Embodying Difference: Reading Gender in Women's Memoirs of Humanitarianism

ABSTRACT

This article explores embodied difference in humanitarianism and peacebuilding by treating women's memoirs as a form of ‘flesh witnessing’. It argues that the essays in the anthology Chasing Misery are claims to the authority of ‘The Field’ that also reveal the women’s feelings of only ‘passing’ as aid workers. Three distinct themes are noted: the construction of The Field as a site of embodied authority and the ways in which the essays reinforce and trouble this; the writers feeling different, and separate, from those they work with/for; and the embodied gender presented with reference to imagined ‘real’ aid workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• difference
• passing
• embodiment
• memoir
• aid worker

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Pol Bargués-Pedreny and Xavier Mathieu, for the opportunity to be part of such a rewarding collaboration, as well as the other contributors to the workshop from which this special issue came – especially Nicolas Lemay-Hébert. I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and generous suggestions, in particular the recommendation to engage with the work of Hannah Partis-Jennings, whom I would also like thank. The idea for this piece came from my participation in a workshop organized by Laura McLeod and Maria O'Reilly in 2016 on feminist interventions in critical peacebuilding, and I thank them for the inspiration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Róisín Read is a lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research explores the politics of international interventions in conflict, with a focus on the dynamics of knowledge production and representation. Her recent research focuses on gender and race in narratives of the humanitarian encounter, as told through memoir and fiction.

Notes

1. The book also features photographic contributions, but these are not included in the present analysis as they are not examples of aid workers narrating their own experiences. The photographs are not of the contributor women themselves but rather of those they are ‘aiding’.

2. I want to thank Xavier Mathieu for his extremely helpful suggestion to explore this literature.

3. http://www.chasingmisery.net/editors/. Accessed 4 April 2018.

4. Kelsey Hoppe contributes three essays to the collection, including the introduction, and Helen Seeger contributes two.

5. Although not all authors choose to share their nationality, most who do are from the United Kingdom (UK), Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (US). 

6. Although here the clothes are a metaphor, Maria Martin de Almagro (2018) explores the ways in which clothes are used in performances of hybrid peacebuilding identities (see also Partis-Jennings 2017, 419).

7. For more on hauntings and masculinity, see Welland (2013).