Kamala Visweswaran
“Betrayal: An Analysis in Three Acts”
Doing feminist research
• Assumption of alliance between feminist
researcher and her female subjects
• Production of knowledge is situated and
relational
• A less authoritative account/a partial
account—not a choice, but a necessity
• Agency as performance
• Identity as constructed and staged
Gender and Indian nationalism
• The family: contained, arena of silence
• Family as metaphor of the nation
• The limits of the archive
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Uma’s silence: around her child marriage
“Don’t tell her I told you so”
Janaki’s marriage: a secret
Tangam’s interception, in English: “she only wants to
understand”
• (anthropologist as agent of betrayals among women)
• Self-staging and self-fashioning
Tools of feminist ethnography
• Shifting identities– identities as multiple,
contradictory, partial and strategic; conflicting
social and linguistic forces
• Temporality—contingency of speech: when is
something said
• Silence: as a marker of women’s agency; silence
as resistance (Uma and Janaki’s refusals to speak
of their child marriage; Janaki’s refusal to be
slotted as spinster or widow)
• By disavowing identification as child widows, U
and J give shape to their agency
Women’s agency
• Based in relation to the non-agent
• Class differences