Fieldnotes of a Feminist Killjoy

Following feminist visions for a feminist ethnography, I threw myself into fieldwork last year as a woman ethnographer deeply listening to women’s voices, writing thickly about women’s experiences in the everyday social marked by violent, intersecting caste, class and gender inequalities in a “non-dominating way”, with care and attachment, bringing into focus the particular not the general, more participant than observer. I carried feminist dilemmas around positionality and objectivity with me into the field. However, I did not anticipate the feelings that tagged along with the acts of participation and observation - the waves of rage, bursts of anger, and spells of madness. I followed Dalit women at work, watching them wage daily battles for survival and safety, continually negotiate for freedoms, agency and dignity, and struggle endlessly against multiple interlocking oppressions. How could I not be consumed with fury even as a dislocated witness to these lived lives? How could I live with this anger (beside it, beneath it and top of it as Audre Lorde wrote) and then turn into a palatable ethnography of “close-in contact with far-out lives?” Could this even be a feminist ethnography? In this paper, I offer an excavation of my fieldnotes to reveal the workings of a researcher who became a feminist killjoy in the field - an intervening, interfering, interrupting, interrogating participant. I rolled my eyes too hard, argued too loudly, ranted too freely, questioned incessantly, and laughed too openly. I recorded my own dissidence even as I documented the dissident lives of others. My objective with this paper is to articulate what takes place when we, the feminist researcher, are in fact at work; what happens within us as observers who are in the process (business even) of observing others. Does feminist anger have epistemic value in ethnography?