Feminist Ethnographic Research: Excavating Narratives of Wartime Rape

Abstract

This chapter reflects upon our feminist approach to narrative ethnographic research and how we explore the production and circulation of gendered stories in post-war societies. The illustrative case is wartime rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992–1995 war. For ethical reasons we rely on women survivors’ accounts of their experiences in order to study how they narratively construct their social worlds and their positions within them. We discuss the practice of “enquiry-as-bricolage” and how narratives produced at diverse sites and by various agents can be put in dialogue with each other—courtroom narratives produced at the ICTY, published life stories, narratives produced at the Women’s Court, interviews with “gatekeepers”, and narratives collected through “being-in-place”—and reflected upon from the positionality of “the vulnerable observer”.