On sex in fieldwork: Notes on the methodology involved in the ethnographic study of anonymous sex

The sexuality of the anthropologist and sex in field work

Herdt (1984) says that sex between people of the same sex raises an important question for anthropology to the extent that it opens up a debate about the local and the universal condition of sexuality. In fact, the anthropology of sexuality is still in a phase of consolidation in which there remain many issues to debate, discuss and agree upon. This lack of study into the subject has generally been justified by the fact that sexual issues are associated with a high degree of intimacy and privacy. Sex has long been thought of as a place in which the anthropologist should not venture. Nevertheless, to the same extent that sex is a cultural fact, it must also be an object of study for the social sciences. Although presented as a private event, sex is, in fact, a profoundly public act, since each citizen is obliged in one way or another to make their socially legitimate sexual condition known to others. That is, as Berlant and Warner (1998) argued, although sexual relations are considered to be within the realm of the intimate, they are publicly mediated.

If no single sexuality exists and if sex is delimited by the cultural and historical context, anthropology must account for the diversity inherent in sex. The contributions of anthropology to the analysis and study of sexuality do not go in search of cultural universals, but instead seek to show the diversity of sexual expression. Meanwhile, Newton (1993) argues that by keeping sex out of the ethnographic account, masculine and heterosexual sex become an unmarked category, a given. When anthropologists are silent about the sexual issues of the groups they are studying (arguing that they do not want to intrude into the private lives of their informants), they are not taking a neutral stance because silence is also a position. Ignoring sexual diversity contributes to the naturalization of Western concepts of sex.

But the question of sex also raises the question of the researcher’s own sexuality. Kulick (1995) declares that the anthropologist’s sexuality has been largely absent in ethnographic research, and that this absence is due to two fundamental reasons: first, because anthropology has developed as a science that studies others, and therefore the experience of the anthropologist must be outside the ethnographic account, and second, because from the anthropological point of view personal narratives have been rejected – especially those that deal with cultural taboos such as sex. Furthermore, Kulick (1995) is quite right in saying the sex of the anthropologist is kept out of the ethnographic account because of the myth of scientific objectivity. Sex is kept at a distance from the ethnographic work for fear of contaminating the scientific results, as if the presence of sex would destroy all reason.

The sex of the anthropologist inevitably pervades any investigation that seeks to study any social phenomenon, regardless of the relevance of sexual matters to the object being studied. Ellen Lewin and William L Leap (1996) argue that the experience of gay and lesbian anthropologists helps to break down the supposed uniformity of the identity of researchers, introducing the dimension of gender into the research and contributing to challenging the masculine hegemony in the discipline. This article shall not attempt to reopen the debate on ethnographic authority, but it is necessary to point out that the sexual identities of researchers help to shape the outlook of ethnographic work. In saying this, we do not expect the reader to come to the erroneous conclusion that only gay, lesbian or transsexual researchers are able to fully engage themselves with studies into sexual diversity, since no one, in fact, can stake an exclusive claim on one particular area of study. Neither should anyone draw the opposite conclusion. It is equally erroneous to believe that homosexual anthropologists cannot investigate aspects of heterosexuality, especially when the majority of homosexuals have been socialized in a heterosexual culture and have learned to adjust for any differences that arise (Goffman, 1963). Any homosexual socialized in the West knows how to behave as a heterosexual.

The question of sex therefore influences different stages of research: sex as an object of study, sex in ethnographic writing, the researcher’s gender and sex life and finally sex in fieldwork. Dubisch (1995) asserts that the negation of sex in fieldwork is not even subject to discussion, as it is assumed to be obvious. Most researchers agree to maintain a certain distance from the sexual activities of their informants or, at most, they include these issues in their interviews but rarely intrude or get involved in sexual practices. In other social events, such as economic exchanges, for example, social scientists would not hesitate to attend or to experience for themselves the economic interaction. However, when it comes to sex, the presence of the anthropologist is highly uncommon. With few exceptions, sexual interaction is usually documented by researchers from interviews or, at best, from the standpoint of a spectator.

