor-ite Urdu poet and Hindi film lyricist, for a different postcolonial ending. Fromhis poem ‘‘ashkon ne jo paya hai:’’12

Ashkon mein jo paya hai, wo geeton mein diya hai,Is par bhi suna hai ki zamane ko gila hai

The pain of my tears is what I have brought to my writings, but perhaps theworld does not approve of this.

Emotion, Risk, and Feminist Research in IR

Laura Sjoberg

Department of Political Science, University of Florida

Feminists in International Relations (IR) have argued that there is a personalelement in the international and shown how people at the margins of global pol-itics matter. Feminists have also criticized the argument that research producesobjective knowledge, instead arguing that all knowledge (particularly feministknowledge) is perspectival, interested, and political. Still, we often acknowledgeintellectual and political perspective without including emotional dimensions.

Yet that is not how research works. I feel my work. My emotions to ⁄ with itinclude relating, desire, repulsion, fear, love, and hate. I am personally investedin my research, motivated by passion about its subject matter and ambitions formy career. Those feelings are without, within, and constitutive of the workitself—not separate from it. Emotion in (and as) research is an experienceshared by all researchers. Some deny it. Some embrace it. Some of us cannotsort it out. Some need therapy about it or fall into more than one (or even all)of those categories. There are also interrelated emotions about disciplinary

12Ludhianvi’s poetry is noted for its rebellious, romantic, socialist, anti-establishment, and even feministovertones.

699The Forum

reactions to the research: the situated and contextual emotional risk of doingthe work and sharing it. Thus, my ‘‘perspective’’ is about my experiences as gen-dered feminine, and my feminist politics, but also about my feelings as (a) me.

If knowledge is interested, then it is not just in terms of experience or politicsbut also feeling and emotion. The interaction between feeling ⁄ emotion andknowledge is neither simple nor static—it is complicated. Our personal emo-tional relationships with our research involve conflict and contradiction and canchange and ⁄ or evolve over time. How ‘‘we’’ collectively relate to our researchalso changes with changing cultural norms, both generally and within the disci-pline. For example, my discussion below involves Facebook statuses, which have(fast) become a popular way of expressing (and commodifying and individualiz-ing) emotion, about research and otherwise. Some might characterize my (andothers’) interest in ‘‘bringing in’’ emotions to IR research as less an intellectualinnovation or development than a follow-on to the relentless ⁄ staged personalemoting of social networking in an increasingly performative online social envi-ronment. Certainly, even a decade ago, it may have been unimaginable to com-plain to a thousand of one’s ‘‘closest’’ friends about a stomach ache, much lessdifficulty with a journal article. Now, such performances are commonplace.

Still, to reduce the question of feeling our research to the recent commodifica-tion of individual emotion in online social networking is as big an error as ignor-ing the role of emotion. Like any research, research about emotion in ourresearch needs to take account of complexities, contingencies, and problems inthe experience, performance, and reception of those emotions; but their exis-tence does not need to hinder doing the research.

There are certainly many ways to research feelings about our research andhow those feelings affect research. I use narratives. Feminists have argued thatnarratives are texts that both assist theorizing and constitute theory (Zalewski1996). I share narratives of the felt experience of disciplinary interactionsaround some of my research here, using contrasting approaches: personalexplanatory narratives introducing the research, Facebook status collages,13 anddiscussions of emotional reactions to the research process.

This piece looks at research as personal and researches the personal in (particularlymy) work, especially how emotional risks in (feminist) IR research inform itscontent. It asks how risks ⁄ emotions shape and are shaped by researching agen-das through two examples of (my) work in (feminist) IR: conversations betweenfeminisms and Security Studies and feminist research on women’s violence.

