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- Convenors:
-
Natalie Araujo
(La Trobe University)
Kalissa Alexeyeff (University of Melbourne)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Helen Lee
(La Trobe University)
- Stream:
- Ethnographic theory and practice
- Location:
- Babel 106 (Middle Theatre)
- Start time:
- 2 December, 2015 at
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
Sex impacts on virtually all aspects of ethnographic fieldwork, but remains marginal to debates about ethical conduct and fieldwork relationships. This panel explores not only moral engagements with research subjects, but also debates about sex, sexuality, and the production of knowledge.
Long Abstract:
Sex, sexuality, and erotic subjectivity impact on virtually all aspects of ethnographic fieldwork, but remain in the shadows of anthropological debates about morality, ethical conduct, and fieldwork relationships. As the discipline has diversified, scholars have paid increasing attention to discourses of gender and sexuality. In the 1990s a proliferation of works, including Taboo and Gendered Fields, examined the sexualized practices, identities, fields, and imaginaries encountered by anthropologists. This promised to help unravel issues of gender and sexual power, pleasure, and danger that have characterized the lived experience of fieldwork.
However, from recent surveys concerning sexualized violence in fieldwork to lingering taboos around sexual intimacy between ethnographers and informants, it is clear that anthropology has yet to fully reconcile the inherently sexualized landscapes of ethnographic encounters. Epistemologically productive debates on sex in the field remain marginalized.
Medical and applied anthropology have been at the vanguard of transforming the prevailing model of sex as risk and danger into one that acknowledges not only violence, but also and importantly, pleasure. We apply these developments to open a conversation not only about the ethical engagement with research subjects, but also more broadly about the role of gender, sex, and sexuality in the production of knowledge.
We invite papers examining a range of perspectives, including:
• The ways in which gendered and sexualized selves encounter, shape and interact with the sexualized field;
• The implications of bodily erotics on the body politic;
• The ways gender and sexual identities rearticulate themselves through power relations and knowledge production.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Kalissa Alexeyeff (University of Melbourne)
Paper short abstract:
The study of hetero-sexuality in anthropology has been largely subsumed to biological and social reproduction, kinship and marriage. What are the implications of heteronormativity on the production of anthropological knowledge?
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on insights about sexuality from queer theory, development studies has produced some ground-breaking analyses of sex, sexuality and erotics in the 'global South'. Scholars such as Susie Jolly and Amy Lind have alterted us to the workings of heteronormative imperialism that produces racialised dichotomies between Southern sex -as a danger and problem (e.g. overpopulation, sexual violence and disease)— and Northern sex as love and pleasure. In anthropology, and despite work on gay, lesbian and queer sexuality, the study of hetero-sexuality is similarly subsumed into functionalist discussions about biological and social reproduction, kinship and marriage. Why this silence about hetero-sexuality? What are the implications of heteronormativity on the production of anthropological knowledge? How, if at all, does discussion of hetero-sex in the field help challenge this bias?
Diana Pakasi (University of Indonesia)
Paper short abstract:
This paper portrays the way gender is performed by the informants and myself, a female ethnographer researching young men. It elaborates how doing gender unravels the issues of immersion and danger in a heterosexist setting, as well as how it becomes a part of the ethnographic knowledge production.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on my ethnographic study on chemical sexualities used by young men in Papua, Indonesia. Specifically, it portrays my experiences as a female ethnographer researching young men on highly sensitive and sexualized topics such as penis enlargement practices and the use of sexual enhancement products. As a female researcher of different gender, age, socioeconomic, and ethnic background, I experienced the challenges of gaining access and faced sexual harassment, that made me struggling to bodily and emotionally immerse myself in the sexualized and heterosexist settings. In this paper, I will show the ways interlocutors and I perform our own gender in everyday relations throughout the fieldwork. Moreover, I will portray how doing gender in the fieldwork relations is intertwined with race, class, and age and is situated within a particular power relations of socioeconomic, and political structure of Papua. I suggest that acknowledging the way gender is performed within a specific context can help a female researcher to position herself in sexual circumstances, to mitigate the risk of sexual advances and sexual assault, and to understand the power relations among the actors in a male-dominated setting. Moreover, the ways gender is enacted all through the fieldwork have to be considered as an integral part of building ethnographic knowledge of the people, culture, and phenomenon under study.
