Abstract

This chapter discusses the emotional vulnerability experienced by the author during a specific fieldwork experience in an Italian women’s shelter. The fieldwork aimed to explore the shelter’s advocacy practices for migrant-origin women who have suffered domestic violence. The researcher’s emotions, engendered by her relationship with both the women shelter’s operators and the migrant-origin women, are strictly related to her former professional activity as a shelter operator. The analysis of her positionality shift and the related emotional experiences offer a complementary ethnographic understanding of the interlocutors’ life-worlds. The first perspective investigates the operators’ ethical and emotional commitment as women advocates. The second concerns the specific structural barriers that affect migrant women’s empowerment and create further sufferance and marginalization for them. Previous scholarly works on emotions have described how in affectively attuned knowledge production, the analysis of feelings such as uncertainty, disorientation, anger, frustration, and powerless creates opportunities to unveil the taken-for-granted in the positionality of both the anthropologist and her interlocutors. This analysis then contributed to a more specific research methodology and a wider comprehension of the critical aspects of any intervention that involved supportive relationships between the shelter’s operators and the migrant-origin shelter tenants.