Writing about people you don’t like: On aversion and empathy in research

How do our feelings—especially, the negative ones—about our research subjects influence how we write about them? This is hardly a novel question in the social sciences and humanities. These disciplines have reflected deeply on the author’s objectivity and subjectivity.  Despite this, I found myself conflicted when I confronted a new project on a group of female lawyers in Chile who closely collaborated with General Pinochet’s dictatorial regime between the 1970s and the 1990s and confused about how to proceed.

As a Chilean legal historian, my previous research has dealt with people I didn’t particularly like but were interesting to study: the male elite lawyers at the head of the Chilean Bar Association. I analyzed how, from the 1900s up to the 1960s these elite men had developed institutional mechanisms to reproduce their own power. These “guys” were not necessarily good people, but neither were they fundamentally evil. They excluded and even sometimes oppressed people in the lower echelons of society, but they did so in subtle ways, basically reproducing the existing social hierarchies of their time. I could easily question and condemn their actions as a moral being, while also understanding the rationale on which they were based as a researcher. Furthermore, my methodological approach was collective and institutional, studying these lawyers as a group rather than as individuals, and this facilitated a more impersonal perspective. The time-period of the research was also distant.

The new project on conservative women lawyers in the Pinochet regime was different. Firstly, I was repulsed by their moral and political choices: these women wholeheartedly supported a highly authoritarian and repressive regime that tortured, murdered, and ‘disappeared’ thousands of people. Secondly, the time period of the research was more recent, and these historical processes had a direct impact on my own biography and on current political developments. Furthermore, the methodological approach was more individual and biographical, requiring me to become more personally involved in their lives. Finally, they were women lawyers, which, as a female lawyer myself, made it easier for me to identify with their experiences.

I believe it was this mixture of closer identification and profound aversion that made it particularly difficult to find an adequate perspective to write about this topic. Indeed, how could I, as a self-defined feminist and left-leaning academic, truly understand the point of view of these conservative and authoritarian individuals? It was easy to judge them and condemn them, but it was much more difficult, at least for me, to try to understand the rationale behind their life choices.

Unexpectedly, as I delved into their writings, past interviews (they were all deceased), and autobiographical accounts, I found myself becoming fascinated and even developing some strange form of affection towards some of them. This was especially the case with Mónica Madariaga—the personal legal advisor and Secretary of Justice of Pinochet—who had a magnetic charisma, witty sense of humor, and brazen irreverence that eventually led her to alienate herself from Pinochet, while never recanting from her support to the regime. With the others I never felt the same connection, but I was still able to admire the way in which they positioned themselves in a highly patriarchal regime, forcing the respect of the military and male legal elites.

The empathy I started developing towards these authoritarian women has been by far the most disturbing but also enriching feeling I had experienced in my research. It made me doubt my own moral and political beliefs, as I wondered if I would have behaved differently from them, had I been in their shoes. This allowed me to understand at a deeper level how and why a regime such as Pinochet’s came to exist. At the same time, I did not want to convey that I justified or condoned their actions or political preferences, but I still wanted the reader to understand the complexity of their subject position—especially as women in a male-dominated world.

As the research progressed, with my colleague Marcela Prieto we circulated some of our results. To our surprise, some feminist scholars suggested that we were judging these women too harshly because, as victims of patriarchy, their political choices were influenced by their gender subordination. We pushed back against this argument.  We felt that casting them as victims deprived them from agency, and that it was certainly not how they experienced their support to the Pinochet regime.

While still writing about this project, I am not sure to have found the “right” balance between judgement and explanation. Also, I do not suggest that my experience can be extended to every researcher dealing with “unlikable” subjects. For instance, I would understand the impossibility of developing empathy to study characters such as Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump. Still, this process has made me aware of the extraordinary power of empathy in research, even towards individuals that we regard with strong aversion. The road from alienation to identification with my research subjects allowed me to descend from my moral high ground. This was probably easier to achieve as a more mature researcher in my 40s than it would have been in my 20s. Even if, after this experience, I am not more inclined to share authoritarian political beliefs, empathy allowed me to submerge myself into the complex waters of human experience, with all its nuances of light and shadows.