Introduction

On using interviews to research violence, Cynthia Enloe has argued that ‘[i]t takes feminist listening … to take on board interviewees’ contradictions, confusions and anxieties’ (Enloe, 2011, p 142; emphasis added). This chapter sets out to explore the dynamics of ‘taking on board’ the emotions of interviewees in settings marked by violence. Within feminist international relations, ethnography and similar approaches to studying violence, it is often argued that engagement with the field should first and foremost be empathetic (see, for example, Dominguez, 2000; Fontana and Frey, 2005; Cowburn, 2013; Johnston, 2015). However, we spend less effort considering what processes empathetic engagement may open up within the field or what aftermath follows from it.

The interviews I have carried out as part of my research about violence in Rwanda have often engaged intimate and traumatic aspects of my respondents’ lives, which, due to their political and social sensitivity, they had rarely delved into in conversations with others. When research interviews engage such issues, interviewees may come to experience the disclosure as prompting new understandings of past events (Birch and Miller, 2000; Hollway and Jefferson, 2000; Rubow, 2003; Holmes, 2013). Thus, ‘this sort of qualitative interview setting can be seen to parallel the therapeutic encounter’ (Birch and Miller, 2000, p 190). While there are differences in the aims and structure of research interviews and therapeutic encounters (Kvale, 1996; de Laine, 2000; Seidman, 2013), my interviewees often told me that the interview felt therapeutic simply because telling their story, even without therapeutic feedback from my side, gave them an outlet in a situation where such outlets are few. Relief, however, was often followed by anxiety about the consequences of having shared too much information. Feeling that he had exposed himself, an interviewee subsequently called my assistant and asked accusingly: “What kind of girl did you bring into my office?”

In discussing such mixed reactions to the research interview, I present two arguments, one concerning the ethical aspects of researching violence, and another wherein I argue that the emotional ambivalence my research encountered speaks to an analytical point about political subjectivity and violence. That is, the violence my research engages worked to make a number of my respondents choose a strategy I here term ‘subduing their sense of self’ in order to survive it.