a body writing

Abstract

This article is a meditation on how the body fights to write about experiences of gendered risk and discomfort in anthropology. It details the sensorium of trauma and risk in fieldwork and how writing is central to processing traumas and but also curating future methodological directions. Responding to the demands placed on knowledge production in the discipline, anthropologists are often trained to seal up and bury these kinds of vulnerable writings. However, feminist writing praxes of disobedience and survival encourage anthropologists to do fieldwork and write not to survive a "trial by fire" or preserve an anthropology tested and known but to treat the body and writing as mutual sites of re-visioning more ethical engagements in their fields of work.