Lila Abu-Lughod’s lecture restores the heuristic force of the “awkwardness” between feminism and anthropology with extraordinary subtlety. This relationship belongs to disciplinary memory, yet it is more relevant than ever today. It should not be viewed as a stumbling block to be overcome or a conflict to be archived, but rather as the very space in which anthropology becomes aware of its assumptions, its debts, and its limits. It is precisely in this fragile yet fertile space that we can reconsider the meaning of our work and our relationships with research subjects and, ultimately, the forms of alliance between knowledge and transformation.

In this sense, Abu-Lughod engages in a dialogue with Marilyn Strathern’s seminal essay from the late 1980s (Strathern, 1987). However, she goes even further, showing that this tension can be transformed into a practice: it allows us to engage in ethnographic relationships while maintaining awareness when we translate the experiences of others into our own concepts. Every ethnography is a translation, but it must never become a projection of our categories onto others.

In this regard, I think that Abu-Lughod also distances herself from Lilith Mahmud’s optimistic vision (Mahmud, 2021) of a programmatic future for feminist anthropology, which she sees as anti-racist, decolonial, and abolitionist. Lila warns us that the problem cannot be solved with a “new manifesto” because awkwardness cannot be “removed”. On the contrary, it must be embraced, experienced, and cultivated as an epistemological and ethical condition of the discipline.

This is why Gateefa is more than just a character in Abu-Lughod’s ethnographic memory. She is a point of departure and perhaps an arrival point, but above all she is the hinge of a research ethic. Through her, Abu-Lughod invites us to contemplate the concept of “giving back”, not in the sense of vague activism or performative “giving voice”, but as the acknowledgment that understanding arises from the intricate tapestry of intimacy, interdependence, and affection (the ethnographies of particularities, Abu-Lughod, 1991). These textures compel us to constantly renegotiate our positionality, even when, as in this case, the relationship with female subjectivities is mediated by men (a fact with which I am also familiar).

It is here that narrative and memory become theory. The relationship with Gateefa is not just a biographical detail, but an epistemological node. It reminds us that ethnography is a shared life experience that can teach us things we did not expect to learn: the virtues of conformity, forms of agency that do not manifest through rupture, and the moral value of belonging. To paraphrase Butler in dialogue with Saba Mahmood: “Understanding was a mode of knowledge dependent on encounter, but encounter was the means through which she was repeatedly transformed into someone with a broader understanding, a way of grasping forms of knowing and living that are too often dismissed through ignorant caricature” (Butler, 2019).

In this way, Abu-Lughod incisively challenges a universalist approach to feminism. Her “provincialising” reading of feminist categories, from “compulsory heterosexuality” to the “feminist killjoy”, is not a withdrawal from critique, but an invitation to measure our words against the rhythm of the lives that we encounter in fieldwork and academia, our two “houses”. In some contexts, categories that seem obvious to us may not align with local notions of justice, desirability, possibility, or impossibility. Here, agency may entail cultivating family loyalty, moderating dissent, safeguarding the continuity of ties, or documenting conflicts. As Abu-Lughod reminds us, feminism is not a suitcase that can simply be placed in different contexts; rather, it is a work of translation, interpretation, and reflexivity that demands attentive listening, renewed responsibility, and openness to risk.

This approach resonated with my own experience in feminist and gender anthropology. Since entering the field of feminist anthropology through autodidactic means in the 1990s (what Lila calls “my awful graduate training in the second half of the 1970s”), I have also tried to balance the critique of categories with awareness of subjectivities. This is why, when studying practices grouped under the umbrella term “Female Genital Mutilations/Cutting” (“FGM/C”), I have chosen, since 2003, to speak of “modifications” rather than “mutilations”; not to downplay violence where it exists, but to avoid turning a word into an irrevocable verdict, fixing women as “forever victims” and erasing historicity, ambivalence, and desire (Fusaschi, 2003; 2011).

Like Abu-Lughod, I have encountered hostility and misunderstanding, particularly within the feminist community. For example, in Rwanda, where I studied gukuna, a form of mutual genital massage practised by girls (in association with kunyaza, a male technique of female stimulation), which is still classified by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as “FGM/C” today, in the annexe, as labia elongation (Fusaschi, 2012; 2020). Yet it is precisely through these frictions that I have become convinced that feminist ethnography only works if it acknowledges the tension between categories, experience, and reflexivity.

