Field Sites from Failure: Lessons in Method from an Ethnography of Queer Radicalism in India | Humanities & Social Sciences

Field Sites from Failure: Lessons in Method from an Ethnography of Queer Radicalism in India

Tuesday Seminar
Speaker: 
Svati P. Shah, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Date and Time: 
Tue, 24/01/2023 - 3:30pm to 5:30pm
Schedule: 
03:30 PM to 05:30 PM
Venue: 
HSS Committee Room (MS 610)

This talk is drawn from an ethnography of the spaces where queer, autonomous feminist and radical politics are mutually imbricated, adjacent, or, indeed, coterminous India. Anchoring my thinking in the 'near histories' of South Asian sexuality politics in general, and radical queer critiques in particular, I focus on that period in every ethnographic project in which we search for the perfect, or almost perfect, ethnographic field site(s), only to find that the project requires modification, or relocation all together. I argue that this both a necessary phase in any ethnography, and that it reveals the ways in which the ethnographic gaze produces the site as a discursive space. The construct of 'searching' for a field site implies the a priori existence of the site's coherence. A discursively productive perspective on the site can help to place the various acts of ethnographic knowledge production, including interlocution and writing field notes, in perspective. So much of the reading of sociality in ethnography reifies the ethnographic encounter 'itself', rightly exhorting the ethnographer to read oneself into the telling of the interaction. At the same time, this can bleed into so much identitarian 'positionality' that can itself obscure the power of the critique, particularly within the Euro-American tradition of ethnographic subjectivity. Here, I use a Lefebvrian perspective on the production to space in order to build on work that discusses the ethnographic encounter as a process of producing these subjectivities in order to discuss the ways in which the encounter's initial failure produces the field site from emplaced locations. This has significant implications for ethnographies of the informal, the underground, the illicit, and the extra-legal that seeks to move beyond the juridical frame.