Awkward sincerity and critical empathy: Encounters in “international marriage brokering” and feminist anthropology

Abstract

When feminist anthropologists engage “Others” close to home – those who might actively criticize feminism or whose political orientations are uncomfortably both familiar and strange – fieldwork encounters engender discomfiting methodological and representational challenges. Here, I explore those challenges through an examination of my own fieldwork among U.S. men participating in the “international marriage brokering” industry, specifically those married to or seeking spouses from the former Soviet Union. Anthropology traditionally represents the experiences and beliefs of culturally distant others relativistically and rather empathetically; but does this task shift when those observed are (at least in some ways) close to home, and when the researcher's personal and intellectual politics (and those of her most expected academic audiences) are in tension with her interlocutors'? This essay describes some of the tense moments and unsettling questions that arose in my own (conventional and online) ethnography and how I chose to navigate them. Ultimately, it argues that a key goal of feminist anthropology should be to use ethnography to create humanizing portrayals of those whom our audiences might otherwise find confusing or offensive – even as we keep dynamics of power and inequity in view. This is a politics of critical empathy that ideally lends itself to opening up new conversations among distinct, mutually skeptical audiences.