Walking the Tightrope: Insider Researchers in Gender Political Violence and the Struggle Between Empathy, Objectivity, and Self-Care

In comparative politics, foreign researchers usually face cultural and language barriers. Moreover, they might have difficulties understanding the cultural context and nuances in the data collected. Studying their home country might be an advantage for non-Western scholars in Western academia or for scholars coming from southern cultures. However, there are overlooked consequences about knowing and caring about the research “subjects,” particularly on sensitive topics such as gender political violence. Through this paper our attempt is to bring our experience from the field in connection with several methodological issues that emerge in contemporary feminist research, such as objectivity, positionality, research ethics and self-care in the field. The aforementioned methodological issues will be approached through our theoretico-political encounters and the intersections of our disciplines, fieldwork research and positionalities. Drawing on past experience on feminist fieldwork in Bolivia and Greece and using the epistemic toolkits derived from Political Science and Social Anthropology, the multiple forms of violence emerging from the field and from the data collected will emerge. Patriarchal oppression, poverty, vulnerability and precarity, only few of the factors that constitute the tension in the feminist fieldwork and the lives of our discussants, shape at the same time the social and political atmosphere in the bolivian and the greek context. Through which ways could we approach and frame the common or similar experiences of gender political violence, such as harassments, femicides, homo/transphobic attacks, in the fieldwork? Which are the limitations, the obstacles and the benefits of working as an insider researcher? How could the complexity of this positionality, as a researcher and a feminist, be described and defined? This paper aims to offer a series of explanations and to constitute a record of useful methodological notes based on intersectional feminist politics and interdisciplinary insights.