ABSTRACT
Marilyn Strathern's focus was on the status of 'experience' for feminism, and for anthropology: in the case of feminism, experience was the grounds for radical subjectivity, while the anthropologist's experience of alterity, or the recognition of difference, was predicated on an ethics of respect and responsibility to the Other. At the risk of simplifying, one could argue that if the tension between identity and difference also indexed an enduring power differential, feminism's future lay in a project of equality and the transcendence of patriarchy. This chapter provides a range of methods and explores diverse archives to think through questions of ethics and experience, witness, and intimacy. Demands for corporal punishment ironically affirmed the state's right to kill in order to protect women, and thus placed feminists in the impossible position of choosing between two kinds of violence: the violence of the state versus community.
