Books by alessandra gribaldo
Unexpected subjects is an ethnography of the encounter between women’s words and the demands of t... more Unexpected subjects is an ethnography of the encounter between women’s words and the demands of the law in the context of adjudications on intimate partner violence. A study of institutional devices, it focuses on women’s practices of resistance and the elicitation of intelligible subjectivities. Using Italy as an illustrative case, Alessandra Gribaldo explores the problematic encounter between the need to speak, the entanglement of violence and intimacy, and the way the law approaches domestic violence. On this basis, she advances theoretical reflections on questions of evidence, persuasion, and testimony, and their implications for ethnographic theory. Gribaldo analyzes dynamics that create the victim-subject, shedding light on how the Italian legal system reproduces broader conditions of violence against women. This book will be of great interest to all social scientists concerned with gender and the law.
“Gribaldo’s vividly enlightening study of language in domestic violence hearings reveals an unresolved gap between women’s words and the law; between a victim’s speech and the law’s expectations. This is a central issue in current debates on trauma, violence, and testimony, and Gribaldo helps the reader to think on women’s hesitations not just as an expression of reticence but as another form of imagination, different from that required by law and the racial-patriarchal order of things. Also especially captivating is Gribaldo’s analysis of the difficulties the social sciences meet in inquiring into this area of ambivalence, fear, and violence that is stubbornly reproduced in our democracies.”
― Roberto Beneduce, author of Archeologie del trauma: Un’antropologia del sottosuolo, and co-author, with Nigel Gibson, of Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics
“Exploring the translation of violent experiences into words, Gribaldo reflects on the social logic of imprecision, ambivalence, and embellishment in establishing credibility. She makes important claims on the role of the speech act in the wake of domestic violence, and shows us just how complicated that act is when it is framed by the court as a medium of verification.”
― Kelly Gillespie, senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of the Western Cape
“This is a fascinating study of the narratives of domestic violence constructed in Italian courts. Engaging ethnographically with socially unnerving contradictions, it shows how the law both offers recognition to those who make recourse to it and yet at the same time subjects them to distorting categorizations. Gribaldo also offers important insights into relations between anthropology and feminism.”
― Julia Hornberger, author of Policing and human rights: The meaning of violence and justice in the everyday policing of Johannesburg
Open access:
https://haubooks.org/unexpected-subjects-intimate-partner-violence-testimony-and-the-law/
Th is volume investigates the relationship between migration, identity, kinship and population. I... more Th is volume investigates the relationship between migration, identity, kinship and population. It uncovers the institutional practices of categorization as well as the conducts and the ethics adopted by social actors that create divisions between citizens and non-citizens, migrants and their descendants inside national borders. Th e essays provide multiple empirical analyses that capture the range of politics, debates, regulations, and documents through which the us/them distinction comes to be constructed and reconstructed. At the same time, the authors reveal how this distinction is experienced, reinterpreted, and reproduced by those directly aff ected by governmental actions. Th is perspective grants equal attention to both the logics of national governmentality and the myriad ways that individuals and collectivities entangle with categories of identity. Featuring case studies from countries as varied as the Netherlands; French Guiana; South-Tyrol; Eritrea and Ethiopia; New York City; Italy; and Liangshan, China, this book off ers unique insights into the production of identity boundaries in the contested terrain of migration and minorities. It outlines how the process of producing national identity is enacted not only through impositions from above, but also when individuals themselves embody and deploy identities and kinship bonds. More so than lines of division, boundaries within are understood as an ongoing process of identity construction and social exclusion taking place among the various actors, levels, and spaces that make up the national fabric.
