Reciprocal Meaning-Making in Feminist Fieldwork
K. Rhoades
Confessions of a Collaborator: Reciprocal Meaning-Making in Feminist Fieldwork
Katherine Ann Rhoades
University of Wisconsin Madison
Collaboration is a recurrent theme in the body of scholarship devoted to feminist research practices. In this burgeoning literature, collaboration often is described as a professionally productive and personally satisfying interaction involving two or more peers who are jointly pursuing a research project.[1] Of primary concern in this paper, however, is the use of collaboration as a strategy for engaging research participants more fully within feminist qualitative research processes.
While many feminist researchers applaud the merits of collaboration as an effective means of enhancing research subjects' participation, few examine its full definitional range which includes "cooperating with the enemy". Juxtaposing these disparate meanings, one which implies a collegial cooperation and the other a more sinister sharing, lifts the veil shielding collaboration's assumed innocence. Further, it points to some of the potential tensions collaboration may infuse into research relationships which are inevitably fraught with shifting power dynamics. In this paper I explore aspects of these tensions by relating some of the major themes which have evolved within feminist research traditions to recent discussions about the collaborative possibilities and limits of feminist ethnography. Then, drawing on a research model I developed for a feminist ethnography I conducted with a diverse group of women's studies students at a large, midwestern, public university, I reflect on various meanings collaboration may bring to feminist research projects.[2]
Following Van Maanen (1988) I am posing this as a confessional tale because I frame my analysis with personal reflections arising from my own recent journey in the field and because I concentrate on dynamics of the fieldwork process rather than its empirical findings. This choice may intensify my vulnerability, because as Foucault argues, the confession is a "ritual of discourse in which a person tells whatever it is most difficult to tell to another person who ultimately will judge, punish, forgive, console, and/or reconcile the confessor" (1990, 61). It is not surprising then that a confession often is "an artifice with an eye to winning a reader's empathy if not sympathy" (Wolf 1992, 54-55). As I begin this tale, I wish to emphasize that I am not interested in arousing sympathy for a particular point of view. Rather, I intend to trouble some assumptions about collaborative enterprises in an effort to add to conversations about feminist research and its continued progress on a tangled path toward more equitable practices.
From its inception feminist research methodology[3] has attempted to bring women from the shadows to the center of social science research (Cf. Stanley and Wise 1983a and 1983b, Bowles and Duelli Klein 1983, Mies 1983, Roberts 1981, Personal Narratives Group 1989, Reinharz 1992)). Many of the earlier feminist critiques of social sciences also advocated an unproblematized corrective to male-controlled scientific inquiry as the following statement illustrates:
Feminism demonstrates without any possibility of doubt that the social sciences are sexist, biased, and rotten with patriarchal values. However, feminist social science can be truly scientific in its approach...[W]e can see and research the world as it truly is (Stanley and Wise 1983a, 12).
Slightly more than a decade later, widespread interdisciplinary critiques including those from the self-reflective or postmodernist movement in anthropology have interrupted the celebration of empirical truth-finding, feminist or otherwise.[4] Further, the apparent unity among women has been disrupted as gender is increasingly conceptualized as part of an interlocking relational system of identification inclusive of other socially constructed differences such as race, class, sexuality, and nationality. As a result, an illusory unity, based on a sense of "woman" as representing a stable category born of shared experiences, has been theoretically challenged as hopes for a universal "we" among diverse women have been dashed (Visweswaran 1988, Mohanty 1991). Viewing gender as a relational rather than an essential difference unsettles the ground upon which many early feminist research assumptions were planted.
Although understandings of what it means to do feminist research have changed in response to these shifts in theoretical terrain, several repetitive themes have emerged from over three decades of dialogue about these issues. The vast feminist literature concerned with research practice defines feminist research as grounded in the researcher's own subjective oppression, as characterized by an emphasis on lived experience and the significance of everyday life, and as politically committed to changing society and the oppression of women within it (Weiler 1988, 58). Although the specific ways these themes are expressed and implemented in particular research projects vary considerably, concerns for collaboration between the researcher and the researched often shape decisions about feminist research models as feminists continue to search for ways to engage in nonexploitive research which will have positive effects on women's lives (Wolf 1992).
