Unsettling ourselves: Notes on reflective listening beyond discomfort

Abstract

AbstractReflecting on Melissa Harris‐Perry's 2016 American Anthropological Association (AAA) keynote address and conversations that followed, this semi‐autoethnographic exploration considers disciplinary tensions and complicities concerning our (un)willingness to hear content when discomforted by academic affect. The article considers why feminist anthropologists might “listen through discomfort,” a process Petillo describes as “embodied listening where self‐reflection is deeply entangled,” and advocates including this in intersectional feminist, queer activist ethnographic praxis. Attuned to the benefits of feminist activist ethnographic self‐corrective action (Morgensen 2013) and aware that research is always somewhat performative (Oikarinen‐Jabai 2003), Petillo focuses on the enhanced potential of embodied listening—a listening reliant on kinesthetic literacy (Gill 2012, 33) turned inward or the ability to read our own “vocabulary of actions.” Through notes and intimately personal observations, Petillo highlights where self‐reflective embodied listening through the “discomforts” of engaging lived realities without “academic affect” affords the feminist, queer ethnographic activist a path for transdisciplinary listening across identities and intimacies.