Abu-Lughod’s talk provides a potent criticism of ‘humanitarian reason’, a concept coined by Didier Fassin that often overlooks the complexities of gender dynamics. At the same time, it builds on her long-standing reflections within gender and feminist anthropology and beyond, from “Writing Against Culture” (Abu-Lughod, 1991) to her explicitly political intervention Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Abu-Lughod, 2013). Indeed, when the salvation of ‘other women’ is mobilised to justify wars, security agendas, or punitive measures, most notably in the rhetoric of the post-2001 War on Terror and its aftermath, and in European securitarian debates around veiling, feminism risks losing its purpose and becoming complicit in global hierarchies.

At the same time, this “saving” script often produces a parallel and paradoxical effect. It relegates women to the role of victims in need of rescue, which marginalises them politically and epistemologically. It overlooks the complexity of ambivalence, negotiation and forms of agency that do not align with the narrative of emancipation. It is precisely at this intersection—between international rights-based classifications, which can slide into imperial justification, and local regimes of victimisation, which reduce women to objects of care, that Abu-Lughod’s analysis aligns with my exploration of international terminology. Terms such as “harmful traditional practices”, WHO classifications, “zero tolerance” campaigns, and the war on the burqa have created a powerful yet imperfect glossary. In development projects, the use of a glossary can lead to distinctions between those who deserve care and those who do not. It can also freeze time, impose moral maps, and silence local transformations and voices (Fusaschi, 2026).

In Rwanda, for instance, I observed young women re-signifying gukuna as a practice of desire, pleasure, and autonomy (Fusaschi, 2012, 2020). Over the years, my interlocutors also made me aware of my own transformation through an expression that struck me for its irony and tenderness: “Now you are no longer a chick, you are a hen.” It was their way of telling me that, since I was married and no longer considered a girl, they could now share more of their “female secrets” with me. Yet, while these women reframed gukuna within local meanings of intimacy and maturity, humanitarian discourse continued to interpret it narrowly as a form of gender-based “cultural” violence. This is not just a linguistic detail: the politics of life itself are at stake, as well as the possibility of recognising feminist spaces of subjectivation beyond spectacle humanitarianism and the rhetoric of pity, as I argued in my 2011 book Quando il corpo è delle altre. Retoriche della pietà e umanitarismo-spettacolo (Fusaschi, 2011).

Taking Abu-Lughod’s lesson seriously means rejecting definitive solutions to the conflict between universalism and relativism and instead adopting a responsible methodology. Within this framework, I propose three approaches that could contribute to the debate. First, I suggest the concept of situated reciprocity, which aligns with Abu-Lughod’s work and my own. Giving back is not about ‘speaking to power’ in the abstract, but about recognising the impact of our presence, the affective economies we activate, and the micro-transformations that occur over time and space. Just as Gateefa was for Abu-Lughod, so my interlocutors are for me when we negotiate the meaning of words and the weight of our lives. Second, I propose translation without capture. Categories such as violence, tradition, and autonomy can be useful in the realms of rights, or in the seductions of quantification, as Sally Engle reminds us (Merry, 2016). However, in ethnography they must always be open to challenge and remain in contextual dialogue. This is the only way to avoid crushing lives beneath concepts. Lila taught us this with her question: “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” (Abu-Lughod, 2002). I have asked myself: must African women always and only be represented as victims? Finally, a critical genealogy of rights governance is needed. Denouncing femonationalism (Farris, 2017), implicit Islamophobia, and punitive humanitarianism do not mean relativising gender asymmetries; it means making them intelligible in their institutional mediations and local translations. If recognised, the local contributes to building the global.

In Abu-Lughod’s vision, which I fully share, awkwardness is not resolved; it is embraced and cultivated. It is the space where admiration for the theoretical force of feminism (always historicised and pluralised) meets the ethnographic prudence embodied by Gateefa; where the desire for transformation meets respect for ways of life that do not always align with our own desires. It is also a space in which anthropology and feminism must engage with their own histories: both, as Abu-Lughod reminds us, have been involved in imperial and neocolonial projects, and both must today decolonise their perspectives.

What this lecture leaves us with is the vision of an anthropology that can embrace conflicting interpretations as a resource. This is an anthropology that avoids both cynicism and moralism, recognising the awkwardness between feminism and discipline as fertile methodological and political terrain. It is in this space that we learn to pause, to listen before speaking, and to consider the context before passing judgement. When we inevitably name and judge, we must be mindful of the fragility of the bridge connecting our words to the lives of others.