Collaborative research tactics may range from asking research participants to generate hypotheses and identify who should be involved in the study, to giving feedback on survey instruments, to shaping or challenging interpretations, and/or engaging in the writing process or giving critiques of the final product. Regardless of the specific forms it may take, collaborative research between researcher and researched extends from an understanding that "social and individual change can be created by altering the role relations of the people involved in the research project" (Reinharz 1992, 181). This approach implies that an "egalitarian relation" between researcher and researched is achievable through negotiations instituted by the researcher. It suggests further that collaboration can mediate differences in social status and background, and give way to shared decision-making and mutual self-disclosure (Reinharz 1992, 181).
Challenges to the seemingly balanced equation between collaboration and egalitarian fieldwork relations are arising from feminist social scientists and from others who are pondering the many issues now troubling ethnographic practice.[5] Central to these challenges are the interrelated concerns that by studying our subjects we may also be exploiting them, and that by attempting to improve women's situations we may be imposing our own values (Wolf 1992). Wolf suggests that feminist anthropologists are aware of the difficulties involved in collaborative endeavors, perhaps more so than the postmodernists who so cheerfully encourage the idea. Mascia-Lees and her colleagues in their "feminist" response to "postmodernist" arguments lend support to Wolf's suggestion by registering the following complaint:
Our suspicion of the new ethnographer's desire for collaboration with the `other' stems not from any such refusal to enter into dialogue with that `other' but from our history and understanding of being appropriated and literally spoken for by the dominant, and from our consequent sympathetic identification with the subjects of anthropological study in this regard (1989, 21).
Mascia-Lees et.al. seem to disregard some of the overlapping similarities between postmodernist and feminist arguments which both are formulated with a watchful eye for the possibility of ethnographers appropriating the experiences of their informants. This abiding and I would argue warranted concern for appropriation often compounds the practical difficulties of implementing collaboration. Wolf, grasping the essence of the struggle, explains, beneath it all "we are talking about power--who has it, how it is used, and for what purposes" (133).
Judith Stacey echoes these concerns as she argues that because feminist researchers, like all other researchers, wield power over the researched, they do not produce "fully" feminist ethnographies (1988, 26).[6] She emphasizes fieldwork's intrusiveness and characterizes it as "exposing subjects to far greater danger and exploitation than do more positivist, abstract, and `masculinist' research methods" (24). Considering exploitation, betrayal, and inequality endemic to any ethnographic process she states, "The lives, loves, and tragedies that fieldwork informants share with a researcher are ultimately data, grist for the ethnographic mill, a mill that has truly grinding power" (23). She concludes that although there cannot be a "fully" feminist ethnography, there can be (and are) cultural accounts that are enhanced by feminist perspectives (26). Moreover, she advocates the "uneasy fusion of feminist and critical ethnographic consciousness" to open possibilities for cultural accounts that "however partial and idiosyncratic, can achieve the contextuality, depth, and nuance" that she considers unattainable through "less dangerous, but more remote research methods" (26).
A compelling question emerges from Stacey's concern for researchers wielding power over the researched: Is feminist ethnography yet another clouded research vision that embodies the discursive power of some women over others? Marnia Lazreg offers one critical assessment of some of the issues surrounding this question (1990). Writing about Western feminists' research accounts of Algerian women, Lazreg argues that Western academic feminists who have incorporated post-structuralist ethnographic approaches and who have participated in the hegemonic discourses of the academy, have, in effect, erased the voices of the women whose stories they wanted to tell. She acknowledges that Western academic feminism has "brought a breath of fresh air into social science discourse on women and held out the promise of a more even-handed, less-biased practice research" (331). On the other hand, she indicts Western feminists for committing violence through their claims to authority to gaze upon and write about female Algerian others. She concludes that Western gynocentrism that claims the power to interpret the lived reality of Algerian women has led to the "essentialism of otherhood" (338). Lazreg casts doubt about whether anyone ever can mediate the inherent power in the research relationship without violating the "other." This is undoubtedly a central concern for collaborative feminist research projects, including my own.
