When Discomfort Enters Our Skin: Five Feminists in Conversation

Abstract

Created around, through and within discomfort, this piece weaves together the voices of five feminist scholars in an exploration of troubling affective and emotional experiences, offering material for critical theorizing and engaged scholarship. This inquiry started at a conference panel in July 2019. Taking on the invitation made by the editors of Feminist Anthropology for the five of us to write in conversation, this piece also responds to April Petillo’s piece in the first issue of this journal where she compelled us, feminist anthropologists, to listen through discomfort in order to challenge hierarchies of power and knowledge production. Through a polyphonic composition that draws on the different backgrounds, research and life trajectories of five feminist scholars through a collective online writing process, this piece purposefully plays with form, presenting reflections on naming relational discomforts, unsettling academic affects with our writing, violence, precarity and privilege, and how to work with discomfort through feminist solidarity.