The Journal of Men’s Studies

In this introduction to the journal's special issue on Gender, Violence, and the Production of Knowledge we engage with the collected articles to expand conversations on embodiment and research. The issue brings together articles that reflect on gender, race, and violence throughout academic spaces—from teaching to tenure, from field sites to job talks. They contribute to ongoing conversations that interrogate embodied experiences not only in the field but also within the university more generally, including but not limited to experiences of harassment. In short, they exemplify, complicate, and go beyond what we argued in our 2019 book: Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research. When read together, the pieces drive forward inseparable conversations on race, gender, and the academy; competency, risk, and pleasure in the field; and embodiment, the aesthetics of resilience, and resistance. Collectively, the articles underscore precisely why attending to embodiment—its pains, its pleasures, its histories and silences—in the field as well as institutional academic spaces is so crucial for the wellbeing of scholars and for the production of transformative knowledge.

The author incorporates her creative writing to share her untold experience of what Carole J. Sheffield would identify as sexual terrorism. She then engages in a candid dialogue with co-editor Patricia Richards, demonstrating the power of conversation as a feminist method. Inspired by their feminist imagination, they explore ways to construct meaning and produce knowledge beyond conventional, mainstream frameworks in sociology. In this intellectual praxis, they explore themes such as the aesthetics of resilience, poetry and creativity, non-mainstream epistemologies across disciplines (including but not limited to Anzaldúa’s theorizing on el corazón con razón and Fals Borda’s sentipensante sociology), authenticity and intellectual vulnerability.

This article is a poetic narrative in the spirit of resistance. It is based on an experience of sexual harassment I had at a dentist’s office in Antigua, Guatemala while conducting ethnographic research. I share an autoethnography, which is analyzed through feminist and historical lenses to highlight how the colonial patriarchal system and its coloniality of power continue to provide fertile ground for everyday forms of sexual harassment in Guatemala. In addition, I explore how power relations are malleable, dynamic, and even unpredictable depending on the bodies we inhabit as researchers. This is an invitation to look within and expand our discussions about the implications of experiencing sexual harassment while conducting research whether we are “in” or “out” of the field. Acknowledging these complexities is crucial to our searches for decolonial practices within the field of ethnography and within the process of academic knowledge production.

Following emerging sociological critiques of hegemonic femininities and calls for embodied research that troubles long standing assumptions about academia as a “safe haven,” this essay provides critical reflections on quotidian forms of gendered racism and vigilantism in the classroom. Specifically, I draw on undergraduate student engagement with “Cat Person,” a short story about a “bad date” that was published in the New Yorker in 2017 and is now considered essential reading for the #MeToo era. By bringing pop culture artifacts and autoethnographic reflections into conversation with what philosopher Barbara Applebaum refers to as the “pedagogical practice of comforting discomfort,” I examine forms of Karenism that emerge in higher education classrooms, particularly for women of color faculty. I argue that in an institutional context where class-privileged white women most readily access narratives about violability and fragility, they are better positioned to summon pedagogical forms of comforting and care.

Qualitative methods training in sociology often warns of the dangers of sex in fieldwork and discounts the power of the erotic for knowledge production. This essay makes a case for a deeper engagement with the erotic in qualitative research. The erotic is an ineffable energy that connects us to one another on a sensual, spiritual, and political plane. Despite its scope, the erotic is typically reduced to sexual intimacy. This limitation maintains the idea that all erotic encounters during ethnographic research are sexual and potentially harmful, discounting the possibilities of pleasure and mutual exchange. Through a meditation on key eroticized moments from ethnographic research for various projects, the author examines how an embrace of erotic ethnography can produce more ethical, mindful, and human-centered approaches to doing qualitative research. A deeper engagement with the erotic creates greater opportunity for mutual exchange and reduces instances of exploitation and extraction during ethnographic research.

Stereotypical portrayals of the academy depict a progressive and inclusive institution, particularly in the social sciences, disciplines that engage with social and political topics including inequality. This article, however, details the extent to which the formal structures and informal culture of academic social science continue to reflect men’s bodies and lived experiences. Specifically, I draw on autoethnographic observations and personal reflections to demonstrate the valorization of extreme bodily strength and stamina, principal components of contemporary masculinity seemingly at odds with the scholarly endeavors of the ivory tower. Additionally, I reflect on the harms proliferated in this environment including physical, emotional, and economic violence; trauma; and the persistence of macro-level patterns of inequality.

In this article, I show how my non-binary embodiment, along with regularly being misgendered, shapes the questions I ask, the research I conduct, the data I can gather, how I understand my research and data, and the knowledge I produce. Through this interrogation of my body in relation to research methods and epistemologies, I illuminate how trans and non-binary scholars disrupt the cisnormative assumptions of ethnographic fieldwork, of sociology, and of academia. These disruptions generate queer forms of knowledge production that center trans and non-binary experiences and perspectives and that move us toward thinking anew about researchers, embodiment, and methods, and their epistemological effects.