Exposure: Approaching IR with Gender Research

Feminist work on the meaning, content, and practices of Security Studiesincreases in volume, sophistication, and breadth as Feminist IR grows. Still, con-versations between feminisms and ‘‘mainstream’’ Security Studies remain stunted.Part of my work has tried to spark these conversations, through engaging with‘‘traditional’’ security theories, publishing feminist work in ‘‘traditional’’ securityoutlets, and involving non-feminist security scholars in feminist conversations.One such project entailed editing a special issue of Security Studies. That projectbegan in summer 2006 (with the special issue proposal) and was published in2009 (in the journal and a follow-up book).14 In Facebook statuses, the emotionsaroused by the project come out like this:

13I am using Christine Sylvester’s (2009) ideas on collage as a methodology to think about filtered forms ofexpression, as interesting for what they leave out as for what they include. That said, they archive immediate reac-tions, which, when triangulated with unfiltered memories of feelings, is richer than the latter alone.

14The special issue of Security Studies is 18(2) (Summer 2009), and the book (Routledge 2010) is called Gender

and International Security.


7 ⁄ 10 ⁄ 06 feels naked in a crowded stadium despite being neither7 ⁄ 12 ⁄ 06 feels like a crazy hot movie star naked in a crowded stadium despite being noneof the above2 ⁄ 18 ⁄ 07 Is way too little to do something this big6 ⁄ 20 ⁄ 07 doing thankless work that no one cares about11 ⁄ 20 ⁄ 07 thinks, what if this actually…works?4 ⁄ 28 ⁄ 08 thinks about (personal and international) security way too much9 ⁄ 16 ⁄ 08 is wishing she could draw and quarter a particular editor9 ⁄ 18 ⁄ 08 is calming down and uttering a few sentences without curse words in them12 ⁄ 07 ⁄ 08 needs to remember that playing with fire gets one burned. She always thinks sheis the circus performer who can juggle the fire. She most definitely is not.05 ⁄ 18 ⁄ 09 Dude! Special Issue! Sweet!10 ⁄ 17 ⁄ 09 The book is out!3 ⁄ 20 ⁄ 10 feels that the problem with bridges is that they don’t belong on either side

Put into personal narrative:Fear and terror: from my (law) office in (Bangor) Maine with no (academic)

job, asking an elite journal for a feminist special issue when they have never evenprinted the word ‘‘women.’’ Heart attack: editors agreed, quickly and enthusiasti-cally. Desire to hide: editors do not get the sex ⁄ gender distinction or feministcritiques of normal science. Courage: there are risks in trying to bridge thesedivides explicitly and without yielding epistemological ground. Submission: jour-nal editors will lead the workshop and select essays. Fear and terror again: I mustdo both. I will edit this issue and must justify my decisions. Enthusiasm: I canturn these path-breaking papers into articles. Defeat: a reviewer clearly does notunderstand. False bravado: negotiating with the journal editors. Exhaustion: lev-els of effort and emotional commitment required are ridiculous. Relief: every sin-gle suggested revision is finally done. Betrayal: should more revision demands beread as about editorial change, disorganization or hostility to feminist work? Fearand terror yet again: defending the work and the review process. Cynical obliga-tion: revising again. Numbness: the articles are finally accepted. Mad, crazy joy:issue is published. Fear and terror, fourth time: how will Security Studies react?How will feminists?

Together, the sense emerges that my effort to ‘‘mainstream’’ gender in IR isemotional (because of my political commitment) and emotionally risky (giventhe high likelihood of misunderstanding and rejection). The nudity referencedescribes feeling exposed when taking big research risks that are likely to causebacklash. The bridges comment expresses frustration that a mainstream-seekingscholarly mission is both encompassing and isolating. There is also emotionalaffirmation: when both ‘‘sides’’ engage, I feel victorious. But neither the frustra-tion of failure nor the celebration of success comes without risk, exposure, andfear or the ambition and bravado that ignoring or overcoming it requires. Theresearch cannot be separated from those feelings. In this research, I am at risk,exposed, fearful, ambitious, and courageous. The research, then, is also risky,exposed, fear-inducing, and driven by ambition and courage. It is more thanthat, but always that.

