Ethnography and Gender

Abstract

Presentation 1: The candidate’s suit: Aesthetic appearance and interdependent performances Presenter: Carolina Rabasa Rucki, KU Leuven Abstract: Looks are important for everyone under the current hyper-mediatised visual culture, but especially for candidates on the campaign trail. There, their looks take part in a performance of legitimation of political power to secure a spot in office. Zooming in on the Argentine legislative electoral campaign of 2025, this research explores the curation of a ‘candidate’s look’ as a legitimation strategy, focusing on the performativity in self-presentation of the three leading women candidates. The analysis draws from a multi-step methodological approach where data collection took place in two stages in Buenos Aires: from November 2023 to May 2024 and from August 2025 to January 2026. It includes semi-structured interviews [N=29] with the elite politicians’ entourage, 2 months of participant observation during the campaign trail and digital ethnography over their online campaign presence on Instagram [N=240]. This research furthers intersectional and decolonial gender perspectives by presenting the concept of interdependent performances for understanding social legitimation processes in highly visible and politically powerful elites. Presentation 2: Developing a Feminist Framework to Study the Effects of Sanctions Presenter: Lisa Neal, IFSH/University of Hamburg This paper examines how a feminist perspective can enrich the study of sanctions epistemologically, normatively, and methodologically. It argues that sanctions are not merely legal or economic instruments but also social processes, whose effects can only be fully understood from subjective, situated perspectives. Research that ignores these perspectives fails to capture the full impact of sanctions. To investigate sanctions in a way that captures their social and experiential dimensions, a qualitative and inductive approach is essential. Incorporating a feminist perspective goes beyond a purely qualitative approach, providing six key extensions that together establish a framework for understanding who is affected by sanctions and in what ways. First, the analytical focus shifts from the state to people, emphasising the perspectives of civilians navigating shortages, informal economies, and new dependencies. Second, an intersectional approach recognises that sanctions shape experiences along multiple axes, including gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and origin. Third, feminist framing provides the theoretical, normative, and ethical direction, while ethnographic methods - particularly open, problem-centred interviews - enable empirical implementation. Fourth, safety considerations necessitate research with diaspora communities or online methods in repressive or high-risk contexts. Fifth, researcher positionality and cocreation ensure that participants are treated as active contributors rather than passive data sources. Sixth, thematic analysis following an inductive approach allows emergent patterns to form propositions, which can later be tested quantitatively, emphasising a dialogical rather than substitutive methodology. This framework highlights the value of feminist perspectives for capturing the nuanced, socially embedded effects of sanctions, bridging methodological gaps, and centring marginalised voices in international political analysis.