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The politics and ethics of ethnography

  
 
Disco is My Class War
06:20 / 04.08.05
I am about to begin designing the direction of the ethnographical section of my PhD research. I've done some very basic ethnographical research, a long time ago and at an undergraduate level where I wasn't required to apply for ethics approval, etc. I remember that I ended up fucking it up quite a lot, partially because ethnography is such an immense administrative nightmare.

Anyhow, the research (or part of it) is this: I'm writing about how metaphors of transnational geography get used to talk about gender crossing or gender transgression. Ie, transgender is referred to as 'crossing the border' or 'inhabiting a borderlands' a lot. I want to compare and add to that by looking at the effects or the realities of literal trans border-crossing: for example, the large numbers of people who travel to other countries to access gender reassignment surgeries. In Australia, a lot of people travel to Thailand. Thailand is actually a 'mecca' of gender reassignment surgery. And oddly enough, it seems that in the Middle East and parts of Europe, Iran plays the same role. So part of the thesis research will involve exploring the postcolonial and political economies of all this travel.

Anyhow, back to the ethnography: I want to talk to transpeople in Australia, and possibly anywhere, who have travelled to access GRS, and why they did it, and how. I'm particularly interested in finding out how the neocoloniality of this stuff works (and if there is a neocolonialism at work): how people who travel to a different country for GRS imagine the place they're 'tranformed' in, and how that imagining relates to their experience of gender transition, how they account for it or narrativise it.

There's already a rich source of this material in fiction (has anyone read Conundrum, by Jan Morris?) but I also think this stuff could be really well documented ethnographically.

So I have two questions, apart from wanting to throw the field open for feedback on this project from my favourite eggheaded Barbelites. Has anyone done any ethnographical research? What constraints/possibilities did you encounter? What were the difficulties? How did you negotiate building trust with your 'informants' and what did you do to ensure that your research was politically sound? How did you negotiate your role as 'the researcher'?

The second question relates to reading materials.
My scope of reading matter around this is pretty limited so far, partially because it's all new and I haven't begun yet, and partially because ethnography is not something I've read about since 1999 or so. I have an article called "Postmodern Ethnography", some Sarah Thornton,
and have read lots of very out-of-date Chicago School stuff on the subject. I'm pretty heavily influenced by Bourdieu but want to be more subtle than that. Does anyone have any suggestions for reading material to flesh out a research methodology?

Thanks in advance!
 
 
modern maenad
11:47 / 05.08.05
Mister Disco - this just sounds like wonderful research. I'm not an ethnographer myself, more humble empirical sociologist, but am sure we can find some profitable overlap. The timing of your post is fantastically peculiar as just this week I have returned to my own PhD (which has been sitting in dusty boxes for several years due to now-resolved health probs) and have decided to begin with my methods/methodology section. Just to contextualise and bring up to speed, I was in the final writing up stages of my thesis when my health crumbled, and had already done all my interviews, data anlysis, coding etc. All (?!?!) I have to do now is finish the writing up (ha ha). Anyhows, back to your situation, the way I was hoping we could help one another is that my first self-appointed task is a re-review of social science methods/methodolgy literature, with a special focus on ethics. My own research looks at the gender skew amongst animal rights activists/veggies/vegans, and in light of this I interviewed women activists across the age/geographical/activism range. This is clearly different to your own focus, but I can see some parallels in terms of issues of sensitivity, intergrity, ethics. I have recently read a friends thesis (looking at sexual orientation categories through interveiws with people in mixed orientation relationships) and would highly recommend the methods/methodology chapter. He writes really well, is also influenced by Bourdieu and engages with a number of key issues such as the political/ethical dimensions of reserach, research/interviews as a potentially transformative process, the pursuit of nonhierarchial knoweldge. I can send you the link, or email the chapter as an attachment. Have you looked at any of the writing in the feminist research methodology camp? If my memory serves me well Liz Stanley and Sue Wise shook things up in the early 1980's with their book 'Breaking Out' which rejected traditional positive research methods(ology) and claimed that for research to be true to feminist principles/practice it needed to engage in new episemologies and rethink the whole researcher/researched relationship. Since then the field has exploded and there's been a ton published. I'm off to the library next week, perhaps we could swap some notes soon after?
 
 
*
19:44 / 05.08.05
If you've not read Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork by George W. Stocking, I recommend it. It's pretty basic; you may have used it in a course. But it was illuminating to me to read critical essays which include the journals, field notes, and private correspondence of ethnographers through history.

Unfortunately my concentration is archaeology so I can't help you very much. But I wish you luck, and I'm excited by your project. I'd love to read your finished work.
 
 
sleazenation
21:37 / 05.08.05
I dunno Mister Disco, to my mind you seem to have focused on ethnography to the exclusion of the more obvious reasons that people might travel overseas for transgender surgery: that it is easier to obtain in another country than it is at home, ie it obviates the checks and balences that help ensure that people don't make potentially irreversible choices that they might regret...
 
 
Disco is My Class War
02:50 / 06.08.05
mm: I'd be very glad to swap notes, I'll be heading to the library sometime next week too! Your work sounds really interesting and so does that of your friend -- maybe you could message me the link?

... a number of key issues such as the political/ethical dimensions of research, research/interviews as a potentially transformative process, the pursuit of nonhierarchial knowledge...

Yeah, this will be really important. Partially, for me, it's a question of avoiding a too-easy theoretical conflation of my identity as trans with the assumption that this will automatically make the research politically progressive -- that a shared identity means I don't need to worry about the power relationships between researcher and subject.

Sleaze: getting around the inability to access surgeries for various reasons is one of the things I'm most interested in documenting. I think I forgot to mention it because it's the one reason for transnational gender-crossing that seems most obvious, as you pointed out. On the other hand, there are lots of other reasons: the standard of surgery in whatever country you're in, cost, etc. Part of the reason I'm doing this research is that many of my trans friends are strongly disinterested in going through the psychiatric process of assessment for GRS in Australia. And of course, there's my own situation: I was rejected by a gender clinic for a diagnosis of transsexualism on the basis that I was too politically active and wouldn't say nice things about the clinic publicly, derailing my plans for chest surgery. This clinic is the only way you can get approved for surgery in the state I live in and they have a total monopoly on treatment. (Long, protracted story there which I won't go into.) So Thailand, or more probably, the US, is actually a definite possibility for me to obtain chest surgery. Oddly, I was already drafting a thesis proposal on exactly this when the clinic drama happened: life imitating theory.

On the other hand, it seems important to place that in a context of transnational economies and transculturality/transnationality. Which is why I want to ask the other questions.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
08:19 / 06.08.05
Mr Disco,

It's a difficult question this, i'm not sure how or even if the ethnographical writing I've found useful will be relevant to your very interesting research. However notwithstanding my doubts I think that there are aspects of the work that might be useful. Both in terms of what constitutes local or universal knowledge, and because the Dumezil Nostradamus book can be understood through Foucault's saying it represented for him 'the freemasonic homosexuality of his youth...'

David Turnbull - Masons,Tricksters and Cartographers (routledge 2003) - 'Compartive Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge.

The works of Georges Dumezil - including the wonderful 'The Riddle of Nostradamus' referred to above.

What the work does is support the address of what constitutes knowledge as well as the political/ethical dimensions of research and scientific practice.

s
 
 
Disco is My Class War
02:00 / 07.08.05
Thanks for that! And thanks to sentimentity, too for the suggestion above.
 
  
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