Right-Wing movements see significant participation by women, who not only espouse their exclusionary and violent politics, but also simultaneously contest their patriarchal cultural nationalism. However, dominant approaches in political science classify these women as ‘deviant,’ labelling them as pawns and subjects of patriarchy with partial or no agency. Gender theory has also had problematic interactions with right-wing women often seeing them as a ‘threat’ to the ‘feminist project.’ In this paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with women in two right-wing movements (the Hindu Nationalist project in India and the ‘liberal’ Zionist project in Israel-Palestine), I examine feminist ethnographic narrative approaches and methodologies in political science as means of effectively capturing the complex ‘everyday’ politics, violence, and sites of agency of right-wing women and their projects of nationalism.
While I argue that narrative approaches are crucial to feminist political science and IR, I argue that numerous ethical and methodological challenges arise when researching ‘difficult’ gendered narratives. Drawing from my field experiences as a feminist researcher whose political views vastly differ from those of the researched, I problematize the researcher/researched relationship and power equations implicit in it. I also raise ethical questions on research on political violence- on safety, anonymity, and disclosure- and how each of these impacts ethnographic narrative methodologies in feminist political science. As a researcher who remains an ‘insider’ in India and an ‘outsider’ in Israel-Palestine, I explore the construction of the ‘Insider/Outsider’ dichotomy in my comparative study and its larger impact on feminist methodology and narrative approaches to right-wing women. Lastly, I argue that approaches to feminist political research questions involving ‘difficult’ narratives require intensive spaces for what Hamdan (2009) calls the “reflexivity of discomfort.”
