Location and Unlocation: Examining Gender and Telephony through Autoethnographic Textual and Visual Methods

Autoethnography as Situated and Embodied Research Practice

Autoethnography challenges established divides between object and subject and so it is important to situate ourselves as researchers and researched in this study. We find Haraway's (1988) notion of situated knowledges useful because physical bodies are located at a particular place and telephony may extend or limit both place and space by the vision, memories, and imagination that emerge as a consequence of telephone use. Thus, possibilities and limitations of “vision” and “seeing” in research are embodied practices bound to shifting practices of privilege and/or subordination. In our case, situatedness has multiple meanings as we inherit positions as researchers and researched and the telephone is a medium for both placement and transgression. To understand our situatedness, we have chosen the concept of reflexivity rather than reflection. Reflexivity is a process, which requires critical engagement with one's own images of the world, marginalisation and privilege, researcher and researched, interpretation, contradictions, and ethics (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004; Lash, 2003). The term reflexivity refers to a bidirectional approach, the researcher shaping research while through critical engagement the research and researcher are shaped by the research process and participants. Reflection, on the other hand, has been critiqued for limitations of navel gazing and abstraction (Davies et al., 2004). Reflexivity, according to Pillow (2003), is a process producing discomfort through methodological innovation, and he writes, “to be reflective does not demand an ‘other,’ while to be reflexive demands both an other and some self-conscious awareness of the process of scrutiny” (p. 177). We have used a reflexive approach to consider and question the construction of our research design, data, and analysis by continually questioning and, where appropriate, changing the way we collected, analysed, or reported data. For example, in relation to ethics, we became aware when writing our diaries that some of our feelings and thoughts could be harmful to others who were unintentionally involved in our research and, noting our privilege and power as academic researchers but also as wives, partners, and friends, this required that some of the recorded information remain in our diaries and not be shared or used for research. Thus, for us, reflexivity is both a scrutiny of ourselves and our research, a willingness to critique and, where necessary, alter our research practices, which in turn reshapes the research and, indeed, ourselves.

Our biographies include commonalities and differences. As academic scholars we both inhabit privileged spaces as white bodies and, at the same time, this privilege is challenged by a number of considerations, such as geographical peripheral location, gender, class background, and family constellation. We are women in our early 50's, working as researchers and teaching at universities; however, our geographical locations, life and family situations, backgrounds, and mother tongues are different. One of us lives in a city in the Southern Region of Australia and is of Greek heritage and the other lives in a small city in a rural area of Mid Sweden, is of Swedish heritage, and has a farming background. We both use English in research and teaching, which is for both of us a second language. For one of us Greek is her mother tongue and for the other, Swedish. One of us lives in a relationship with a man and has a teenage daughter and the other is single and the mother of three sons, with one son living with the other parent in a distant city. One of us lives close to other family members such as our parents and brothers/sisters, while the other lives far from other family members.

The Design of the Collaborative Autoethnographic Textual and Visual Inquiry

Our collaborative autoethnographic approach included diary notes, written memories, and photography. In this section, we present the process of collecting data and provide guidance about relevant evaluation criteria for our study. An important motive for working with both textual and visual inquiry was the intention to extend our methods to engage with complexity and shifting practices of emotions and social relations that shape understandings of location and unlocation: diary notes made it possible to document and to engage reflexively about everyday telephone use during an “ordinary week”; writing memories allowed retrospective engagement with situations of telephone use to which we ascribed particular meaning; photography created awareness about vision and provided us with visual data of indoor and outdoor milieus.

