Abstract
A young graduate student conducting fieldwork in Mexico turns down an invitation to dance with a man at a party in the small community where she is working. Later that night, the man she rebuffed—accompanied by others—comes to the house where she lives alone and attempts to enter, presumably intending to assault her. Meanwhile, another graduate student finds herself with a man who is a potential research participant with no one else in sight on beach in a torrential rainstorm as night approaches. She realizes that she would not ordinarily allow herself to get into such a risky situation. How do we make sense of such experiences in the field? How can we use them as data to better understand the site we are studying? How can we prepare graduate students for such encounters in ethnography seminars and through faculty mentoring?
Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards tackle these timely questions in their insightful book Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research. While acknowledging that social dynamics within field sites matter, the authors focus on how ethnographic standards make ethnographers vulnerable to sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape. These standards also go far in explaining, according to the authors, why we talk so little about these experiences—and embodiment more generally—in the field and tend to excise them from our analysis. In contrast, the authors argue that they can and should be analyzed as an integral and valuable component of fieldwork.
The authors identify three standards of ethnography, which they call ethnographic “fixations” because of the importance placed on them by the women they interviewed and their perception that they are fundamental in the larger sociological community (p. 25). These include solitude, danger, and intimacy. The idea that the ideal researcher is a brave and solitary adventurer led the woman described in the first vignette of this essay to live alone and to try to deal with the situation independently. This ethnographic fixation, which is reinforced in coursework and by ethnographies commonly held up as exemplars, discourages students from developing collaborative research designs or hiring research assistants—strategies that can preemptively close down uncomfortable flirtation and harassment.
Closely linked to the fixation on solitary research is the idea that worthwhile ethnographic research requires facing danger. Graduate students learn that the most valued ethnographies are those conducted—usually by men—in the most dangerous and violent research sites and observe that students working on topics perceived as dangerous receive the most accolades. They internalize the idea that they should endure dangerous situations—like being alone with a man on a beach as described above—in order to get good data. The third and final ethnographic fixation is intimacy, or the idea that ethnographers are supposed to forge close emotional bonds with their research participants. For many women, and some men, getting close to participants and spending a lot of time with them puts them at risk of unwanted sexual attention and even sexual assault. It also makes them feel like they are to blame if their relationships with research participants feel awkward or strained.
The authors’ analyses are grounded in the experiences of 56 ethnographers—47 women (all cisgender) and nine men (eight cisgender and one transgender)—whom they interviewed. None identified as non-binary, but the sample had variation by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation—allowing the authors to examine how people’s experiences in the field are shaped by multiple and intersecting positionalities. The authors consistently analyze how race, ethnicity, and national origin matter in the field. They recount the experience of a trans man who had to navigate dangerous interactions with gay men at a bar where he was conducting fieldwork. They aggressively asked if he was “born a man” and threatened to find out when he did not give a straight answer. The authors find that most (cis) men, however, are more concerned about abusing their power with young women and girls than about navigating danger to themselves.
Identifying how academic standards themselves—and ethnographic standards specifically—make sociologists vulnerable to gender and sexualized violence is an important and timely contribution to the field. The book is clearly written, organized, and presented. It should be required reading for any class on ethnography or in-depth interviewing, for any researcher conducting ethnography or interviews, and for any faculty member who is advising students conducting such work. Armed with this book, researchers will not only be better able to protect themselves but they will also gain a model for how to learn and teach from their own embodied experiences in the field.