This book is the outcome of a common need, both theoretical and political, to elaborate a feminis... more This book is the outcome of a common need, both theoretical and political, to elaborate a feminist reflection on the intertwining of gender and visuality, starting from the Italian context. The topic of “the image of women” has come to the fore as an emergency in conjunction with the sex scandals that accompanied the decline of Berlusconi-ism, strongly characterized by a renewed visibility of sexist ideas and behavior. Our contribution calls back to radical feminism as the key to interpreting the present, with the prospect of reconnecting it to crucial contemporary questions, starting with gender. Instead of addressing the downgrading of the female gender to eroticized and subjugated images and its more or less direct relationship with women’s condition in Italy, our departure point was a critique of representation as a gendered domain and the answers provided by feminist movements. In fact, our aim was to problematize a series of questions that were raised by Berlusconi’s sex scandals, but which have been constantly deferred to a more opportune moment, removed from the contingency and an emergency that seemed to call for a straightforward, immediate, compact and shared answer.
The visual field is a crucial area for feminist reflection, starting with a problematization of questions that involve a multiplicity of subjects who do not necessarily identify with the category of “woman.” The image and the forms of subjugation inflicted on women are, in fact, indivisible from the many articulations through which difference is created. The female image as a screen of power has a double weight: on the one hand, it hides power dynamics through processes of naturalization and legitimation; on the other, it also represents a political field of negotiation and conflict, both a product and a place of production.
In rendering increasingly evident the impossibility of distinguishing between political and private, Italian and global political events have proven feminism right. If “the time is now,” we don’t need redemption in order to make room for an image of women that is complete and dignified; rather, it must be re-invented. The critique of processes of naturalization of alterity, of the crystallization of identity, of the co-optation of every form of diversity, of the criminalization and marginalization of conflict and of the racialization of society is central to feminist politics. Topics regarding the feminization of labor – the extension of the characteristics which have historically been attributed to female labor, i.e. care-giving and reproduction – to the entire work sphere, the intertwining of identities, politics and the demands of situated positions and the structural violence of a productive system have become central junctions representing starting points for rethinking possible common politics.
Vogliamo dedicare questo libro ad Agata, siciliana, che come tante sta per avere un bambino con s... more Vogliamo dedicare questo libro ad Agata, siciliana, che come tante sta per avere un bambino con suo marito grazie alla fecondazione assistita; ma anche a Sarah che abita a New York e avrà vent'anni nel 2020 perché ci ha raccontato con molta grazia questa storia. Suo cugino Jordan e il suo compagno Richard hanno avuto due bambine: sono nate Maria e Jamie, perché suo cugino e il suo compagno hanno donato il seme a Melanie, una loro amica lesbica, che ha offerto l'ovulo fecondato al ventre ospitante di Magdalen. Le gemelle stanno bene. Ha detto, una bella famiglia. 9 788887 995985 luca sossella editore La natura scomposta Riproduzione assistita, genere, parentela ALESSANDRA GRIBALDO ©2005 luca sossella editore via Zanardelli 34 00186 Roma info@lucasossellaeditore.it www.lucasossellaeditore.it Finito di stampare nel mese di ottobre 2005 da Graffiti srl, Roma Art director Alessandra Maiarelli progetto grafico Lev laboratorio di comunicazione ISBN 88-87995-97-4
La produzione del genere. Ricerche etnografiche sul femminile e sul maschile, a cura di (con Valeria Ribeiro Corossacz), Ombre Corte, Verona, 2010.
Papers by alessandra gribaldo
Visual Ethnography, 2023
The aim of this article is to propose an anthropology of a peculiar document that is the amateur ... more The aim of this article is to propose an anthropology of a peculiar document that is the amateur family film. These intimate visual documents represent a privileged space for an anthropological approach, which has developed its discourse on the construction and projection of differences, similarities, and otherness. Starting from the definition of what "familiar" means in the family film, I will articulate anthropological thinking on footage with ethnographic practices, in search for convergences and distances, through the analysis of a family archive filmed by a woman of peasant origin, from the early 1960s to the 1980s, between Emilia Romagna, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. I suggest that these visual fragments, only partially filled with meaning by the words of those who made them, are spaces with the capacity to show-also through an undisciplined aesthetic-a different "us", an invisible relatedness. It is a suspended projection, neither celebratory or predatory, of the places, objects and subjects encountered.