Perversion: Women’s Violence in Global Politics

In April 2004, I saw pictures of prison abuse in Iraq in the newspaper. I foundmyself unsurprised by the US military perpetrating war crimes but shocked bythe (female) sex of some perpetrators. I thought, ‘‘A woman did that?’’ Later, itoccurred to me that I think women can do that (not that they should) becausewomen are as capable as men. As a feminist, I seek to reveal, transgress, andultimately defeat sex and gender subordination. Political, scholarly, and media

701The Forum

reactions of shock, fetishization, and stereotyping to Abu Ghraib were themselvesforms of gender subordination, enacted by me (among others). So long as wesee women as incapable of anything (even committing heinous violence), weplace limits on all women’s capabilities.

These limits on all women’s capabilities discipline me as woman. As such,I desire to deconstruct (my and others’, particularly feminists’) essentialistunderstandings of violent women in order to deconstruct essentialist understand-ings of me. I also desire the development, growth, coherence, and prominenceof a feminist community of scholars in IR. Work on women’s violence can situncomfortably in the feminist community because it unseats our characteriza-tions of violence as male ⁄ masculine, and, I think, our unnecessary but existentassumption that women have men’s capacities without their flaws. I have alwaysbelieved that these two emotional commitments are not contradictory.

Reactions within the feminist community to my work on violent women haveranged from enthusiastic bandwagoning to repulsion at violent femininity andalienation from the resulting research. From the ‘‘mainstream,’’ reactions haveincluded a befuddling (pornographic?) fascination with women’s violence, takingwork on women’s violence as a critique of feminist IR, and entrenching genderessentialist understandings by trying to differentiate women’s motivations forviolence from men’s.

Doing this research inspires a number of feeling-experiences for me. Happi-ness: the idea caught on. People come to the panels. There is a research pro-gram. Accomplishment: Damn. I had a hand in starting this. But there are alsonegative feelings. Fear: most data collection in such research involves physicaland emotional risk. Repression, anger, frustration, caged-ness: people’s failure tosee my stakes, their stakes, and feminist stakes in this research makes me want tolash out about how I cannot figure out how to interact with people who cannotsee. Gaze: people often find this research perverse—why would I highlight thedisgusting stuff (very few) women do, when it contradicts the maternity, peace-fulness, and care of femininity it would be easier to emphasize? Isolation: I musthave some sick fascination with violence. Contradiction: I am a(n) (afraid butviolent) trapped pervert who gets attention for it.

A Language for Feeling in Research?

3 ⁄ 09 ⁄ 10: [American Political Scientist and Foreign Policy blogger Dan Drezner’sblog about the ISA Compendium, [an encyclopedia covering the discipline ofIR]: ‘‘You can’t say that feminist scholarship was neglected or marginalized in this encyclo-pedia – both J. Ann Tickner and Cynthia Enloe [feminist scholars] were cited in moreentries than either Robert Jervis or John Mearsheimer [security scholars].’’ Congrats, fem-inist friends. Maybe all of the work was worth it. Maybe.1 ⁄ 29 ⁄ 09: just got told by the National Science Foundation that her research plans were‘‘irrelevant,’’ ‘‘radical,’’ and ‘‘ unlikely to produce any real knowledge.’’ Motivating.

Research is often an emotional roller coaster. Most of us know that. Some of us(myself included) now share a fair amount of that roller coaster not only amongmy best friends and officemates but very publicly—on Facebook, and now here.Our performances not only shed light on and provide an outlet for the emotionthat has always been a crucial but silent part of our research, but they also distortand possibly exaggerate it. We are starting to see these complexities.