My dissertation data was collected over a one and one-half year period primarily from interviews with thirty-six women's studies majors, participant observations in classrooms and less structured settings, and informal and formal documents including student journals. The overarching questions which informed my entry into the field arose from my interest in identification politics or why some women choose to identify with women's studies and how they describe the meanings this identification brings to their personal, social, and academic lives. Because the interview sequence is most illustrative of my attempts to implement collaborative strategies into this project, I will limit this discussion to describing that process.
I emphasized collaboration in the interview sequence in several ways. Initially I gave each potential interviewee a one page statement describing the project and detailing the scope of their participation in it. Then, prior to the first interview, I explained to each student who agreed to participate that I wanted to learn as much as possible about how she decided to major in women's studies and what differences that decision had made in her academic, personal, and social life. I explained that because I considered it important to learn about her experiences from her own point of view, I wanted her to bring to the interview questions that I should ask. By asking the students to generate the questions, I reasoned that I would be less apt to impose my particular framework on their expressions of meaning. I audiotaped the interviews which lasted from one to one and one-half hours and after transcribing them word-for-word from the tapes, I gave each student a copy of the transcript. After we each had an opportunity to read and respond to the transcript, we met for a follow-up interview to discuss meanings and themes, and to clarify any misunderstandings or contradictions.[7]
These follow-up interactions designed to negotiate reciprocal meaning-making rarely yielded more than spirited agreement. Occasionally, students would minimally embellish my interpretations or suggest that I substitute one word for another, but they never contested my analyses. This pattern appears consistent with at least some other researchers who have utilized similar strategies (for example, see Jacobson 1991 and Lather 1991). How can I account for this, and what insights might such an accounting offer to understandings of the role of collaboration in feminist ethnographies?
First, the participants in my research and I are members of a similar feminist narrative community. Most of them shared my investments in the outcomes of the research because they were meaningful to them in terms of their own lives and in terms of the larger feminist community of which they are a part. On the surface these investments would appear to make these students prime candidates for collaboration. On the other hand, as Stacey (1988) suggests, because of their vested commitments these students represent the very research participants who may be at greater risk of being exploited.
Collaborative intentions on the part of the researcher cannot assure equality in research relationships because the researcher neither has all nor none of the power (Wolf 1992). Wolf elaborates this understanding well by explaining that those who "carry the culture and those who desperately want to understand it may participate in a minuet of unspoken negotiations that totally reverses the balance of power" (134). This suggests that the researcher/researched relationship, inevitably influenced by unpredictable shifts in power, negotiation, and compromise, is not an innocent encounter in which the researcher possesses and wields an infinite arsenal of power.
In designing my research, I attempted to attend to some of these inherent power shifts in part by using a collaborative research model. I was unprepared for the outcome which on the surface seemed strangely smooth. One plausible explanation for this apparent harmony resides with the complex exchanges which occur between researcher and researched during a lengthy interview process. Myerhoff refers to the new creation constituted when two points of view are engaged in examining one life as an "ethno-person" or a third person who is born from the collusion between the interlocutor and the subject (1988, 281). Kaminsky suggests that Myerhoff's use of the word "collusion", meaning a secret agreement for fraudulent or treacherous purposes, instead of "collaboration" reveals her conflicted position regarding the norms of empiricism and the complexities of collaboration in challenging them (1992, 132).
These complexities haunt my continued engagement with my research collaborators.
This morning L. called from a nearby city wondering if I'd be doing any follow-up interviews over the holidays. She volunteered to help out and suggested that I interview a woman she met from another college. Since we last talked, she's lost a job, found a new one, and started looking at graduate schools for next fall. Could I help with applications?