“Antropologia e femminismo”, in Antropologia Culturale e Sociale a cura di B. Palumbo, G. Pizza e P. Schirripa, Hoepli, 2023
Manuale di Antropologia Culturale e Sociale, 2023
Estetiche e politiche della parentela nelle rappresentazioni visuali
Rivista di antropologia contemporanea, 2022
The article charts a reflection on visuality in kinship studies. Trees, lines, rhizomes are repre... more The article charts a reflection on visuality in kinship studies. Trees, lines, rhizomes are repre- sentations that convey their own aesthetics and, altogether, an ethics in the visualization of relationships. Starting from Rivers’ genealogical method, I propose a path in the history of the discipline on the meanings related to graphic representation and, more generally, to vision as a privileged and later strongly debated methodology of kinship knowledge. The use of visual methods in the discipline has followed the shift in focus from the analysis of kin structures to reproductive processes in a fractal projection of anthropological theories of kinship. I suggest that the explication of the relationship between politics and aesthetics allows for a rethinking of the use of diagrams and images in kinship studies.
La vita in formato ridotto. Note sugli home movies a partire da un fondo di famiglia
Studi Culturali, 2022
This article proposes an anthropological reflection on home movies, questioning some of the pecul... more This article proposes an anthropological reflection on home movies, questioning some of the peculiarities of this object of research: the dimensions of repetitiveness, selfreference, fragmentality. The text focuses on a fund from the Archivio Nazionale dei Film di Famiglia (National Archive of Family Films) that does not share the characteristic of incompleteness that marks most of the visual documents present. Through the analysis of the films and the cineamateur’s words, I suggest that family films codes, by presenting an attention to naturalistic detail, intimacy, and the production of a personal narrative, draw a vision of the self and an aesthetic of the familiar relationships of those who film and can constitute a space for reflection as a sign of the becoming-minor of a historicized filmic gaze.
L'Uomo, 2021
Review essay. Anand Pandian,
A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times, Durham and London... more Review essay. Anand Pandian,
A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 168.
Carole McGranahan (a cura di),
Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment, Durham and Lon- don, Duke University Press, 2020, pp. 320.
The burden of Intimate Violence. Evidence, Experience, and Persuasion
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2019
In domestic violence cases, the production of legal evidence faces several challenges. While scho... more In domestic violence cases, the production of legal evidence faces several challenges. While scholars have amply discussed the issues of intimacy, dependency, and ambivalence, their relationship with evidence and persuasion appears undertheorized. The Italian context is particularly suitable for analyzing this issue, as the testimony of the victim is central in cases of intimate partner violence. Drawing on ethnographic research into domestic violence and the law, I analyze the two components of the burden of proof: evidence and persuasion. The first corresponds to the reconstruction of facts based on eliciting the victim’s experience in the form of a story; the second to how the persuasiveness of testimony is judged based on the performance of authenticity. Questioning the notion that one of the qualities of evidence—in law as in anthropology—is to be free of human intention, the article suggests that these two components of proof appear, in cases of intimate violence, not only mutually implicated but also in a relationship of intractable contradiction.
Hashtags, testimonies, and measurements. Gender violence and its interpretation
Anuac. Journal of the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology, 2019
In this article, I address gender violence through the act of witnessing and speaking out by the ... more In this article, I address gender violence through the act of witnessing and speaking out by the victims. Starting from a critical comment on some arguable points raised in the recent Hau journal forum aimed at discussing forms and claims of the #MeToo movement, I let emerge the conundrums that anthropology faces in dealing with the issue. A focus on domestic abuse as a specific form of gender violence allows me to delve into the twine of intimacy, agency and consent in the experience of the victims. I detect the specific dynamics that characterize the issue of speaking/not speaking out against violence by abused women and that underpin analytical biases. Then, I illustrate how these complexities can be found in the general assessment and measurement of gender violence as a global phenomenon. I conclude with a reflection on violence and women’s voices as an opportunity for anthropological knowledge to deal with truth telling, intimacy, and the gendered act of speaking out.
