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- Convenors:
-
Matthew Porges
(University of Oxford)
Maria Gunko (University of Oxford)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
Both anthropologists and their interlocutors are subject to complex landscapes of sexualised dynamics during ethnographic fieldwork. We invite theoretical and empirical contributions that address the subject/object relations between researchers and research participants in fieldwork contexts.
Long Abstract:
Though a great deal of excellent anthropological research exists on sexualities and gender dynamics across cultures, less attention has been paid to the experiences of anthropological fieldworkers whose presence in the field maps them inevitably onto existing sex-and-gender entanglements--nor to the enormous theoretical potential of such entanglements. This refers not only, or even predominantly, (or even necessarily at all) to the intimate relationships between anthropologists and their interlocutors (which are generally banned by ethical protocols) but rather to the mutual establishment of shared imaginaries of what sexuality and gender mean relationally and contextually. The development of sexual boundaries, the avoidance of certain forms of intimacy in the field, and the iterated and negotiated positionality of an individual and community, are all a fertile territory for understanding ethnographic engagement beyond one-way data collection. This panel aims to engage with both theoretical and empirical contributions that explore and complexify the anthropologist’s position within the sexual context of the field site, the knowledge thereby produced, the generative entanglements that arise, are engaged with, or are resisted.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses ‘consent activism’ by local Tokyo grassroots groups and how the fieldworker became involved in intimate forms of boundary and self-making through volunteering in sexual consent project teams.
Paper long abstract:
Recent consent projects by grassroots organisations in Tokyo have demonstrated the importance of ‘boundaries’ (kyōkaisen) in both their educational content and in interactions between members. Such materials struggle to introduce concepts of sexual intimacy and relationship building which use a ‘yes means yes’ model instead of one where the absence of a no means yes (iya yo iya yo mo suki no uchi, lit. ‘no’ also means liking it). Within the matrix of ‘consent activism’ are affective practices of collaboration which expect trust and rapport between team members, such as sharing sessions and talk events where the fieldworker is also expected to contribute. Such processes, however formal or informal, reaffirm that boundaries, especially around intimate topics like gender identity, sexuality, and sexual orientation, are constantly negotiated. Depending on the members spoken with or the setting of an event, the fieldworker becomes more entangled in the intimate lives of individuals. Around the theme of ‘consent’, this is inevitable, uncomfortable, but far from unwelcome.
This paper uses anecdotes from the field, to underscore the growing emphasis on boundary-making in activist projects and how it nearly always overlaps with understanding individual desires and needs—of both fieldworkers and interlocuters.
Paper short abstract:
This article explores the ethical, methodological, and emotional challenges I faced as a Polish female, migrant researcher studying far-right movements, where I strategically employed personal sex appeal as methodological tool, while interviewing male Polish migrant far-right activists in the UK.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the ethical, methodological and emotional challenges I encountered as a Polish female, migrant researcher studying far-right movements, interviewing predominantly male Polish migrant activists involved in far-right politics in the UK. The ethnographic experience underscores the complicated intersections of affinity, antipathy, and empathy, as well as the emotional toll on ethnographer’s wellbeing. Methodological reflections address how the fieldwork presented challenges that went beyond traditional ethical guidelines, demanding creative and reflexive approaches. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, participant observations among various far-right milieus and dozens of interviews, it explores three central questions: (1) How can researchers cultivate empathy or maintain professional positive regard for far-right activists without compromising their ethical stance? (2) What ethical and methodological implications arise when a woman researcher utilises personal sex appeal as a strategy in the field? (3) In what ways can hope be found and resilience maintained while conducting research within the environment shaped by racism, toxic masculinity, hate and violence. The findings build on ethnographies of the far-right such as Kathleen Blee or Hilary Pilkington and aim to broaden methodological perspectives in extremism research by inserting a feminist perspective such as Heidi Kaspara & Sara Landolt and a third wave of feminism to deepen our understanding of how identities are constructed and performed in transnational, multicultural settings emphasising the value but also limitations for reflexive methodologies that adapt to the dynamic and ethically fraught terrain of far-right studies, promoting researcher resilience and methodological innovation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how un/shared intimacies and affects shaped research with queer and trans Kurds in Amed, Turkey. It critiques cis-heteronormative assumptions on intimacy, proposing "ethnography as a cause" to explore the transformative potential of engaged, intimate and decolonial methodologies.