Abstract:

Can we ever fully prepare ourselves for the fieldwork moments in which our pre-conceived interests, ideas, and questions meet the complex realities of our subjects’ lives? In “The Feminist Ethnographer’s Dilemma,” Orit Avishai, Lynne Gerber, and Jennifer Randles challenge feminist ethnographers to discuss our reflexive practices when fieldwork realities conflict with our personal political goals. All three authors conducted fieldwork in what they consider “conservative social spaces.” In each context, individuals confronted social forces feminist analyses typically cast as regressive, normative, and regulatory.  Each author found that her fieldwork encounters forced her to reflect on her own preexisting assumptions and the distance between her politics and those of her subjects. Each author found herself developing a far more complex intellectual and political relationship to the issues she studied than anticipated. In this response, I draw on my work with gender nonconforming children and their families to offer two conclusions about the business of feminist (and, really, any) ethnography: First, constraint and agency are always at play, no matter whether the social context is conservative or progressive, and the interplay between those forces outlines the contours of communities of practice. Second, as we labor to place ourselves at some distance from those we wish to analyze, they are also laboring, watching us, making meaning of us. These interpersonal processes should be treated as an important form of data, one that allows us to redress a weakness common to some strains of feminist thought—accounting for the individual women who deliberately choose life conditions we ourselves might consider oppressive.