Veline, ordinary women and male savages: Disentangling racism and heteronormativity in contemporary narratives on sexual freedom
Modern Italy, 2018
This article takes as its starting point the so-called ‘sex scandals’ surrounding Italy’s former ... more This article takes as its starting point the so-called ‘sex scandals’ surrounding Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi during the last years of his premiership (2009–2011), which have filled Italian newspaper columns and legal case files. Political discourses and media interpretations of women’s freedom at the time represented genders through the eroticisation of power. The deployment of postfeminist and ste- reotyped representations of gender relations produced a complex and ambivalent frame for female sexuality and agency which reproduced the hegemonic neoliberal rhetoric that locates freedom and emancipation in the market. This narrative was further inflected by class and race, as it was deployed through the opposed images of white, Italian, respectable, caring women, and cynical young women and migrants using their bodies as a resource in a sexual-economic exchange with men occupying positions of power. Through feminist reflections on work I frame and discuss the use of the notions of choice and freedom in these discourses. Shifting the focus from women’s behaviour to the analysis of a peculiar image of masculinity displayed by the then premier, the article highlights how racism, colonial legacies and homophobia are enmeshed in this histori- cally and culturally based gender imagery.
This article proposes a reflection on kinship starting from a recent debate between Marshall Sahl... more This article proposes a reflection on kinship starting from a recent debate between Marshall Sahlins and Warren Shapiro hosted by the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, between 2011 and 2012. The heated controversy about the " new kinship studies " , regarding sense, meaning, and ultimately the nature of human relatedness, finds the two anthropologists on divergent stances: on one hand kinship as mutuality of being, a locus for multiple ways to conceive and live relatedness, on the other kinship as biological and inescapable invariant of human relations. The article aims at highlighting how some key issues related to relations of power remain un-dertheorised in the " beyond constructivist " and " essentialist " views deployed in the Sahlins-Shapiro contention and underlines the ways that kinship issues engage with broad political stances. Finally, I introduce a reflection on gender as a possibly crucial, and yet eluded, dimension in the debate.
Migrazione e fecondità: note su modernità e scelte riproduttive
L'Uomo, 2016
In the Italian context of very low fertility rates, reproductive issues and migrants’ fertility c... more In the Italian context of very low fertility rates, reproductive issues and migrants’ fertility choices take on relevance to produce stereotypes and scaremongerings.In this article I address the way anthropology deals with the issue of reproduction and fertility and, specifically, I discuss the widespread notions of modernity and assimi- lation in socio-demographic analysis of reproductive behaviors, through an anthro- pological approach towards fertility in the frame of migration.
I propose a reflection on meanings and practices related to reproductive choices through the analysis of the current literature and a recent research experience about families of Moroccan origin in two Italian regions. This contribution intends to provide glimpses on practices and narratives that chal- lenge the clear distintion between native and migrant populations’ reproductive be- haviors.
Commento a Pier Giorgio SOLINAS ⎸Sahlins, la parentela, essere e non essere: non è un problema, A... more Commento a Pier Giorgio SOLINAS ⎸Sahlins, la parentela, essere e non essere: non è un problema, ANUAC. Vol. 4, n° 1, dicembre 2015: 189-195.
The Paradoxical Victim: Intimate Violence Narratives on Trial in Italy, in American Ethnologist, Vol.41, issue 4, November 2014, pp. 743-756
Victims’ testimony plays a pivotal role in domestic violence hearings in Italy. In examining this... more Victims’ testimony plays a pivotal role in domestic violence hearings in Italy. In examining this role, I approach the Italian legal field as a heterogeneous system of knowledge and power that engages in complex relations with techniques of subjection and discourses of truth and, thus, as eminently suited to investigating the production of the victim-subject. Paradoxically, the testimony of female victims of abuse is trapped between the normativity of justice system requirements and the confessional device, rendering it legally insignificant and thus essentially inadequate. In this context, the women’s credibility and agency are central. I outline one legal case in which race and class intersect and the required modes of testimony are disrupted through the use of communication styles drawn from popular culture.