Geir Henning Presterudstuen (University of Bergen)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I use a series of vignettes from my fieldwork on masculinity and sexuality in Fiji to reflect more broadly on how the notions of intimacy, sexuality and gender power are intrinsic to the ethnographic encounter.
Paper long abstract:
In an early fieldwork conversation with a Fijian qauri (non-heteronormative, effeminate male), my interlocutor interrupted my opening questions to explain that if I expected any sexual favours he preferred to get it over and done with before we started the interview properly. While my initial reaction was one of confusion followed by acute professional embarrassment, the statement also facilitated a comprehensive self-reflection about my own gendered performance in the field and how the notions of intimacy, sexuality and gender power are intrinsic to the ethnographic encounter. In this paper I continue these reflections in order to achieve two things: first to highlight some of the key issues impeding non-heteronormative Fijian citizens' sense of belonging and inclusion. Second, I use this particular "shock of difference" as the foundation for a more detailed analysis of the particular dangers associated with ethnographic research on gender and sexuality. Though I maintain that ethnographers are uniquely well placed to study gender and sexuality as it is lived and experienced, I will analyse a series of vignettes that highlight key implications of the realisation that doing ethnography is gendered work. As I conclude my paper I will use my own field experience to discuss these implications with a particular focus on the question on how an ethnographer of gender and sexuality can avoid reinforcing local systems of gendered and sexual power.
Claire Langsford (University of Adelaide )
Paper short abstract:
In the carnivalesque atmosphere of Australian costuming events, temporary body transformations enable participants to play with alternative genders and sexual identities. How does a costumed ethnographer negotiate the pleasures and dangers of participating in these performance contexts?
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on the author's ethnographic research among Australian cosplay communities, this paper explores the risks and challenges of participant-observation in performance contexts where sexual and identity play are both encouraged and feared.
Cosplay, or costume role play, is a fan practice centred upon the assembly and performance of costumes based on pre-existing character designs. Cosplay performances in Australia take place mainly at popular culture conventions, large multi-day events attended by thousands of costumed revellers, dressed from head to toe in detailed and spectacular outfits that can completely transform the appearance of the wearer.
Performing in costume is regularly described as a liberating experience by participants as these temporary body transformations enable them to play with alternative self-presentations and identities, particularly alternative genders and sexualities. Donning masks of body paint and papier-mâché, participants are engage in carnivalesque and ribald performances of gender and sexual identities.
However, for the ethnographer and all participants, these performances can be dangerous as gazing and performance activities are seen to carry the risk of unwanted attention, sexual harassment or even assault. Frame slippage can occur as 'playful' performances are interpreted as non-playful actions.
From managing the concerns of an ethics committee, to walking the streets among crowds of zombies, to experiencing sexual harassment during performances, and to managing outsiders' perceptions of a field's penchant for kink and fetishism, this paper details the ethical and practical challenges of an ethnographer in costume.
Yiran Wang (AISSR, University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
I study my same-sex erotic experiences with informants during fieldwork in China, argue that in a highly globalized era, there is no an-Other lesbian in field, and the subjectivity, knowledge and power of researcher and researched are deconstructed and reinvented through these interactions.
Paper long abstract:
Twenty years ago, in the collection "Taboo", American anthropologist Evelyn Blackwood wrote about her experiences of falling in love with an-Other lesbian in her Indonesian field. She stressed the importance of a researcher's partially positioned self; discussed about the conflicts and bridging of cultural differences between her informant lover and herself; and reflected on the power inequality between the researcher from the first world and the researched from the third world. In order to dialogue with earlier reflexive writings on researcher-researched sex, subjectivity and power relation in fieldwork, my paper analyzes my own erotic, love and sexual experiences with informants during fieldwork on female same-sex relationships in contemporary China. I argue that when the researcher and the researched are both native Chinese and highly globalized, the notions of positioned/nomadic, difference/sameness, unequal/equal become non-binary and ever dynamic, especially in intimate interactions. At the same time, gaps exist between academic concepts and language, and the bodily practices and passionate aesthetics in everyday life. There is hardly "an-Other" lesbian in my field; and through erotic encounters and falling in love with lesbians who redefine "I" and "we", the subjectivity, knowledge and power in sex, gender, and sexuality of both the researcher and the researched might be deconstructed and reinvented.
