Draft –Handbook on Gender and Violence Chapter - Krystalli Narrating Violence: Feminist Dilemmas and Approaches by Roxani Krystalli This is a draft chapter. The final version will be available in The Handbook on Gender and Violence, edited by Dr Laura J. Shepherd, forthcoming 2019, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. The material cannot be used for any other purposes without further permission of the publisher, and is for private use only. “Well, this is all very interesting, really – I just had one question: Do you have any data? I’d be very curious to see the hard evidence.” I had just finished presenting my research at a workshop that drew together scholars of political violence. The majority of the participants were political scientists based at institutions in the United States and conducting research in other countries. They studied issues ranging from how people keep themselves safe during civil war to electoral politics after mass atrocities. My own research explores the politics of victimhood during transitions from violence. I investigate this topic by engaging with bureaucracies of justice in Colombia and the ways in which they produce the category of ‘victim’ through their protocols, processes, and officials. I also conduct in-depth interviews with individuals who vie for recognition as ‘victims’ and with those who refuse or reject that identity altogether. Finally, I ethnographically observe processes of interaction between conflict-affected individuals and state entities, paying particular attention to how hierarchies of visibility and recognition emerge among different experiences of suffering. The question did not come as a surprise to me. I have confronted many variants of it as a researcher who is interested in narratives of violence: the peer reviewer who suggested replacing “feel” with “believe or know,” the colleague who suggested “maybe running a regression, just to be sure.” These issues are not particular to that workshop setting, to political science, or to 1