Diary notes in research may be written in different ways for different purposes. For us, collecting data to understand the everyday dimension of our telephone lives motivated a documentation that included a series of connections, interactions, and locations of telephony. Hyers, Swim, & Mallett (2006) have argued that in comparison to commonly used qualitative data collection methods, such as face-to-face interviews, diary writing may document mundane life experiences that are not included in oral telling. For example, Widerberg (2002) used a research diary in a project on tiredness during a month with the purpose of reaching a more complex understanding. She described how the diary exposed the many different situations, emotions, and consequences related to tiredness in her everyday and working life. Another example of diary writing in research is Latham's (2003) study of city life, where participants used diaries to gather data on everyday experiences and document comments, events, and emotions. Interestingly, Latham's (2003) research actualized great variety in writing and raised ethical issues for participants when documenting their lives as they also visualized and experienced uncomfortable emotions. We both wrote diaries during seven weeks, one day each week starting with Monday, and then writing on Tuesday the next week, Wednesday the following week, and so on. Our agreed upon instructions were to write every time we used the telephone and include all kinds of telephones (mobile and stationary) and conversations. We documented the content of telephone calls, the timing, where we were when we received or made the call, and our reflections and emotions related to telephone use.

To be able to learn more retrospectively about the way telephony shapes social relations and to address one of the most common questions among mobile callers—“Where are you?” (Garcia-Montes et al., 2006)—we included memory work as part of the autoethnographic design. This method views memories as a basis for life writing in a societal context and allows for the creation of a subject-subject relation, with attention to “moments” that are often fragmented and non-linear (Haug, 2008). Memory work was first introduced by Haug (1987) and has been used by researchers for various purposes as a collective and individual method (e.g., Crawford Kippax, Onyx, Gault, & Benton, 1992; Onyx & Small, 2001; Widerberg, 1995). Kuhn (1995) practiced memory work through photography and film, using family photographs and memories to analyze family and nation. Bryant and Livholts (2007) used memory work to explore the conceptualization of the gendering of space. For this study, we began the process of memory work by identifying key themes in the literature. These were then used to stimulate memories to allow for an exploration of the complexities of gender and space. The aim was for memories to bring forth both concrete situations and abstract notions of space that we could analyze. We agreed to write three memories in the third person, on the theme “Where are you?”

The question of location and unlocation challenges notions of bodies in certain places and the transgression of space through telephone use. Written words through memory or diaries give a sense of bodies in space while photographs capture a still image of bodies in place. We used photography to complement memory and imaginings and allow for the opportunity to extend the data to document our telephone lives. Following Rose (2007), we used the concept of critical visual methodology to emphasize the cultural and social impacts and consequences of producing and interpreting images. Rose (2007) noted that while vision refers to what the human eye can see, visuality problematizes this seeing. This connects to Haraway's (1988) writing on situated knowledge and to memory work, which allows distance by using the third person while writing. Furthermore, Sontag (1999) emphasized the controlling power of photography to redefine reality “as a target for surveillance” (p. 82). Hence, we used the camera in parallel to our research diary by taking a photograph of ourselves each time we used the telephone, which included photographing indoor and outdoor landscapes.

The analytical process involved a series of steps, as we will describe below; however, analysis was ongoing throughout the project. Writing a diary and memories encouraged us to be reflexive and analytical during data collection. An increasing awareness about the topic emerged as we continued to write in our diaries and reflect on our memories. As we wrote, we became aware that telephony played a central role in our lives, indeed as an extension of our embodied and imagined selves. Following data collection, we transcribed the diary to computerized text, which created the first step enabling us to review the whole content of the telephone diary. We then sent diaries, memories, and photographs to each other so we could analyse each other's data. We each used a thematic approach to analyse the data and sought to identify emergent themes and patterns and any potential non-patterns across the data set (Bryant & Livholts, 2007). Thereafter, we sent our key findings to each other and then discussed and jointly interpreted the emergence of the gendered spatiality of telephony.

Given that autoethnography challenges the subject-object relationship, it was vital that we situated ourselves as researchers and researched and agreed upon the applied practices of data collection to sustain accountability to the data and analysis (see also, Leavy, 2009; Richardson, 2000). As stated above, transcribing our diaries and reading and making preliminary reflective comments on each other's diaries, memories, and photographs was followed by joint dialogical analysis. Due to our different backgrounds as academics and different geographical locations, the collaboration benefited from interdisciplinarity and produced complex understandings. We used “validity checkpoints” (Leavy, 2009, p.19) to stop at various points throughout data collection and analysis to discuss our writing, photography, and analysis and to examine how our personal stories were shaped and could be interpreted theoretically. Ellis (2004) argued that by connecting personal stories with societal structures, autoethnography makes visible power relations and evokes agency and change among both participants and readers. Inherent to autoethnography as an approach is the relationship between the academic text and reader, and the impact that the text may make. It is difficult for us to foresee the response from readers, but we hope that this article will encourage similar forms of inquiry among other scholars.