Brigitte Lewis (University of Melbourne)
Paper short abstract:
How does a gendered female Self "jam" the stylised repetitions of a rational self and what does it mean for gender as a construct? Can theory save us? Can it become the object of our salvation we smuggle in as a nod to our enlightenment past of a one true theoretical love?
Paper long abstract:
As a culture of western people we have learnt, since the scientific revolution, to master the "stylised repetition of acts through time" (Butler 1988, p. 519) that constitute not only what it is to do gender but also what it is to be a rationalist self. How does a gendered female Self "jam" (Irigaray 1991, p. 126) the stylised repetitions of a rational self and what does it mean for gender as a construct? Can theory save us? Can it become the object of our salvation we smuggle in as a nod to our enlightenment past of a one true theoretical love? I ground my Self in theory to bring you back the answers.
Butler, Judith. 1988. 'Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.'Theatre Journal 40, no. 4, pp. 519-31
Irigaray, Luce. 'The Power of Discourse and the Suboordination of the Feminine.' In The Irigaray Reader, edited by Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 118 -132.
Caroline Schuster (The Australian National University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper tracks erotic economies that generate obligation and desire—themselves key relational dimensions of credit systems. Long-term collaboration with, Luz, a Paraguayan woman who managed her sister’s informal credit business, provoked me to reconsider my own assumptions erotic economies.
Paper long abstract:
Reflecting back on two years of fieldwork on Paraguayan microfinance programs—undertaken from 2006-2015—I am consistently surprised by how these development projects successfully consolidate their focus on women while at the same time bracket and displace sex into the technical realms of demography, law, and health. I suggest that this focus comes at an important cost, particularly to understanding erotic economies that generate obligation and desire—themselves key relational dimensions of credit systems. Building outward from the everyday conditions of indebtedness in a Paraguayan border city, this paper asks two linked sets of questions. First, I query how key aspects of the economy (especially money and credit) are themselves sexed and gendered in anthropological theories of value (cf. Bear et al 2015). Second, I consider the economic dimensions of sex gender systems as they are organized and experienced within financial systems in Paraguay, both in microcredit development loans and informal credit markets. My long-term friendship and research collaboration with, Luz, a Paraguayan woman who managed her sister's informal credit business, provoked me to reconsider my own assumptions erotic economies. I interpret her lesbian kinship affiliations and queer allies in the banking world within the wider thematic of obligation as it is encoded in her financial labor. I suggest that is precisely the embodied and affective dimensions of both obligation *and* desire that challenge easy associations between microfinance and heteronormative sex/gender systems.
Natalie Araujo (La Trobe University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores experiences of sexual violence in the field in order to interrogate the dynamic tension that exists between the subjects and objects of ethnographic knowledge production.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the reverberating effects of instances of sexual violence that occurred in context of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Latin American migrants in London during 2007-2008. I explore the experience of sexual assault to achieve three interconnected methodological and analytical ends. First, viewing and indeed presenting myself as a research informant, I seek to investigate the methodological implications of analytic auto-ethnography (Anderson 2006; also compare Ellis and Bochner 2000) and, as Borstein has aptly put it, the harmonic dissonance of what it means to inhabit the field (Borstein 2007: 483). As such this paper highlights the dynamic tension that exists between the subjects and objects of ethnographic knowledge production. Second, I show how the incorporation of what might otherwise be viewed as uniquely personal or private events within public ethnography may provide important analytical insights into the life dilemmas of research participants. This illuminates how received understandings and embodiment experiences of public and private, as largely cultural abstractions, may be profoundly disrupted by critical events. Third, my analysis of sexual violence serves as the basis for exploration of gendered subjectivity and intersubjectivities in the context of Latin American London.
Helen Lee (La Trobe University)
Paper short abstract:
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Paper long abstract:
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