The next step is to start a research program on the role of personal feeling inIR research and teaching and ⁄ or the global political arena that is the subject ofour gaze. To do that research, our community would need to confront the dis-comforts of relating to our work. We would have to come up with languages andmethodological toolboxes to address the personal and the emotional and ⁄ in


ourselves, individually and as a community. This language would need to combinenarrative analysis and performativity to deconstruct the boundaries of ‘‘normalsocial science;’’ so that it includes interpretive research and reflexivity, interpre-tation of research and thinking (especially as these relate to risk, fear, awe, expo-sure, and celebration), as well as the other languages in which we often feel ourresearch but rarely if ever speak it.

Writing Emotion

Christine Sylvester

School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Incorporating emotion into feminist IR research is not a straightforward matter,as the contributors to this forum clearly show. As always, we find here debatesabout appropriate frameworks, positionings, and interpretations. Meanwhile, thefield of IR is itself far from the narrow, disciplined, and gate-kept enterprise itwas twenty years ago. That can be a small comfort to feminist IR researchers whofeel the heat of difficult fieldwork that was rarely conducted under IR rubricstwenty years ago, or the disapproval of camp colleagues when they take up topicsor viewpoints that push the parameters of risk, as in studying war or violence asfeminist IR rather than peace. When writing up research, feminist IR researchersknow they can be rewarded for holding emotions in check. It is how things aredone across the social sciences. Got emotion? ‘‘Then please stand behind thepolice barricades, ma’am.’’ If a researcher decides to breach the barricades,she or he might wonder, as Megan MacKenzie and Swati Parashar do, how towrite emotions into intended publications.

My own journey through feminist IR covers a lot of ground, from extendedfieldwork in Zimbabwe on the production of women in a newly postcolonial set-ting to research on major art ⁄ museums as institutions of IR (Sylvester 2000;2009). The Zimbabwe research showcases ordinary local people as agents ofknowledge, power, and identity. It also acknowledges me as a researcher affectedby the days upon days and months upon months of exhaustive interviewingaround the country. Art museums are not ordinary locations for most people inthe world and probably never will be. Like most institutions of IR, these special-ized places attract those with some knowledge of what they are all about and canintimidate or anger others who are put behind the knowledge barricades; I knowsomething about museums, but even that does not prevent me from landing at afew such barriers when researching art ⁄ museums. Both projects have featuredextensive fieldwork, ethnographic in nature in the case of Zimbabwe and some-thing of participant observation in numerous art museums. In each situation,experiences of the senses envelop the researcher, and the people, or art, build-ings, and literatures researched, in tangent circles and productions of emotion.The issue here is not what those emotions are exactly but accessing theemotional and finding ways to write it into research instead of minding thebarricades.

Zimbabwe: Facts plus Fictions

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s and beyond, as Zimbabwe rose out of colo-nialism, I made more research trips to the country than I can count andwrote excitedly as well as quite critically about its opportunities and disap-pointments. At the new millennium, however, the country started sliding into

703The Forum

severe economic decline at the hands of the same ZANU-PF machine that hadearlier been seen as progressive. The emotional impact of Zimbabwe’s fall,temporary as it will be, can leave ordinary people and researchers alike sickfeeling, speechless, wordless—me among them. Not Zimbabwe’s fiction writers.They hardly miss a beat in depicting daily life in a country that has no mone-tary currency of value, no jobs, no reliable drinking water in the cities,unsteady electricity everywhere, malnutrition, rampant AIDs infections, and lifeexpectancies hovering in the upper thirties. A local gallows humor ballastssome of the best stories of today’s Zimbabwe, as Petina Gappiah’s An Elegy forEasterly (2009) shows:

‘‘I say to Blair and to Bush that this country will never, a trillion trillion timesnever, be a colony again.’’ The microphone gave a piercing protest at the trilliontrillion, making the phrase jump out louder than the other words. There was anugget of newness in the use of trillion and not million as a measure of theimpossibility of re-colonisation. It is three months since inflation reached threemillion three hundred and twenty-five per cent per annum, making billionairesof everyone, even maids and gardeners (p. 7 emphasis in original).