Finally, we wish to address the ethics of research and the limitations and dilemmas of the methodological design. Even though autoethnographic research does not require ethical approval by our respective universities, this does not mean that autoethnography does not raise ethical issues or have unintended consequences. As Roth (2009) argued, auto/ethnography refers to the writing of the self “but because the Self exists in relation to the world … and because the human relation is inherently ethical, there are inherent ethical questions where the Other may come to be harmed as much as the Self” (p. 1). Some of our documented situations involved sensitive information both in relation to work and our friends and family. We did not have consent from individuals to report some of the data that emerged during telephone calls, and thus where we deemed it was sensitive or potentially harmful, we chose not to use this material. Tamas (2011) reminds us that “calculating the harm versus the benefits of telling stories seems equally futile: there are too many variables” (p. 262). Nevertheless, we made decisions as responsibly as possible knowing that we “are never ethically home free: the best we get is endless questioning” (p. 262).

We must also acknowledge that our data, collected from our lives, is limited to our life situations and has meaning in the context of our privileged lives. Pease (2012) discussed how stating positionality and even demonstrating reflexivity does not take away privilege. Another dilemma associated with the research design is that some representatives of memory work (Haug, 2008) have argued for the collective form of the method with a group of at least five participants to strengthen the variety of data and analytical process and to reduce vulnerability of single authorship. However, the problems encountered by the collective approach have also been critiqued in terms of homogeneity, relations of power, and choice of topic (Onyx & Small, 2001). Widerberg (1995) and Kuhn (1995) have demonstrated that memory work constitutes valuable grounds for analysis even by a single author. To address these limitations and dilemmas we used multiple methods to allow us to work experimentally and reflexively in a variety of spaces and time dimensions. This variety includes, for example, writing memories in the third person and using the camera to watch our telephone lives at a distance. We used a similar collaborative method and analytical process as that used in memory work when carried out with groups. We undertook individual writing and reading and then analyzed our own data, following which we proceeded to analyse each other's data. The final steps involved discussion and agreement on key emergent themes. In the following section, we draw upon our data to explore and theorize situated and contextualized experiences and practices of telephone use. Our aim is to show how these methodological choices bring forth the kinds of rich data that is lacking in quantitative analyses and traditional qualitative accounts. We argue that our methodological choices contextualize and give meaning to telephony and the gendering of space.

Gender and Telephony: Physicality, Emotions, and Relocations

In this article, we argue that researchers are challenged to develop methodological tools to critically examine the complex and lived experiences of gender and telephony. Our findings indicate that placement of the telephone and the phone holder's awareness of the physicality of the telephone both genders space and creates emotional spaces (see Livholts & Bryant, in press). An important departure has been to acknowledge embodied and situated telephone use and to explore the shaping of social relations and emotions across spaces. Indeed, Ahmed's (2004) theorisation of how emotion “sticks” to certain bodies in specific contexts and creates movements and directions for subjects is helpful for critical examination of how human interaction with telephony stretches beyond placement at the same time as location plays a key role for emotions and memories. For example, our findings show that the question “Where are you?” (Garcia-Montes et al., 2006) paved the way for identifying physical and embodied location but was always simultaneously a result of emotions that detached or attached to our selves in relation to embodied others, and thus infused relocation through alternative sights.

