Breaking the Binaries in Research—The Listening Guide

Feminists and Critical Theorists have long acknowledged the importance of methodologies in research frameworks. They also highlight the necessity for deconstruction as a means to question normalized hierarchies concerning the production of knowledge. These considerations are particularly true in the context of studying violent conflicts, trauma, security, and insecurity. However, to reach a sensitive research framework for examining war experiences, a suitable methodology is critical. Our study implements the Listening Guide method in analyzing the experiences of women in combat. We emphasize the merits of the Listening Guide in the context of research about complex, challenging, and traumatic contexts—in our case the environment of war and armed conflicts. By implementing the Listening Guide, our findings unpack voice and undermine the binary distinctions of active versus passive women, agency versus fragility, women engaged in violence versus women as victims of violence, and silence versus voice, all through the prism of the combatants’ multilayered war experiences, as perceived by the combatants themselves. The shift between the combatants’ various voices indicated that the “psychological” is not detached from the “political.”