Why do anthropologists not experience sex with the groups they are studying? What makes sexual interaction different from other interactions in the field? One explanation for this absence could be the issue of scientific objectivity. However, the appeal to scientific objectivity has long been debated in the social sciences and it is not restricted to sexual relationships. The anthropologist should not lose the capacity to analyze the observations because of sex during fieldwork; on the contrary, the anthropologist should be able to capture the objectivity of the subjective experience whatever the social event taking place (Bourdieu, 2004; Bourdieu et al., 1991). In any case, when anthropologists conduct fieldwork, beyond their attempts at objectivity, their interpretation will always be guided by their own categories, attitudes and orientations (Geertz, 1973; Peacock, 2002). That is to say, when the researcher maintains sexual relations in fieldwork, the documentation of information deserves as much attention and care as would be applied to any other social event.

Another argument presented against sex in fieldwork might focus on the legitimacy of the way data is obtained (Dubisch, 1995). This brings up a trade-off that is worth qualifying. Various authors have highlighted the ethical controversies generated by sexual relations in fieldwork (see Abramson, 1993; Probyn, 1993; Wade, 1993; Whitehead, 1986). Undoubtedly, anthropologists, throughout their work in the field, must remain alert to any ethical conflicts that may arise from their interaction with others (Scheper-Hugues, 1995), and inevitably this will require them to scrutinize their sexual practices in the field. But sexual relations in themselves need not undermine the ethics in the field; this would only be so if such a relationship involved abuse, exploitation or imposition. Meanwhile, Wengle (1988) says that when anthropologists impose abstinence during fieldwork, it helps to preserve their personal identity. But in reality, maintaining sex apart from fieldwork as an absolute rule is no guarantee of identity protection, but rather, in some cases, it may be an imposition which leads to the loss of information that is relevant to the understanding of social relations. In fact, Dubisch (1995) argues that sexual abstinence in certain contexts could create problems among the social groups being studied by anthropologists, as they may be perplexed by the voluntary decision to abstain from sexual experiences.

The experiences of anthropologists and their accounts in ethnographic texts also generate knowledge specific to the discipline. In this regard, the role of sexuality in fieldwork has been channelled in recent years mainly through autoethnography, which gives value to the sexual experiences of the anthropologist and is a research method in which knowledge can be produced through the body (see Barbé i Serra, 2015; Berry, 2007; Blinne, 2012). Much of the discussion about sexuality in fieldwork in recent years has not been concerned with ethical issues or scientific objectivity, which was the case in the 1980s and 1990s; these days, as Spronk (2014: 8) argues, the focus has shifted ‘to corporeal experiences for analysing the relation between culture and self’. That is to say, in the 21st century we have managed to address the criticism regarding ethics and scientific objectivity with contributions from body studies and the increased presence of autoethnographic methodologies. However, the use of sexual relations in anthropology as a legitimate instrument to explain ‘otherness’ is still in its infancy.

Anonymous sex and participant observation

The practice of anonymous sex between men is fundamentally the product of three factors: first, urban expansion which enables encounters between strangers in large cities; second, a response to the persecution of homosexual behaviour; and finally, a response to the criminalization of multiple sexual relationships that go beyond the logic of sex between couples and with love.

As with any other social experience, the practice of cruising has not remained unchanged over time, nor does it present itself as a homogeneous space that is readily available to our understanding (Jenkins, 1994). Therefore, we must take into account, as noted by Bourdieu (1998), that our understanding of the social world must be forged from an empirical relationship, which is historically located and dated. In this sense, the researcher has different intellectual and moral responsibilities that are not neutral (Van Maanen, 1988), and this is why the resulting knowledge is as important as knowing how such knowledge is constructed. Fieldwork is the space in which we configure the way we view the people we study, and is therefore something that requires the greatest attention from researchers.

In this case, the aim was to analyze the technique of participant observation in research into anonymous sex in cruising areas in Catalonia (the Park of Montjuïc, the forest at Sitges and the beaches of Sitges and Gavà). Although some informal conversations and even a few in-depth interviews were possible in these open-air areas, participant observation proved to be the technique that provided the greatest volume of information. Each of the cruising areas in which the fieldwork was carried out had certain particularities that are worth describing briefly in order to account for the differences that arose among them.