A group of Zanu PF supporters arrives at the pearly gates. Saint Peter is greatlyshocked, and goes to consult God. God says, but ruling party supporters are alsomy children. Saint Peter goes to fetch them, but rushes back alone shoutingthey’ve gone, they’ve gone. How can the ruling party supporters just disappear,says God. I am talking about the pearly gates, says Peter (p. 115–116).

The largest research project I conducted in Zimbabwe entailed interviewing400 working women and managers on-site, as well as scores of government andnon-governmental agents with resources to help women workers. In the late1980s and early 1990s, things were different in Zimbabwe than they are today.Women found paying jobs on commercial farms and in factories, or they devel-oped cooperatives and intensified the small-scale farming that had been dis-rupted by decades of war. The women spoke vividly and emotionally about theirwork situations. Managers and agencies of assistance used very different yet color-ful words to describe women workers.

When it came time to write up the reams of interview ‘‘data,’’ however, thetexture of the workplaces, and the emotional words that had come tumblingout with great expressiveness, landed stale on my pages. They were supposedto be dead, evidentiary, and unemotional, but because they were so, thesecould not be anything other than stick-figure tales short on meaning. The solu-tion for me was to intersperse the words of people interviewed with words spo-ken by similarly situated characters in Zimbabwe’s postcolonial fiction, addingmy own responses now and then. Postcolonial novels, I reasoned, would not beunrelated to experiential facts, a supposition that the distinguished Zimbab-wean writer, Chenjerai Hove (1994: 15), underscored: ‘‘people themselves arebits of imagination. We are invented. We are invented by other people.’’ Min-gling local fiction with local facts also helped in addressing Gayatri Spivak’s(1988) ever-present question about whether the subaltern can speak, updatedto where and how do subalterns speak? From my Producing Women and Progressin Zimbabwe (2000:155):

At the end of the day Mazvita felt weak, felt faint and frantic from the tobaccosmell which spread toward her, like decay. The tobacco rose from inside her.The air was mouldy. Dark and wet. She turned her eyes towards the asbestos roofwhere the air hung downward like soot. It choked her, that smell. Out of theshed, she breathed slowly and preciously (Yvonne Vera, Without A Name,1994:22).


But, arguably, not too slowly, not too preciously. Labor on commercial farmsis grimy, even in the open air. It can consist of soybean slashing—brutal workthat sends soil and bean dust up around your head. It can be lime picking orcotton gathering, both of which pick and scratch at your legs and arms. It canbe tobacco stripping and grading—utterly noxious, worse even than Mazvitadescribes. It can, if you are lucky, be flower bundling, which is less dirty. Always,however, there are the men about supervising you so that you cannot breatheprecious air by yourself. Hove: ‘‘…You women over there, stop gossiping aboutthe latest love potions and get on with the work’’ (Hove, Bones, 1988:16-17).

Those farms, that work, and those supervising men have all but disappearedunder Robert Mugabe’s land confiscation policies. The women workers are gone,too; some were beaten up first for the crime of working for white landowners.Ghosts and bones remain of a time past, when women workers could whisper tothe researcher that ‘‘management pretends to think that we women are humanbeings when, in fact, they look down on us’’ (Sylvester 2000:165), just as the fic-tions said that they did. And there were times when I could say somethingsnappy back to that management (pp. 14–15):

All this emphasis on women. It seems too much. I don’t approve of separateactivities for women. They can always just join the men.Can the men always just join the women?Silence.

Art ⁄ Museums: Who’s Feeling What?

It is a vastly different world inside an art museum. Obviously so. Yet the workthere is visual fiction, narratives in oils, abstractions defying narrativization,installations yelling at viewers, and pieces spectators must touch or sit on to com-plete. Stories lie behind each artwork and behind each museum facade, buriedin brief, bland descriptions posted on the walls. Everyone must stand behindemotion-eliminating barricades when approaching most of the art, even if youare trying to do some research:

I’d like to see museum archives that contain documents, debates and museumposition papers, if that’s possible.Are you from Greece?Umm, no.Have you been to Greece, then?…Excuse me?This is a difficult area for the museum right now. Everyone’s making a fuss aboutsomething that doesn’t warrant it (Sylvester 2009:25).