In the afternoon I ran into J. and her lover as they were bounding across the mall area in front of the library. They were frenzied with excitement because graduation is but a few weeks away. They plan to travel cross-country after the ceremony. Would I have time to have a cup of coffee before they leave town?
When I returned home in the evening there was a message from S. on my answering machine. She said she wants to talk with me about expanding her senior thesis bibliography. She assured me that she remembered my preference for short, fat Charlie Brown Christmas trees, and she's saving the perfect one for me at the Christmas tree lot where she is working. Can I call back soon?
Regardless of whether these messages represent cries of the exploited, concerns from collaborators and/or echoes from "ethno-persons", they compel me to continue questioning how the boundaries of collaboration are negotiated, and to reconsider who reaps the benefits of such a process. Feminist ethnography, with collaboration at its core, opens possibilities to challenge structures of knowledge by eliciting multiple expressions of situated meanings. But in seeking greater representation from researched voices feminist ethnographers may be walking a fine line between collaboration and collusion.
Feminist researchers have heeded initial calls urging research for, by, and about women. Notions of collaboration suggest that this research must also be conducted with women. Given the complex nature of research relationships and the illusory assumption that women constitute a unified "we" this becomes a slippery encounter which begs continued dialogue about the possibilities of conducting research which is both beneficial and nonexploitive. Conversations about the multiple and at times contradictory roles of collaboration in this process must continue to enliven this dialogue.
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Notes
[1] Two recent examples which reflect this understanding are Janet Miller's Creating Spaces and Finding Voices: Teachers Collaborating for Empowerment (1990) which details the collaborative process she shared with five classroom teachers as they jointly analyzed the contexts and assumptions that influenced and framed their pedagogical practices, and Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose's article Strange Bedfellows: Feminist Collaboration (1993) which details their collaborative efforts as feminist scholars.
[2] Christina Zwarg argues that "feminism has become at once too large and too small for its compass" (1990, 161). Because of widespread ideological disunities, I prefer to speak of feminisms rather than feminism. While I generally agree with Linda Gordon's definition of feminism as "a critique of male supremacy, formed and offered in light of a will to change it, which in turn assumes a conviction that it is changeable" (Dolan 1991, 3), I qualify my agreement by suggesting that there are many ways of feminist redress which may arise from differing ideological interpretations and political strategies.
[3] Here I am thinking beyond techniques of gathering data and use methodology to mean "the theory and analysis of how research should or does proceed" (Harding 1987, 3).
[4] I am not suggesting that these movements are separate or homogeneous, as there is much cross-fertilization between postmodernism and feminisms. Following Lather (1991, 4), in referring to postmodernism I mean the larger cultural shifts of a post-industrial, post-colonial era. However, I am also referring to their theoretical effects particularly within the field of anthropology. For two of the most influential explications of the postmodern movements in anthropology see Marcus and Fischer's Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (1986) and Clifford and Marcus' Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). While this movement has centered more on the complexities and contradictions in writing rather than practicing ethnography, its concern with ethnographic authority and subject representation is at least tangentially related to notions of collaboration in the field. See Mascia-Lees et. al. (1989), Stacey (1988), Abu-Lughod (1990) and Wolf (1992) for discussions of the intersections and conflicts between postmodernism and feminisms as they relate to ethnographic practices.
[5] These groups are by no means mutually exclusive.
[6] It is interesting that Stacey's 1988 article, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" was followed two years later by Abu-Lughod's (1990) which used the same title. However, Abu-Lughod did not refer to Stacey's earlier work. What seems most curious about this coincidence is that in their identical titles they primarily questioned the possibility of feminist ethnography existing as a category, rather than questioning what that category might include.
[7] Wolf (1992, 121) suggests that "some young feminist ethnographers" give copies of their written work to their informants. It is curious that she links this practice to age as if this particular collaborative act is restricted to the young.