Se consideriamo il visuale come, precisamente, la natura dell'oggetto sociale che il femminismo d... more Se consideriamo il visuale come, precisamente, la natura dell'oggetto sociale che il femminismo dovrebbe impegnarsi a criticare, allora spetta a noi analizzare il fondamento epistemologico che lo sostiene. Si tratta, infatti, di un fondamento nel senso che la produzione degli «altri» occidentali dipende da una logica del visuale che divide i 'soggetti e gli 'oggetti' in posizioni incompatibili di intellettualità e spettacolarità. rey chow, Il sogno di Butterfly (2004, 151) Visuality […] a time-based medium. Nicholas mirzoeff, On visuality (2006, 76) di fronte ad un'immagine, ci troviamo di fronte al tempo. Georges didi-Huberman, Storia dell'arte e anacronismo delle immagini (2000, 11)
Violenza, intimità, testimonianza. Un’etnografia delle dinamiche processuali in Creazzo G. (a cura di), Se le donne chiedono giustizia, Il Mulino, Bologna, pp. 237-260, 2013.
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Books by alessandra gribaldo
“Gribaldo’s vividly enlightening study of language in domestic violence hearings reveals an unresolved gap between women’s words and the law; between a victim’s speech and the law’s expectations. This is a central issue in current debates on trauma, violence, and testimony, and Gribaldo helps the reader to think on women’s hesitations not just as an expression of reticence but as another form of imagination, different from that required by law and the racial-patriarchal order of things. Also especially captivating is Gribaldo’s analysis of the difficulties the social sciences meet in inquiring into this area of ambivalence, fear, and violence that is stubbornly reproduced in our democracies.”
― Roberto Beneduce, author of Archeologie del trauma: Un’antropologia del sottosuolo, and co-author, with Nigel Gibson, of Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics
“Exploring the translation of violent experiences into words, Gribaldo reflects on the social logic of imprecision, ambivalence, and embellishment in establishing credibility. She makes important claims on the role of the speech act in the wake of domestic violence, and shows us just how complicated that act is when it is framed by the court as a medium of verification.”
― Kelly Gillespie, senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of the Western Cape
“This is a fascinating study of the narratives of domestic violence constructed in Italian courts. Engaging ethnographically with socially unnerving contradictions, it shows how the law both offers recognition to those who make recourse to it and yet at the same time subjects them to distorting categorizations. Gribaldo also offers important insights into relations between anthropology and feminism.”
― Julia Hornberger, author of Policing and human rights: The meaning of violence and justice in the everyday policing of Johannesburg
Open access:
https://haubooks.org/unexpected-subjects-intimate-partner-violence-testimony-and-the-law/
The visual field is a crucial area for feminist reflection, starting with a problematization of questions that involve a multiplicity of subjects who do not necessarily identify with the category of “woman.” The image and the forms of subjugation inflicted on women are, in fact, indivisible from the many articulations through which difference is created. The female image as a screen of power has a double weight: on the one hand, it hides power dynamics through processes of naturalization and legitimation; on the other, it also represents a political field of negotiation and conflict, both a product and a place of production.
In rendering increasingly evident the impossibility of distinguishing between political and private, Italian and global political events have proven feminism right. If “the time is now,” we don’t need redemption in order to make room for an image of women that is complete and dignified; rather, it must be re-invented. The critique of processes of naturalization of alterity, of the crystallization of identity, of the co-optation of every form of diversity, of the criminalization and marginalization of conflict and of the racialization of society is central to feminist politics. Topics regarding the feminization of labor – the extension of the characteristics which have historically been attributed to female labor, i.e. care-giving and reproduction – to the entire work sphere, the intertwining of identities, politics and the demands of situated positions and the structural violence of a productive system have become central junctions representing starting points for rethinking possible common politics.
Papers by alessandra gribaldo
A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 168.
Carole McGranahan (a cura di),
Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment, Durham and Lon- don, Duke University Press, 2020, pp. 320.
I propose a reflection on meanings and practices related to reproductive choices through the analysis of the current literature and a recent research experience about families of Moroccan origin in two Italian regions. This contribution intends to provide glimpses on practices and narratives that chal- lenge the clear distintion between native and migrant populations’ reproductive be- haviors.