The political and emotional ‘‘fuss’’ this librarian was referencing had to dowith the Parthenon sculptures and ongoing international struggles over theirrightful ownership. Greece wanted the sculptures. I wanted documents. The Brit-ish Museum, where many Parthenon sculptures are housed, wanted no pokingaround on this topic. It was tricky terrain to negotiate as a feminist IR scholarout of place and in the museum as an interloper trying to study art ⁄ museums asinstances and institutions, rather than representations, of IR.15 That researchexperience felt like the early days of feminist IR itself, when simply showing upat IR was a suspicious act.

15It is tricky for most researchers. Museums can be guarded palaces, as Michael Gross (2009) reveals about hisefforts to get to the bottom of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

705The Forum

My decision in that context was to go with the outsider feeling rather thanfight it. I would learn by not trying to get behind the behind or around thepower barricades. Hour after hour, day after day, looking nose bleed hard atwhat the exhibition rooms held, what the museum architecture contained anddid not contain, I was forced back as a researcher onto judgment reachedpartly via the senses and partly through archives and interviews. It was an emo-tionally heaped experience, combining researcher as agent with researcherwritten by the works, the museum buildings, and the people of art. JamesElkins (2004) tells of parallel emotional experiences looking at Mark Rothkopaintings hours on end in their Houston chapel home. It brought him tears,boredom, and at times insightful delirium. Sarah Thornton (2008) describesMichael Asher’s art classes at the California Institute of the Arts that focus onone work for up to eight hours straight. Within that time span, a lot happensand nothing happens: there is critique, critique of the critique, silence, peoplewandering in and out, some food now and then, and sometimes a good sleepin situ.

Spend enough time and the art ⁄ museum interviews the viewer-researcher, pull-ing hard on body and senses. Consider the late Juan Munoz’s ‘‘ConversationPieces.’’ Dozens of vaguely Asian ‘‘men’’ stand around with smiles on their facesand twinkles in their sculpted eyes as they look toward the doorway you have justentered. You are delighted to make their acquaintance as art and they are sopleased to see you. Only no eyes meet and no one talks. Emotions are bottledup behind the shared barricades of polite smiles. A docent comes by, regularlyoffering visitors an art-based interpretation of ‘‘Conversation Pieces.’’ She doesnot know my feminist IR version, which follows hours of looking, smiling, andobserving viewers with the ‘‘Pieces.’’ Here it is.

An international meeting is taking place in a room of identically dressed, iden-tical men of manners. Others, who have breached the institutional barricadesand come inside, begin communicating how they feel about the issues under dis-cussion. The important men who were there first could find this intrusion anaffront. They could continue to not look at the barrier-breakers, smiling on andinsistently ignoring the political drama emerging around them. Instead, the bois-terous talkers bring life to ‘‘Conversation Pieces:’’ they are just what those identi-cal figures have smilingly entered the museum hoping to engage, mostlyencountering adoring art fans instead. The mood in the room changes as a polit-ical process of looking and talking takes the place of a distant and formulaicsmiling. It is a process the feminist IR researcher-participant there feels, watches,and writes into the investigatory framework of her project—and then into thearticle that follows.

So…

How does it feel? the young Bob Dylan wailed. How is it meant to feel by whomand by what social, artistic, historical, cultural, and economic mores? In a differ-ent time and in multiple contexts of research, it is good to dust off and extendthat wailing question and take it seriously in all its possible meanings and loca-tions. Find ways to write the myriad emotions of IR and watch yet another set ofknowledge barricades fall away.