The Park of Montjuïc, on the large hill that overlooks the centre of Barcelona, has long been the quintessential site for anonymous sexual encounters in the city. It is surrounded by working class neighbourhoods with large immigrant populations. In the 1980s and 1990s, a very wide range of men came to the park looking for sex, but nowadays, due to online sex, geolocation programmes on smartphones that help find sexual partners and the emergence of other leisure scenarios aimed at the gay community in the city, such as bars, restaurants and nightclubs, the number of participants has been reduced mostly to residents from adjacent neighbourhoods and the elderly and other men who do not have the knowledge or the tools necessary to use the new technologies. For the most part, those who go to the cruising area in Montjuïc are men who cannot access the commercial, publicly visible gay scene due to economic constraints or because they fear the dire consequences of being discovered (Langarita, 2014b). Indeed, Heaphy (2011) has pointed out that gay visibility is only an option for a privileged socio-economic group.

Gavà is on the outskirts of the metropolitan area of Barcelona. The cruising area is next to a beach and the coastal highway, which means some participants are passing drivers, such as truck and van drivers (mostly during the day). However, it is also frequented by local men, usually middle-aged, many of whom consider themselves to be heterosexual or do not label their same-sex encounters as homosexuality.

In Sitges, a coastal resort town to the south west of Barcelona, there are two major cruising areas: the forest and the beach. Both the forest and the beach are usually frequented by local men, but also by tourists, especially in summer. Sitges is a town with a large tourist influx of gay men, offering a wide range of opportunities for socialization, leisure and consumption, which means there is high public visibility. Although access to sex is also a prime motive that leads men to go cruising in Sitges, the social context is undeniably different from that of the Park of Montjuïc or Gavà, since many of the tourists who visit the cruising area of Sitges by night do not hide their sexual orientation during the day, and openly frequent bars, restaurants and beaches aimed at gay men.

In other words, although the patterns of communication and the rituals of interaction have many similarities from one cruising area to another, the differences are established, fundamentally, by the type of population that frequents them. Without doubt, this is a factor that must be taken into account in analyzing cruising areas.

Access to sex with participants was relatively easy, first because I recognize myself as a gay man, and second, because although I had not previously participated in sexual encounters in cruising areas, I had had sexual encounters with other men through online dating sites.

This provided me with previous sexual and social experience which, although not enough to understand the cultural patterns without an analytical input, placed me in a particular position within the social world in which I was immersed. That is, I was regarded as a Western man in a context in which women are not physically present and are not objects of desire or attention. If I had been a woman, or regarded as one, this kind of approach would have been significantly more complex and inevitably different, since the physical absence of women is very marked in the cruising areas.

The fact that I could also articulate my own sexual desire, as a gay man, in this space allowed me to establish a kind of intimate relationship which could by no means be carried out in a similarly hypersexual, but heterosexual, scenario. My own sexual identity became the starting point for establishing interactions in cruising areas, not only as an object of desire for men, but also as a desiring subject. By this, obviously, I have no wish to conjure up the stereotypical ideas related to gay promiscuity that are a staple of homophobic discourse. Rather, what I am trying to point out is that sexual identity and desire have an inevitable impact on interactions in fieldwork, especially the kind that use sexual relationships as a source of information; but this is also true in any other relationship. At the end of the day, desire presents itself as a constant possibility in human relationships and sexual identity is subject to inspection in all our interactions.

My previous personal experience in online meetings was marked by multiple sexual relationships, without further commitment and without reference to the logic of sex with love, which, although this was not determinative, facilitated my sexual interaction with the participants of the cruising areas. On the other hand, the fact that I was one of the youngest men frequenting the cruising areas meant that I was, on many occasions, a priority target of the affections of many of the participants and an object of interest for interaction, in such a way that many of the approaches were initiated by the other participants.

From the first forays into the field, it was obvious that the rule of silence would control how the information was accessed. This rule plays an important role in cruising areas to the extent that it facilitates interaction, prevents additional information from being provided that would otherwise hinder the sexual negotiation and helps to maintain the anonymity of the participants, which is one of the basic demands of most of the participants (Delph, 1978; Elwood et al., 2003; Langarita, 2013). Given the difficulty of engaging in verbal interactions to acquire information from the users, it was necessary to resort to other means of accessing data in order to understand the operating logic in these areas of anonymous sexual exchanges. For this reason, participant observation became the basic technique. Although participation in a social event is not immune to the distorting effects of lies, nor is it a guarantee of the accuracy of the information obtained (Lyons, 2014; Spronk, 2014), sometimes, as is the case in this study, participant observation becomes the best available technique to access the type of information that would otherwise be impossible to gather. At the same time, it is important to recognize that any lies that are gathered in the field can themselves become a source of information, since they can highlight what people want to hide.

