A RT I C L E 639Interviews as encounters: issues of sexuality and reflexivity when men interview men about commercial same sex relations a b s t r a c t Few qualitative sociologists have considered how men who have sex with men hold diverse understandings of sexuality and how these matter in research encounters, especially as it regards 'touchy' interview topics such as intimacy, intercourse and men's bodies. Drawing from transcripts and field notes concerning my experiences of interviewing 30 male-for-male internet escorts in Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto (Canada), Houston and New York (USA), as well as London (England), I analyse moments where, as the interviewer, I was sexualized by respondents. A first question was often posed to me at the start of interviews: 'are you gay?' The 'are you gay?' question not only seeks out a singular identity declaration but also flips over established researcherrespondent roles, indicating that the reflexivity of the respondent is as important as the reflexivity of the researcher in shaping the conversation to come. My analysis demonstrates why it is important to consider the impact of researcher bodies and speech acts during interviews. Arguing that there are specificities of talk and gesture concerning queer sexualities that researchers must be aware of during interviews, I focus on how my responses to respondent propositions and sexualization shaped and modified the meanings produced through the research encounter.k e y w o r d s : interaction, interviewing, masculinities, men, sexualities
Contributing to debates about cultural representations of prisons and prisoners, as well as exploring the crossover between the dark tourism literature and cultural criminology, this article reflects on how penal museums in the province of Ontario, Canada, create and communicate meaning as it regards imprisonment and punishment. Drawing from field notes made after observations at penal museums located in central and eastern Ontario cities and towns, we contend that penal museum relics offer a polysemy of meaning to viewers, as critical, indifferent and punitive interpretations are possible. Based on analysis of tour guide narratives as well as penal relics, we explore how the process of memorialization in many of these museums is organized around the idea of penal reform, which positions imprisonment and punishment as remnants of the past and introduces a social distance between the punished and the penal spectator.
In this article, we examine the spatial regulation of homeless people by National Capital Commission (NCC) conservation officers in Canada's capital city, Ottawa. We explore NCC officer practices by analyzing occurrence reports obtained through access to information (ATI) requests and interview transcripts. We contend that policing of NCC parks is organized according to a logic of dispersal. Dispersal policing aims to preserve an aesthetic for public consumption and ceremonial nationalism, entails specific temporalities, and is actuated through a public/private policing network. We argue that "dispersal" more accurately conceptualizes the spatial regulation in this case compared with alternative concepts (ie banishment) and thus supplements existing typologies of spatial regulation. We conclude with a discussion of these typologies and of the worth of ATI for future research on urban policing and regulation.
This article examines the mutability of symbolic sanctionsor stigmas-applied to sex industry work by examining newspaper narratives in one medium-sized Canadian city over two time periods: 1870-1910 and 1980-2004. The article's purpose is first to get a sense of what the authors call the ecology of stigmas-their relation to the temporal and spatial contexts in which they are produced-and second to give needed historical context to them and the representational tropes that currently dominate media, policy, and academic discussions about prostitution. This article finds significant continuities and discontinuities between media representations during the two study periods. In particular, prostitution stigmas are constituted out of cross-articulations of narratives around containment, culpability, and contagion across the twentieth century, but the ideational contents and empirical referents of these narratives reflect the intersection of sex industry contexts with historically specific concerns around gender, sexuality, race, and social status. Stigmas of the sex industry, rather than being constant, reveal themselves to be both deeply ecological and accommodating to a range of concerns about female sexuality and normative behavior that are sensitive to historical time.
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