Question mark in Landia

Abstract

What happens when we remove key specificities that orient ethnography? Based on 30 months of fieldwork somewhere and set in fictional Landia, this piece eschews conventional ways of representing ethnographic encounters—through specific matterings of people and place—for disquieting generality. Against vague references to violence by Snatchers and a movement to protect the Marked, I foreground the affective experiences of two interlocutors without relying on taken-for-granted specificities that structure modes of seeing. This reveals how power operates through the reproduction of embodied difference, even within movements by and for people with non-normative bodyminds; and how generality as a method of creative ethnographic writing can reveal otherwise eclipsed strands of meaning and experience. Despite being Marked, Yuli and Adan do not see themselves in discourses about markedness. As a result, they question processes of categorization, identification, and marginalization in social movements. My goal is to dwell in these moments where operative narratives unravel, and people overspill their categories. Asking what a messier crip politics of difference might do for those with forms of markedness, this piece encourages readers to envision activist-adjacent modes of redress that acknowledge complicity and entanglement, embrace accountability and repair, and build solidarity across forms of difference.