In this research, based on the experience of participant observation, I gradually made sense of the law of silence and the need to respect it so as to access information, much like the participants needed to respect it to achieve sexual pleasure. Although it was possible to engage in a few conversations, attempts to initiate a brief dialogue with participants often failed or resulted in rejection by the participants. Indeed, I became complicit with the rule and reinforced it by interacting without exchanging a word. Hence, most of the information I gathered was not through conversations with the men, but rather, through interactions between our bodies. The sexual activity and the flirtation carried out in the field made me simply one more participant. For example, through sexual proximity I could see how the social meanings of cock were constructed in a way that was different with respect to ass. ¹ In the cruising areas, the focus of desire centres primarily on the participants’ cocks, which play an important role throughout the interaction and are a key element for attracting other participants. It is common for participants to touch each other’s cocks to assess interest based on size or erection. In contrast, the ass, which for many gay men gives the greatest pleasure, is practically absent in sexual relations in the cruising areas. My cock was available to the other participants, who touched it to assess whether they wanted to continue the interaction, just as I did with theirs. By the way they touched my genitals and the way they initiated the interaction, I was able to ascertain the intentions and circumstances of the other participants. Some of them touched my cock as if assessing it, indicating they were in a hurry or had limited time to spend in the cruising area. Others preferred to take their time, walking around the cruising area looking for the right candidate and initiating a process of negotiation based on ways of looking and fondling; there were also men who preferred to remain motionless during the sexual activity and simply let another participant touch them.

Sex in cruising areas is articulated from a perspective of immediacy, and is not intended to generate any subsequent ties between the participants, which meant I could take part without creating any kind of commitment beyond my own personal and scientific ethics. This tendency for immediacy and the absence of words also led sometimes to an uncaring attitude from some of the participants who put their own individual interests first and foremost, and this was sometimes uncomfortable for me. This was the case, for example, when some participants would insist on leading the sexual activity for their own personal interests by taking my hand and putting it on their genitals. Normally, however, this type of situation could be resolved without problems and the situation quickly remedied. In any case, my presence as a participant fulfilled more functions than that of a mere observer: I became complicit in achieving the objectives of some of the visitors, but was also allowed to take part in the activity in the field in as close proximity as any other participant. As Dubisch (1995) has pointed out, mere observation in areas of such sexual intensity could have been understood by some of the participants as annoying or disturbing, but interacting in the activities going on in the field with the rest of the participants helped to generate a greater sense of security in the environment. However, this also posed a number of methodological problems. How can we ‘observe’ in places where everything happens in silence and in such darkness that it is difficult to see anything? In order to study the cruising areas, observation was important but participation was crucial. The sexual use of my own body became a key factor in understanding the functioning of anonymous sexual exchanges. Observing the interaction of participants as a spectator was not enough, especially as it was often too dark to see anything. What was important was to be a participant and to experience the events physically. Therefore, it was essential for me to join in with the sexual practices, to become an object of desire but also a person who desired. Touching was a way of getting to know the other person in their relationship with the environment – and also of recognizing myself. The way in which the participants passed their hands over my body while I experimented with theirs allowed me to slowly build up a knowledge of the cruising areas, the rituals of interaction and the most suitable behaviour for achieving satisfactory sexual interactions. The difficulty, however, was transferring the sensations derived from sexual interaction to an ethnographic account. How was I to build theory based on what I had experienced with my body but about which nothing was spoken or even seen? In this case, it was essential to carry out a comparative analysis based on the repetition of activity with different participants in the same area, as well as exercises of analysis and reflection on the sexual relationships after each field visit.

This approach to fieldwork facilitates a form of theoretical generation that begins with the sexual experience of the researcher in the field. It is an approach that proceeds from what Wacquant (2009) called carnal knowledge. That is, the bodily experience of caressing, arousal and orgasm becomes a source of knowledge in itself which contributes to the ethnographic production. A carnal approach allowed me to make sense of sexual pleasure with strangers, to get closer to what is supposed to be confined to the realm of the intimate, to get to know the sexual practices from the perspective of experience, to recognize how to touch, seduce and arouse. It is an active participation which demonstrates that an approach using sexual activity in fieldwork can become the starting point for generating the analysis of the sexual relations taking place.