We used mobile phones more often than landlines. Landlines were sometimes used at work and at home; however, landlines had different functions depending on whether cordless technology was available. Cordless phones at home allowed movement to different rooms, while the office phone was attached to and attached the user to, its location. Livholts and Bryant (in press) have shown that the telephone is a hybrid meeting place of various intersecting relations of gender and generation, family relations, and friendship, as well as caring and work. Usage demonstrated the phone as a constant in one's life, associated with gauging and responding to emotion via text messages and, especially, voice. Telephone use involved detecting, identifying, checking, and responding to emotions, as well as the person at the other end of the receiver responding to our emotions. Indeed, a close reading of the material pointed towards the crucial impact of emotions for the construction of gendered spatialities, including how such emotions transgressed material and imagined places and spaces to allow agency, resistance, and transformation. As feminist scholars have identified, emotions are a field of critical study that transgresses these bounded concepts and, at the same time, emotions occur in the context of power, inequality, resistance, and agency (see Gorton, 2007). Ahmed (2004) has also drawn attention to how studying emotions requires analytical awareness of conceptual dynamics, since people do not have the same relationship to a particular emotion and emotions regain meaning through cultural and societal values and practices. She reminds her readers to “remember the ‘press’ in an impression” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 6) and to theorise the ways in which emotions “stick” to certain bodies and create direction, movements, and change in people's lives. Showing emotion or suppressing emotion is in itself a sign of gendered and other power relations vital to processes of exclusion and inclusion. From such a perspective emotions can be understood as a form of action that promotes specific desired social values.

Analysing our telephone lives paved the way for complex understandings of how telephone use transcended gender and space through multiple levels of interaction, including the personal, social, and political. We discerned three, partly-overlapping themes of location and unlocation. The first was the location of the project itself, shaped as a collaborative project between us and situated in Northern and Southern peripheral spaces. The second was the placement and physicality of the telephone itself as an artefact and as a transgression of our embodied selves. The third was related to the question of being unexpectedly located by someone via the telephone and the agency of dislocation as a form of resistance to gender inequality.

Peripheral Geographical Location

An important aspect of our autoethnographic inquiry was interpretations of gender and telephony through the landscape locations of the project. The collaborative project design, with one of us living and working in Sweden and the other in Australia, created working sites of peripheral locations. Our diaries, memories, and photographs provided documentation of our everyday life in our homes, at work, outdoors, and during transition like travelling. Also, particular sights that we often visited or lived nearby illustrated the materiality and spatiality of the places we inhabited. For example, the view of greenish ocean water that stretched from the shoreline to what occurred as indefinite locations beyond that, the frozen surface of an inland lake covered with snow that transformed open water, and the separation of mainland from island to a connective surface for human bodies to transfer themselves across. These were landscape scenes of geographical locations that grounded us and served as a base for connectivity to each other but also to distant family members and friends across space. On another level, our geographical locations in Sweden and Australia in a world perspective are not part of the metropole, but the periphery, and the autoethnographic design placed us in the situation often ascribed to those who are the subject of the study (see Connell, 2007).

The photograph below illustrates the geographical landscape from which one of us received a phone call, and thus shows the site of geographical situatedness. Indeed, our findings show the importance of geographical situatedness and how the disconnection that sometimes occurs between subjects and physical location is embedded in a wider context of what Moss (2006) has called emotional landscape and that Ahmed (2004) has problematized as a question of emotion that “sticks” to bodies at particular situations and locations, thus creating movements in a specific direction. In other words, telephony and communication is always performed from somewhere and the self that inhabits this location is affected by an environment of dislocation. A phone call, particularly long distance calls, but also being at a distance from our children and trying to guide them or care for their well-being, was emotionally grounded in loving and caring acts where we would not only hear but see them while communicating. As the diary shows, for one of us telephone life included regular “connectivity calls” across vast geographical distance, often at night. Thus, placement of the telephone itself was always close to the bed at night and made it possible to move towards a distant child as a loving and caring act. Photography provided a lens through which the snow and coldness of the Swedish landscape showed the home and the location of the phone holder.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Photograph of a Swedish landscape.