References

Ackerly, Brooke, and Jacqui True. (2010) Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science. Lon-don: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ackerly, Brooke, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True (eds) (2006) Feminist Methodologies for InternationalRelations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Agathangelou, Anna M., and L.H.M. Ling. (2010) Transforming World Politics: From Empire toMultiple Worlds. New York: Routledge.

Ahmed, Sara. (2004) Affective Economies. Social Text 22 (2): 117–139.Bahramitash, R. (2008) Iran, the Axis of Evil. International Feminist Journal of Politics 10 (1): 98–101.Bleiker, R., and E. Hutchison. (2008) Fear No More: Emotions and World Politics. Review of

International Studies 34 (Suppl. S1): 115–135.Bloom, Leslie Rebecca (March 1997). Locked in Uneasy Sisterhood: Reflections on Feminist

Methodology and Research Relations. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 28(1): 111–122.Butali, U. (2000) The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. London: Hurst &

Company.Chowdhry, Geeta, and Sheila Nair (eds) (2004) Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations:

Reading Race, Gender and Class. London: Routledge.Conover, Pamela Johnston, and Virginia Sapiro. (1993) Gender, Feminist Consciousness, and

War. American Journal of Political Science 37 (4): 1079–1099.Crawford, Neta C. (2000) The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotion and Emotional

Relationships. International Security, 24 (4): 116–156.D’Costa, B. (2006) Marginalized Identity: New Frontiers of Research for IR? In Feminist Methodologies

for International Relations, edited by B. Ackerly, M. Stern, and J. True. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, pp. 129–152.

Davis, Angela (1998[1978]) Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting. In The Angela Davis Reader,edited by Joy James. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 129–137.

Edkins, Jenny. (2002) Forget Trauma? Responses to September 11. International Relations, 16 (2):243–256.

Elkins, James. (2004) Pictures and Tears. New York: Basic Books.Elshtain, Jean Bethke. (1981) Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Enloe, Cynthia. (1990) Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics.

Berkeley: University of California Press.Fanon, Franz. (1967[1952]) Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.Fernandes, Leela. (2003) Transforming Feminist Practice: Non-Violence, Social Justice and the Possibilities of

Spiritualized Feminism. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.Gappiah, Petina. (2008) An Elegy for Easterly. London: Faber and Faber.Gluck, S. B. (1994) An American Feminist in Palestine: The Intifada Years. Philadelphia: Temple

University Press.Gross, Michael. (2009) Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the

Metropolitan Museum. New York: Random House.Haraway, Donna. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:

Routledge.Harding, Sandra. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Hawkesworth, Mary. (1989) Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth.

Signs 14 (3): 533–557.Horsfall, Debbie. (2008) Bearing Witness: Toward a Pedagogical Practice of Love? Reflective Practice

9: 1–10.Hove, Chenjerai. (1988) Bones. Harare: Baobab Books.Hove, Chenjerai. (1994) Shebeen Tales: Messages From Harare. Harare: Baobab Books.Hull, Gloria T. (1984) Alice Dunbar-Nelson: A Personal and Literary Perspective. In Between Women:

Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about Their Work on Women, edited by CarolAscher, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick. Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 105–112.

Huston, Nancy. (1983) Tales of War and Tears or Women. In Women and Men’s Wars, edited byJudith Stiehm. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Irigaray, Luce. (1985) This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Jacoby, T. (2006) From the Trenches: Dilemmas of Feminist IR Fieldwork. In Feminist Methodologies

for International Relations, edited by B. Ackerly, M. Stern, and J. True. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, pp. 153–173.

Jaggar, A. (1989) Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology. Inquiry: An Interdisciplin-ary Journal of Philosophy 32 (2): 151–176.

Kotef, H., and M Amir. (2007) (En)Gendering Checkpoints: Checkpoint Watch and Repercussionsof Intervention. Signs 32 (4): 973–996.