On the other hand, we need to answer certain questions regarding the figure of the anthropologist in a scenario with such a highly charged sexual atmosphere. How should the researcher react to sexual advances in the cruising areas? In cruising areas, every man present can be the object of another participant’s desire. The anthropologist is simply another possible candidate, another ‘fuckable’ man for those who are in the cruising areas. But given the circumstances, which of these suitors should the researcher have sex with and which ones not? Should he choose those he is attracted to or those who he feels are more appropriate to his research? Where does the researcher set his own limits? How does he deal with his own feelings of desire? These are some of the questions each researcher must face in whichever socio-sexual context they find themselves, while not forgetting their own socio-sexual reality and their own limitations during the interactions. That is, the researcher must be able to deconstruct the Western cultural values of the ‘legitimate’ uses of sex in order to use sexual interaction as an instrument for data collection and analysis, while being fully aware that certain interactions may not be possible due to personal limitations or the context.

In this study, I was aware that my way of managing sexual desire and inviting interactions in the field responded to conventional standards of homosexual desire. That is, the men with whom I initiated sexual interaction and negotiation in the early stages of the study tended to be younger (between 25 and 40 years of age), handsome according to the current standards of the gay subculture and, in general, Catalan, Spanish or Latino. ² As Berry (2007: 274) pointed out, ‘We in this context use each other to better understand who we are, to better ingratiate our erotic nature, and yet also to reject each other when this using is completed, or when others become and/or are undesirable’. Once I became aware that these patterns of desire responded to hegemonic models and that this was influencing my fieldwork, I attempted to resolve the situation by also approaching other men of different ages and backgrounds, which gave me the opportunity to obtain new perspectives on the participants, their motivations and characteristics. In Montjuïc, for example, I interacted with men who were much older, many of whom were Pakistani or Moroccan. However, this does not mean that the fieldwork researcher must do anything asked of them, including things they would not want to do. Unquestionably, at some point, they should set out limits to their interactions. In my case, for example, the most important limitation related to safe sex. Throughout the fieldwork, safe sexual practices were maintained in all interactions and, as with the majority of the participants in the cruising areas, my sexual activities were limited to fondling, mutual masturbation and oral sex. It is probable that these boundaries will have prevented access to other practices and sensations, and therefore further data. However, in this case also, the researcher needs to exercise personal responsibility and take on board the standard sexual health recommendations.

The relationships with other men on the margin of dominant gay norms allowed me to recognize conflicts relating to sexual identity in the cruising areas. I came to understand that the notions of participant, practitioner or user were much more appropriate terms to refer to those frequenting the cruising areas than the term gay. At the end of the day, the practice of cruising is not a starting point for asserting identity, but a place to find sexual satisfaction, and it is one that has little resemblance to the usual places of identity production. Therefore, this approach produced a new area of analysis in which sexual relationships were more important than identity construction. Nevertheless, this fact does not exempt the participants in the cruising areas from the homophobia endemic in the social fabric of Western society; this is why those who practice cruising employ the rule of silence, the ritualized interactions and the search for anonymity – it is an attempt to cope with homophobic hostility and discrimination.

Conclusions

Having analyzed the use of sexual relations in the study of anonymous sexual exchanges between men, it follows that sexual practices can be used as one more source of information for analyzing the social and cultural realities involved and can even be the basic source of information depending on the field of study. Sex is a key contributor to the regulation of our cultural fabric; we should therefore be able to incorporate sex into fieldwork – as a technique that helps to maintain a particular mode of relationship between the researcher and the object of study – without thereby sacrificing scientific objectivity or professional ethics. If we accept that sex is culture, sexual acts should be allowed to become an ethnographic resource to understand a specific social reality. The use of sexual relations in research into cruising shows precisely the opportunity afforded by such relations in fieldwork.

However, the strategies used to access information in the field also have certain limits, and sexual relations are no exception. In this sense, the limits are, for the most part, determined by establishing such relations in a framework of free choice, and an absence of coercion for all parties involved in the interaction.