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research with queer and trans Kurds in the highly securitized city of Amed (Diyarbakır), this paper examines how shared intimacies, affects, and dis/attachments influenced my research, addressing the ethical and security considerations that emerged throughout the study. Using key concepts from Kurdish lubunya communities—such as "chameleonhood" (the practice of adapting by assuming another's identity), "dava" (cause), and "bedel" (debt)—which connect queer and trans Kurds to their national struggle, I critique cis-heteronormative assumptions of intimacy in anthropology and explore queer ethnographic methods that embrace adaptability, care, and “going stealth” in response to shifting security and ethical contexts. I propose the idea of “ethnography as a cause” to rethink how our interactions shape ethical loyalties, accountability, and responsibility, both to informants and the discipline. Rather than simply “giving voice” to informants or uncovering hidden truths, I draw from decolonial methodologies to reflect on the ethnographic bonds we form with informants and the broader value of our research. I show how research becomes a site of political and emotional engagement, shaped by intimate struggles, aspirations, and solidarities, highlighting how affective and intimate connections, as well as shared experiences of marginalization, can inform ethical, accountable research practices. Critiquing conventional understandings of intimacy as “sex acts,” I explore the transformative potential of engaged intimate methodologies, where researcher-informant collaboration is central to knowledge production and the development of more reflexive, ethical research practices.
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on embodied experiences of (transient) ethnographic fieldwork to interrogate Kampalan nightclubs as spaces for the expression and negotiation of racialized masculinities and femininities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper takes the transient nature of ethnographic fieldwork as a starting point to interrogate nightlife practices in Kampala, Uganda, and the racialized transnational masculinities and femininities they produce.
European expatriates engage in Kampalan nightlife in ways shaped by their mobility as a transient class, and their negotiation of racialized, postcolonial gender identities. Drawing on observational data and autoethnographic experiences as a white European participating in Kampala’s nightlife during my doctoral fieldwork, I contribute to debates on race, sexuality, and the erotic economy (Rubenstein, 2004) within ‘global nightscapes’ (Farrer, 2011; Jankowski, 2018; Tutenges, 2022). I examine how sexuality and gender are navigated in these spaces, particularly by expatriates positioned as both connected to and distanced from life ‘at home’ in Europe. Through thick ethnographic description of arrival at, participation in, and departure from the effervescent Kampalan nightclub, I analyse how these spaces, while reinforcing class and postcolonial racial divisions, also enable expatriates and middle-class Ugandans alike to subvert hierarchies, challenge gender norms, imagine alternative futures, and cross boundaries through sexual intimacy. Reflecting on my positionality in relation to - and (measured) participation within - this erotic economy, I confront how ‘knowledge of the West’ generates new desires in others in the postcolonial present. Overall, this paper seeks to illuminate the anthropologist's participation in erotic economies as generative for understanding sexuality and gender relationally and contextually in her field site, of particular importance when, like myself, we engage in research more broadly concerned with local politics of gender.
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents through several examples how learning to navigate a sexualised field as a long-term resident ethnographer in a Nigerian city contributed to gaining access to specific sites and to knowledge construction
Paper long abstract:
My ten years in a Nigerian city from 1980 to 1990 became after a few years back in Europe one extensive field, although I did not systematically document every moment of those 3650 days and nights. With hindsight, it would be no exaggeration to state that as a young single white woman the field was effectively sexualised given the gender relations that prevailed at the time. In this hetero-normative patriarchal society, men’s access to multiple partners whether in polygynous households or through relationships with “outside wives”, lovers or girlfriends was counterbalanced by women’s sway over domestic affairs and their strategies to secure economic autonomy by occupying top professional positions, engaging in business or/and building a house, for example. Children, especially boys, also played a role in securing both parents’ status and futures in different ways. This setting generated competition, rivalry and jealousy but also solidarity amongst women and, I suspect, also amongst men although I was not party in the same way to their relational dynamics. In this paper I wish to explore, through specific examples, how I navigated this complex territory in which status and hierarchy also played a major role. Indeed, almost all public endeavours to which I actively contributed in a professional capacity as university researcher-lecturer were tainted with implied sexual relations, playing into local conceptions of the specific roles that I was afforded.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork among Chinese otome game players, this study examines how hierarchies of various masculinities are constructed both within otome game player communities and through the process of ethnographic writing.