Conclusion

In this study, we argue that use of the telephone occurs as gendered but also genders space. By using diaries, memory work, and photography to design a collaborative autoethnography it was possible to analyse the complex life and power of emotions and theorise the gendered spatiality of telephony. Our methodological design enabled reflexive analytical thinking and the opportunity to capture everyday emotions. These integrated methods generated the conceptualization of the telephone as a hybrid meeting place where intersecting relations of gender, family and friendship, work, and home transgress movement between spaces. These spaces are also emotional spaces. We show how a variety of emotions are expressed and suppressed depending on where the call is received or made, who is calling, what the subject of the talk is, and how it is mediated.

We found that the landscape location and geographical situatedness of our embodied selves and the collaborative project were part of complex meaning making in transgression of gendered space. The landscape views that surrounded our homes produced emotions through peripheral location, and the medium of the telephone allowed us to move towards other people (Ahmed, 2004). The placement of the telephone and its physical presence was often located close to us in the home, in the office, and in our handbags. This represented the ways in which the phone was intricately woven into our daily lives to become a constant presence. Thus, emotional landscapes of gendered spatiality of telephony hybridised physical, embodied movements, perception, and imagination. This constant presence brought security but also unexpected and unwanted interactions and emotions. For example, receiving a call from a person not seen for a long time evoked troubling memories of the past and feelings of uneasiness; at the same time, distance in time and space in the present allowed resistance. From previous research and our documentation of telephone use, we identified that the recurring key question “Where are you?” geographically situates the phone holder and the caller. It shapes spatiality of telephony as an emotional landscape as we are called back to physical locations and memories of particular occasions and landscapes. Our memories connect us to imagined places, whether they are rooms in a house or outdoor locations. Moments and the way they are bound with physical location and emotions, as Moss (2006) has suggested, are also potentially sites for seeing life circumstances in a new way and for agency.

Our review of the research on the gendering of space and gender and the telephone showed the limited use of methodologies beyond quantitative or interview data, and we also found a lack of research that applied a reflexive and situated approach. In this context, we wish to comment on some aspects of the strengths and limitations of the design of our methodology. The first is that different forms of data collection created a rich and varied material of voices, relations, places, and landscapes. Use of photography helped us to visualise geographical space and our location at a particular moment in time. Images showed detachment and geographical distance and recalled emotions related to being disconnected. However, the experience of being under surveillance was challenging; thus, we were scrutinized by the camera with our homes and workplaces exposed to a documenting eye. Thus, issues of power and control, subordination and agency, are intimately intertwined with methodological design. As researchers interested in this field of study, we see great potential in, but also cautiousness in relation to, future use of photography involving research participants. An important aspect is also the demanding task that gathering textual and visual data involved; in other words, the methodological design involved hard work both in relation to time and emotions.

The textual methodologies were chosen to allow us to use different forms of writing. Memories allowed retrospective glimpses of important situations and relations and showed how emotions are linked with time, space, and locations. The diary included data over time, unlike photography and memory where we placed particular emphasis on certain events and situations. Using third person for the purpose of writing memory work and first person when writing the diary, created possibilities for different ways of seeing a situation, which sometimes would emerge to us as an image by the way it mediated details about a place, a storyline, and emotions. The diary was useful in documenting context for telephone use, that is, the rhythm and wide range of telephone use, emotions, and situations. Both diary writing and memory work created data of the mundane and, particularly the diary, produced a rather detailed documentation of our lives during the hours we wrote.

Beyond the challenges of seeing the contextualised and fragmented images of our working and everyday lives, we experienced the methodology as empowering. It provided new knowledge to act on and showed resistance and agency throughout normative and subordinating patterns of hard work for us as women. For example, as women in the workplace the telephone engaged us in caring despite whatever tasks we were currently undertaking, thereby creating an emotional engagement that alters the space we occupy. However, the telephone also allowed for theorising our own dislocation in time and space, hiding our embodied selves through communicating via voice or text.

Considering the transformative expressions of the telephone as an artefact, and its changing and multiple functions, we think that there is a great need for challenging the extensive use of established traditional methodologies to allow theorising about the spatiality of telephony. Indeed, writing and visualising telephone lives make it possible to trace the transformations of human communication featured by unlocation, which is a good starting point for new and innovative explorations beyond the topics that we have explored.