Sep 21, 2020

Agency & Power Through Storytelling: Why Histories Told by Marginalized Women Are Paramount In…

Why Histories Told By Marginalized Women Are Paramount In Feminist Research Methodology
By Mar An Films / medium.com
Agency & Power Through Storytelling: Why Histories Told by Marginalized Women Are Paramount In…

It’s long been noted in feminist circles the ways women are prevented from mobilizing together and communicating with each other. For example, in many societies around the world, when women do get together and talk, there are often negative connotations applied; “gossiping” and “scheming” are words that are sometimes used to describe women talking together in a group as a means to belittle the discourse and hold them with suspicion.

This patriarchy-derived stigma can prevent women from having discussions about their problems and grievances. However, when women do have the opportunity to speak about injustices amongst each other, they can begin to realize that the problems they have are oftentimes shared. By realizing that individual problems aren’t individual but a structural problem affecting everyone, women can arrive at feminist consciousness. Once this consciousness is raised amongst women and others, the process of dismantling the oppressive systems that cause these problems can commence. These oppressive power structures remain in place only when women are kept isolated from each other, unaware that the suffering they may experience is due to structural violence and oppression, perhaps blaming themselves instead.

One of the prevailing themes of Playing With Fire is essentially the use and power of collaborative storytelling. The group of women from Playing With Fire each arrive into their feminist consciousness by sharing stories of their lives, including their hardships and the rigid patriarchal power structures that seek to control them. The Sangtin Writers (grassroots activists from the Sangtin organization in Uttar Pradesh, India, who are the focus of Playing With Fire) come from a variety of different caste and class backgrounds.

The objectives of Playing With Fire is not to consolidate and homogenize the stories of these women, but instead illustrate how patriarchy impacted all of their lives, no matter how their stories compared or contrasted. This book shows that because the Sangtin Writers had access to each other and were able to talk their problems out, they began to be better equipped to solve these problems in their own lives and beyond. Once they were able to somewhat alleviate the grip of patriarchy in their individual lives, the women became a positive feminist force in their communities, spreading pieces of knowledge and helping others to come into a feminist consciousness; a domino effect that benefits individuals and entire communities alike.

 

Playing With Fire concludes with the Sangtin Writers, who have gained enormous strength through solidarity and each other, taking their feminist values a step farther to critique and confront their place of work, an organization that is supposed to be an empowering space but is without immunity to the casteist hierarchies it’s supposedly combating. With this conclusion, the Sangtin Writers of Playing With Fire come full circle in their feminist journey. The objective of this story is to illustrate the Sangtin Writers finding agency and power through storytelling and how it transforms them from isolated and oppressed to a brave and positive collective force in their community that won’t be halted by patriarchal structures in any aspect of their lives, from their families to their places of work.

There are a lot of things that make this book extremely valuable in terms of feminist research. The reader is fully immersed in the lives of the Sangtin Writers; their lives are told to us in their own words without any filtration, and they are in control of how their own stories are told. It prioritizes perspectives and voices that are usually ignored, overlooked, oversimplified, or remain entirely unheard in academic and historical settings. For these reasons Playing With Fire itself can be an example of evidence of experience, as described in Joan W. Scott’s Chapter of Just MethodsAnother great resource for feminist research, Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader addresses research methodology and its inseparability from political and ethical principles. The book contains chapters authored by forty-five different feminist philosophers and scholars. In Scott’s chapter, Scott points out that using personal experiences as evidence can bring to light the histories of marginalized people, whose stories would otherwise never be heard in mainstream historical knowledge. This is the politics of epistemology — discourse coming from marginalized knowledge are often devalued, overshadowed, and silenced by patriarchy and white supremacist-enabled discourse. More value is usually placed on knowledge coming from Eurocentric academia filtered through patriarchal and white supremacist ideologies. The alternative histories of marginalized people as told by themselves rather than by an outsider are crucial to telling the full story of human history by creating visibility for these marginalized identities. They also tend to challenge patriarchal white supremacist understandings of history; notions that always erase what doesn’t fit its filtered historical framework. Make no mistake, the stories of these women are far more complex, dynamic, and significant than how a generalizing dominant discourse would describe their lives. Playing With Fire is an alternative history that highlights the experiences of the Sangtin Writers, and makes it accessible for those who would otherwise never hear stories of peasant women from the Global South. Furthermore, because of how Playing With Fire is written (with the authors in control of the stories), it gives the authors autonomy or the “authority of experience” that Scott describes.

There are other ways in which the Sangtin Writers used feminist research methods as they began to work in the community. In the Just Methods chapter “Research As An Act of Betrayal” By Naheed Islam, the author describes conducting a series of interviews in a Los Angeles immigrant community. Rather than relying on recording formal interviews as most psychological research goes, Islam instead conducted informal interviews in environments where interviewees felt comfortable and at ease. The interviewees saw the interviews as a way of airing their grievances and telling their community story and felt that they were on equal footing with the author. However, when the interviewees expressed racist views, Islam wondered whether she could challenge these notions without dissolving the insider status she had with the interviewees.

This question is connected to the methods the Sangtin Writers applied to their community work. After finding strength and gaining confidence through sharing their experiences, the Sangtin Writers go about their research method similarly to Islam as they begin to reach out and help their communities, and they help others come into a more feminist consciousness. They wanted to challenge the patriarchal aspects of the Gudiya festival, a festival in which dolls that are made by girls are strung up and beaten by boys. They recognized that this was a tradition that had lasted generations and knew that they had to go about challenging it carefully; not to do away with the tradition entirely but instead leave behind the harmful implications. Their solution to the dilemma was to encourage a new way of celebrating the festival by having the dolls be swung rather than beaten. They used the slogan “don’t beat the gudiya, swing it” to help reinforce the alteration. This method of using insider status to solve problems and raise consciousness is used in other situations as well.

The feminist development of these women becomes especially prominent towards the end of Playing With Fire. The main point of this final chapter is to highlight the fact that while the goals of NGOs (nonprofit organizations that operate independently of any government) are often to alleviate oppression from marginalized identities and be a source of empowerment, often the hierarchies within these organizations can become oppressive themselves. In the NSY organization (Nari Samata Yojana [in English, Women’s Equality Program]), the women can speak about equality, share their experience, and offer solutions to problems, which empowers them. However, there are a lot of situations in which the women are not empowered by the NSY, but instead undermined in small ways.

The Sangtin Writers give several examples of casteist microaggressions that they experience from other workers at the NSY. In one situation, a coworker commented on the simplistic dress of one of the Dalit Sangtin Writers when she visited her at home. For the Sangtin Writers, the politics they are involved with at work are the politics of their very realities and lives; they can’t just step away once they leave work like many of their more privileged coworkers can. They describe a distance between their “rural worlds” and their lives working at the organization and cast doubt on whether some members of the organization are sincere about truly understanding the struggles of Dalit women. In this sense, NGOs can be both empowering and problematic for women in the Global South — and everywhere.

By the last pages of Playing With Fire, it becomes clear that the Sangtin Writers were able to become more empowered by each other’s solidarity than by working for the NSY, and that communication and storytelling became the most powerful feminist tool in creating healthier individuals and communities overall for these women. It’s an incredibly valuable lesson for transnational and intersectional feminist scholars, philosophers, and activists working to better their communities.


This article was originally a critical book review essay on Playing With Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism Through Seven Lives in India as it pertains to ideas from Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader.

 

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