Paper long abstract:
Originally developed in Japan, otome games were specifically marketed to women and designed to encourage female users to incarnate as the heroine surrounded by attractive digital male characters in the gameworld with whom she could build heterosexual romantic relationships. Along with globalization, domestically produced otome games by Chinese companies have developed into a cultural industry that reflects China's gender landscape, creating tightly-knit player communities among young middle-class Chinese women living in urban areas.
Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork among Chinese otome game players in two major cities, this study reflects on how hierarchies of various masculinities are constructed both within otome game player communities and through the process of ethnographic writing. It examines this trajectory from the community’s "no-men-allowed" entry rule, to collective storytelling critiquing toxic masculinity in China’s offline world, and finally to the co-construction of "misandry" as a collective term emerging from dialogues between the anthropologist and her interlocutors.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores my experience of the sexualised dynamics of ethnographic fieldwork in arms fairs; theorising my encounter with the deeply patriarchal ‘politics of desire’ that mark corporate defence culture and entangle researcher and research subjects in complex suggested and actual intimacies.
Paper long abstract:
‘Arms fairs’ are exemplary sites for studying the embodiment and materialisation of the global military-industrial complex, holding the spectacular-cum-banal everyday of ‘defence business men’ as they trade military technologies, safely removed from actual battle. Ripe with drones and desires, these sites brim with sexual politics: the sexualised dynamics endemic to corporate defence culture that take on new forms in their encounter with bodies out of place, such as the woman researcher. In this paper I dig into the theoretical, empirical and methodological implications of my experience of the sexual politics of ethnographic research in arms fairs, 2023-2024; as global arms stocks hit “all-time highs” amid the ruination of communities in Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine and beyond. Conducting ‘arms fair fieldwork’ as a young woman is a process of studying-up laden with sexual violence. This violence includes subtle to direct forms of objectification and sexual harassment, denoting the racial, patriarchal and heteronormative ‘politics of desirability’ that structure men’s, women’s and gender non-conforming experiences in this space: ordering each body in a hierarchy of desirable vs undesirable. This politics entangles the woman researcher and her research subjects in complex and precarious intimate dynamics, forcing the former to negotiate a fickle boundary between suggested/potential and actual intimacies; facilitating her own sexualisation while rejecting/resisting actual sexual invitations. What are the ethico-politics of the researcher’s collusion with harmful gender norms during ethnographic fieldwork in studying-up settings? What can the sexual politics of the arms fair tell us about the normalisation of military-industrial interests in contemporary politics?
Paper short abstract:
How do women fieldworkers approach personal safety risk? In this literature review, I present key themes around how locally varying understandings of gendered risk collide with each other as ethnographic access is negotiated and experienced.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropology is the only social science whose core method immerses us in the full unpredictability of life. We are not able to control our data collection environment in the same way that someone working in a lab or an archive can. Indeed, this is partly the point – we trade predictability of working conditions for richness of understanding.
Prompted by risk calculations I had to make during my experience as a master’s student arranging meetings with mostly male interlocutors, in this paper I will examine a selection of anthropology’s literature on women in the field, with a particular focus on how acknowledging risk may contribute both to better safety and better theorising, and on questions of universality versus locality in moral norms.
If anthropologists and anthropologists in training are not encouraged to prioritise risk considerations as part of their fieldwork planning, is more than safety compromised? Such an approach can carry with it an under-acknowledgement of the social embedding and co-construction attendant upon living with a community, and a failure to fully contend with the relational, positional nature of ethnographic work suggests theoretical implications as well as practical ones. On the other hand, very rigid approaches to mitigating the risk of violence may restrict our participation in the lifeworlds we go to the field to learn about. Through this review, I will engage with these and related questions through querying the work of female fieldworkers who have reflected on the price of access to ethnographic knowledge.