Fragments and Interruptions Sensory Regimes of Violence and the Limits of Feminist Ethnography

The ethnography of violence presents dilemmas that are at once ethical, corporal, intellectual, and political. Drawing on fieldwork experiences from the study of mothers and female infanticide in south India, this essay elaborates on one ethnographic encounter that both informed the representational process and talked back to its normative assumptions. The dynamics of the encounter are used as a point of departure to reflect on gendered violence, the limits of feminist ethnography, and the admissibility of fragments as evidence of subaltern subjectivity.