Abu-Lughod also reminds us that categories are never innocent. She compels us to question them and erode our certainties. She also encourages us to recognise the uneven ground on which feminist alliances are formed and dissolved. An example of this can be seen in the cancellation of a panel at the American Anthropological Association meeting due to accusations of transphobia, which positioned gender-critical feminism within anthropology itself (Lancaster et al., 2023; Fusaschi 2025). It is in this fragile yet powerful space of ambivalence - between speaking for and speaking with, and sometimes against, between universality and particularity, and between critique and solidarity, that feminist anthropology continues to generate transformative insights.

Perhaps, then, echoing Sara Ahmed’s formula already mentioned in the lecture, what the discipline most needs today is to embrace the role of the feminist killjoy: an anthropology willing to cause disruption, expose fractures, and maintain awkwardness as a space for critical thought, responsibility, and, hopefully, shared politics.

Abu-Lughod’s reflections on awkwardness suggest that the discomfort she describes is not a stumble to be managed, but the very place where what it means, today, to do feminist anthropology is decided. Because, as this lecture shows, productive embarrassment is not a private feeling. It is rather a discipline of the gaze; a practice that forces us to slow down when everything around us demands quick conclusions (social-media pace), and to remain faithful to particulars precisely when public discourse asks for sharp categories, if not essentialist ones. The term killjoy may not be viewed as a heroic figure, but rather as an everyday person who not only brings attention to problems, but also actively works to alter the pace of what constitutes “evidence”. They advocate for the importance of ensuring that our words align with the lives they are meant to represent. To be a killjoy, then, is primarily to strive to write without capturing. It is to teach (or, better yet, to socialise) by making genealogies apparent and by showing what categories do. It is to give back without moralising, recognising that the ethnographic relation is not a path to theory but the place where theory is unveiled and reworded.

Yet it remains an open question how feminist anthropology can truly stay “uncomfortable” in public spaces and within academic institutions without being neutralised—for instance, by media and social formats that reward news as a verdict; by procedures that reward conformity; or even by certain feminisms that demand immediacy and a ready-made language of keywords without attending to contexts and plural voices. This is where Abu-Lughod’s provincialisation of feminist categories emerges both as an urgency and as a test. If her lesson over these years is taken seriously to its full extent, notions such as autonomy, choice, and freedom cannot be treated as moral universals, but must be approached as situated concepts, with their own histories and geographies.

And I feel it on my own, especially when I confront global lexicons that turn complex practices into total labels. I have seen this for twenty-five years with FGM, and there I understand how easy it is for feminism to become a language of governance: a grammar that claims to save and ends up ordering, classifying and punishing. As a result, now more than ever, we must ask ourselves: what aspect of feminism do we truly wish to preserve? In response, I would argue that feminism should remain within the category of gender, serving as an analysis of power, a method, and a relationship, and as the ability to form alliances based on real conflicts and needs rather than an ideal. I reclaim the possibility of principles that can be translated, but not made identical, and of coalitions that are partial, yet transnational and transgender. These coalitions establish, on a case-by-case basis, a shared threshold for what is intolerable, what constitutes violence, and what constitutes justice. However, they do not claim that this threshold should have the same meaning everywhere. Therefore, we need to build a transnational horizon that does not resort to either moralising universalism or a pluralism that disarms critique. This, in my opinion, is the true challenge of this lecture.

To conclude, I return to Gateefa because, ultimately, everything starts again from there. The way Abu-Lughod brings her back on stage after her death with writing composed of memory, notes, hesitation, and responsibility strikes me as a gesture that conveys something essential: theory cannot be separated from the relationships that made it possible, and “giving back” is the form knowledge takes when it is born from interdependence. However, precisely because it is such a powerful gesture, there is a risk of turning a life into a useful metaphor for our discipline. Without intending to, we can turn “our” Gateefas into names that solve epistemological problems instead of showing us the contradictory nature of subjectivity. As an ethnographer, I think that, precisely to avoid this capture, I must accept that the particular is not exemplary and that all the opacity and incoherence must remain. Above all, however, I believe that our task is to reveal our desire to create meaning in order to avoid appropriation. In short, I believe it is essential to avoid replacing one posture with another and to avoid confusing complexity with absolution, or illuminating our interlocutors as figures “against” someone. In this sense, Abu-Lughod’s account of Gateefa and her work with her also illuminates the thresholds of entry and exit, and the choices involved in remembering. Finally, I am convinced that if we keep these thresholds slightly open, without falling into romanticism, it leaves space for creativity and for awkwardness that can become practice. I think this is something that Abu-Lughod and I have experienced. This is not something that should be eliminated, but rather a way of conducting research that prevents cynicism and moralism and forces us to be more careful because we are involved.