The Implications of an Ethnographer’s Sexuality

Abstract

This article discusses the implications of an ethnographer's sexuality with regard to his fieldwork. Adopting a self-reflexive stance, the author discusses how his queer identity and the fear of repercussions against his intellectual and physical body affected his fieldwork. As a native Brazilian, he was still an outsider in the rural community in which he did his fieldwork. But more than his outsider status, his memories of growing up in the closet in Brazil informed some of his research choices and shaped his reactions to the experience of returning to the closet to conduct research in a community where machista attitudes, notions of queerness, and his own internalized homophobia positioned his queer self as an outsider. L ess than 2 weeks into my fieldwork, Dona Maria, an older woman who lived a block away, asked me if I were dating Zelia. Some younger women, she added, were saying that I could not be dating her because she was too old and there were younger, better looking women after me.I felt jolts of panic run through my body as I realized that a gossip chain, which I had been oblivious to, was moving at full speed. I also realized at that moment that I would have to dance around my sexual status-sexual orientation, sexual practices, and sexual desires-in the community for the rest of my stay. But the long-term implications of my sexual identity were barely forming in my mind when I answered Dona Maria, a response that would trouble me for the rest of my fieldwork and still troubles me almost a decade later.The beginning of an ethnographic project is always fraught with conflicting emotions: the excitement of being in the field, anxiety of entering the site, establishing relationships with informants, developing friendships, gaining a sense of place within the local dynamics, preparing for the departure, and mourning the separation. It is nerve-racking. Will I make it? Will I be able to establish meaningful rapport fundamental to conducting good fieldwork? Will I be able to be truthful and committed to my fieldwork and

Coming out and coming back: Rural gay migration and the city

“…This process places the research subject as an active participant not only in the research, but in the definition of the social location in which the research is produced. Moreover, following La Palestina's (2006) argument that the interviewer's real or perceived sexual orientation might impact data collection and interviewees' response, the interviewer "revealed" his queer identity to informants, both in the context of the interview and in response to direct questioning.…”

Ethics Beyond the IRB: An Introductory Essay

“…La Pastina wrestled with the decision of whether or not to correct research participants' assumption. On the one hand, La Pastina (2006) did not want to engage in what he terms "deception" by not disclosing his sexual identity to research participants, a decision that would force him back into a "closet" he had rejected after living in the United States for several years (pp. 726, 732).…”

“…While studying Brazilians' consumption of telenovelas-serialized soap operas-in a rural northeastern province, Antonio C. La Pastina (2006) began to realize that his ethical commitment to transparency generated unforeseen problems. His closeness to a woman research participant led others in the community to assume he was heterosexual.…”

Between Pleasure and Resistance: The Role of Substance Consumption in an Italian Working-Class Subculture

“…Such a contingency undeniably influenced the re-enacted voices and the silenced ones. In fact, the ethnographer's sexuality is not a neutral matter while doing fieldwork [55].…”