Little, M.O. (1995) Seeing and Caring: The Role of Affect in Feminist Moral Epistemology. Hypatia10 (3): 117–137.

707The Forum

Lorde, Audre. (2007[1984]) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press.MacKenzie, Megan (2009) The International Politics of Rape, Sex and the Family in Sierra Leone.

Institute for Security Studies, ISS Paper 203.MacKenzie, Mgan. (2011) Ruling Exceptions: Female Soldiers and Everyday Experiences of Civil

Conflict. In Experiencing War, edited by Christine Sylvester. London: Routledge, pp. 64–78.Marcus, G.E. (2000) Emotions in Politics. Annual Review of Political Science 3: 221–250.Mohanty, Chandra T. (2003) Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity.

Durham: Duke UP.Moisi, Dominique. (2009) The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope are

Reshaping the World. London: The Bodly Head.Moraga, Cherrıe, and Gloria E. Anzaldua (eds). (2002[1981]) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings

by Radical Women of Color. Berkeley: Third Woman Press.Nielsen, Joyce McCarl. (1990) Feminist Research Methods: Exemplary Readings in the Social Sciences.

Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Oakley, Ann. (1998) Gender, Methodology and People’s Ways of Knowing: Some Problems with

Feminism and the Paradigm Debate in Social Science. Sociology 32 (4): 707–731.Obeidi, A., K. Hipel, and D. Kilgour. (2005) The Role of Emotions in Envisioning Outcomes in

Conflict Analysis. Group Decision and Negotiation 14 (6): 481–500.Pain, R. (2009) Globalized Fear? Towards an Emotional Geopolitics. Progress in Human Geography 33

(4): 466–486.Reinharz, Shulamit. (1992) Feminist Methods in Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Shepherd, Laura (ed.). (2010) Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International

Relations. London: Routledge.Sharoni, Simona. (1995) Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women’s Resistance.

New York: Syracuse University Press.Sjoberg, Laura (ed.). (2009) Security Studies: Feminist Contributions. Security Studies 18(2),

183–213.Sjoberg, Laura (ed.). (2010) Gender and International Security. New York: Routledge.Spivak, Gayatri. (1988) Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited

by Cary Nelson, and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–313.Stanley, L., and S Wise. (1983) Breaking out: Feminist consciousness and feminist research. London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul.Sylvester, Christine. (1994) Empathetic Cooperation: A Feminist Method for IR. Millennium:

Journal of International Studies 23: 315–344.Sylvester, Christine. (2000) Producing Women and Progress in Zimbabwe: Narratives of Identity and Work

from the 1980s. Portsmouth: Heinemann.Sylvester, Christine. (2002) Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Sylvester, Christine. (2007) Whither the International at the End of IR. Millennium: Journal of

International Studies 35 (3): 551–573.Sylvester, Christine. (2009) Art ⁄ Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect It. Boulder,

CO: Paradigm Publishers.Sylvester, Christine (ed.). (2011) Experiencing War. London: Routledge.Thornton, Sarah. (2008) Seven Days in the Art World. New York: WW Norton.Tickner, Ann. (1988) Hans Morgenthau’s Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation.

Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 17 (3): 429–440.Tickner, Ann. (1992) Gender and International Relations. New York: Columbia University Press.Tickner, Ann. (2005) What is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International

Relations Methodological Questions. International Studies Quarterly 49 (1): 1–22.Weingarten, Kaethe. (2003) Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Every Day: How We Are Harmed, How

We Can Heal. New York: New American Library.Vera, Yvonne. (1994) Without A Name. Harare: Baobab Books.Zalewski, Marysia. (1996) All These Theories Yet the Bodies Keep Piling Up. In International Theory:

Positivism and Beyond, edited by Steve Smith, Ken Booth, and Marysia Zalewski. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.


Documents

The Forum:Emotion and the Feminist IR Researcher emotion and the... · 08/12/2011 · dealing with emotions in academic research and writing, it is usual for feminists in International