The Afterlife of Visibility

Media reporting undeniably played a crucial role in drawing public attention to hysterectomies among sugarcane cutters. Without that visibility, it is unlikely the issue would have received national attention.

Yet fieldwork also raised another question: what happens after visibility has been achieved?

I met women who had appeared in newspaper reports and documentaries years earlier. Some were surprised to learn that their photographs continued to circulate online. Others expressed discomfort that their names, faces and personal histories remained publicly accessible.

One woman asked me:

“Everybody comes, takes photographs and asks questions. Then they leave. What happens after that?”

Her question pointed to a dimension of representation that often receives little attention.

A great deal of effort goes into making suffering visible. Far less attention is paid to how visibility itself is experienced by those whose lives become public.

For many women, public recognition coexisted with continuity. Their stories had travelled. Their circumstances often had not.

Debt remained.

Health problems remained.

The struggle to access healthcare remained.

The gap between visibility and transformation became impossible to ignore.

This is not an argument against documenting inequity or life debilitating precarity. Nor is it a dismissal of journalism or activism. Both have played crucial roles in bringing attention to issues that might otherwise remain invisible.

But visibility and change are not the same thing.

The women I met repeatedly reminded me of that distinction.

Trying to Do Things Differently

As these concerns surfaced during fieldwork, I found myself rethinking not only the questions I was asking, but also how I was asking them.

Women were accustomed to people arriving with cameras, questionnaires and predetermined narratives. Many had been asked to recount their hysterectomy experiences multiple times. Some could almost predict the trajectory of an interview before it began. The questions were often similar. The outcome was usually the same. Their lives were condensed into a story about a uterus.

I did not want to replicate that process.

From the outset, I made a conscious decision not to photograph the women I worked with. I did not carry a camera into conversations and often left my notebook aside entirely. Instead of beginning with hysterectomy, I began with whatever women wanted to talk about. Sometimes that meant discussing childhood memories, migration journeys, grandchildren or the rising costs of food. At other times, it meant spending hours listening to accounts of grief, debt and illness that had little obvious connection to reproductive health. Hysterectomy often entered these conversations later, if at all.

What surprised me was how often women themselves resisted reducing their lives to a single medical event.

One woman told me:

“Don’t ask only about hysterectomies like the media people. Our lives are full of pain. To understand us, you have to spend time with us.”

I took that seriously.

Over months of fieldwork, conversations became less about extracting information and more about building relationships. Women asked me questions as often as I asked them. They wanted to know about my family, my life in Delhi, whether I was married, what my parents did and why I was interested in their village. There were times when I felt less like an interviewer and more like a participant in a shared conversation.

This did not erase the inequities inherent in research. I remained a researcher with the privilege of leaving the field, writing about it and building a career from the knowledge produced there. Nor did it solve Geeta’s question. I could not promise improved healthcare, debt relief or policy change.

What I could do was refuse to approach these women as repositories of “hysterectomy stories.”

Instead, I attempted to situate hysterectomy within the broader trajectories of their lives. This meant listening not only to accounts of surgery, but also to stories of child marriage, repeated pregnancies, migration, workplace injuries, loss, ageing and everyday survival. It meant recognising that hysterectomy was rarely the most extraordinary thing that had happened to them.

Perhaps most importantly, it meant acknowledging that women’s frustrations with researchers, journalists and activists were not obstacles to fieldwork but valuable ethnographic insights in themselves. Their scepticism revealed something important about the politics of representation. It reminded me that being heard and being helped are not the same thing.

Ethnography, at its best, cannot solve this tension. But it can sit with it. It can resist reducing lives to events and people to evidence. And it can begin from the recognition that those whose experiences we document have long been reflecting on us, even as we seek to understand them.

Geeta’s Question and the Limits of Representation

As fieldwork progressed, women increasingly asked questions that mirrored my own concerns:

“Who will read what you write?”

“What will happen to our stories?”

“Will anything change because of this?”

These were not simply methodological questions. They were ethical ones.

Over the course of fieldwork, I tried to work differently. I avoided photographs, relied on long-term conversations rather than one-off interviews, and attempted to situate hysterectomies within the broader trajectory of women’s lives rather than reducing those lives to a single surgical procedure. I spent time listening to stories of childhood, marriage, migration, illness, debt and loss, stories that often never made it into media accounts.

Yet it would be disingenuous to suggest that this resolved the ethical dilemmas that Geeta’s question posed.

“How will I benefit from talking to you?”

The truth is that I never found a satisfactory answer.

My fieldwork did not reduce Geeta’s debt. It did not improve healthcare access in her village. It did not fundamentally alter the economic and social conditions shaping her life. Like many of the women I met, she continued to navigate illness, uncertainty and financial precarity long after my research ended.

Nor am I convinced that ethnography, however careful or reflexive, can fully escape the inequalities embedded within the research encounter. I entered these women’s lives for a period of time, listened to their stories and eventually left. They remained. I would return to write, publish and build an academic career from knowledge that emerged from their experiences. That imbalance cannot simply be wished away through good intentions or methodological reflexivity.

What Geeta’s question changed, however, were the questions I asked of my own work.

Rather than treating representation as an unquestioned good, I began to think more carefully about its limits. Making suffering visible matters. Without visibility, many forms of violence remain ignored. Yet visibility alone does not guarantee justice, accountability or material change. Stories can travel across newspapers, documentaries and academic publications while the conditions that produced them remain largely intact.

The women I met did not reject being heard. What many questioned was the assumption that being heard was enough.

Geeta’s question forced me to confront that uncertainty. Ethnography cannot resolve the tension between visibility and transformation, nor can it offer a satisfactory answer to what participation ultimately gives back to those whose lives become the subject of research. At best, it asks us to remain with that discomfort rather than conceal it behind promises of change we cannot guarantee. It requires a form of accountability that extends beyond making suffering visible: one that resists simplifying lives into narratives, foregrounds complexity, and recognises that the act of witnessing does not absolve us of responsibility.

Years later, Geeta’s question continues to unsettle me. It serves as a reminder not only of the limits of what research can accomplish, but also of the obligations that remain despite those limits. If this essay argues for anything, it is not that ethnography provides a solution to the ethical problems of representation. Rather, it offers a way of staying with them, openly, imperfectly, and with a continued responsibility to the people whose stories make our work possible.

The ethics of representation do not end once a story becomes visible. If anything, they begin there.