Drawing the line at angels: Working the ruins of feminist ethnography

This paper addresses the usefulness of angels in breaking out of the Hegelian enclosure that typifies late 20-century critical thought and practice. Grounded in efforts to create a broadly accessible book about an interview study of women living with HIV AIDS, the paper sketches interpretive and textual strategies toward a less comfortable social science. After providing background to the study and an overview of the book's format, the paper presents an overview of the angel inter texts. This is followed by probing four thematics: displacement dispersal deferral, translation as betrayal, rhizomatics, and feminist ethnography as a ruin rune. Each is prefaced with quotes from readers of the book as a sort of ''fold'' of ''response data'' in order to situate the book within a larger field of the failures of representation in order to begin to theorize the failures of the book in moving toward a different scene of representation.