The Instructor’s Perspective: A View
from the Top
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"We all led fictional
lives in the very moments we faced one another, even when the presence
of the others who remained out of sight was only imagined."
Dan Rose, 1987
Black American Street Life
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The
Questions
When
Dan Rose says that we all lead fictional lives, he is alluding to both the
primary difficulty in traditional ethnography and the primary strength of
postmodern ethnography. If identity is this slippery thing, if it is
always already a performance, as Judith Butler would say, then those
multiple performances don't undermine the real. They are the real --
fragmented, slippery, constantly shifting.
I could hardly be
labeled "queer" under traditional methods of categorization – where queer
is viewed in opposition to normal, much as gay is viewed in opposition
to straight. I am an Anglo heterosexual male from a Southern U.S.,
middle-class suburban background, fast approaching middle-age. I’ve
assimilated to American Broadcast English, having erased, as best as I
can, all traces of a Southern drawl during my 15 year transplantation to
New England and then to the Midwest. I live with my wife and son in an
economical condominium in a traditional, upper-middle-class neighborhood
and commute in a mid-priced sedan to my job as a tenure-track college
professor. While my material body may be marked by a few small signs of
Otherness (a few piercings, a tattoo, Doc Martins), and my virtual body
may be marked by expressions of subaltern politics and queer theory, I
perform in the classroom with the inescapable authority of white male heterosexual
middle-class privilege.
As a college professor of e-composition
in suburban Detroit, I inevitably build
my courses
around issues of diversity and Otherness. Students are asked to read about
issues involving relations of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and
other markers of difference and Otherness. They are asked to explore their
own communities and share their own experiences about encountering
difference or representing Otherness.
This
schism between privilege and pedagogy creates an inevitable contradiction
in the classroom. How can I justify inviting students into open dialogue
about difference from my own safe position of privilege? Then again, how
"safe" is my position, in a context where I advocate that race, gender,
and sexual orientation are social constructions?
This narrative
describes my own participation in a larger project about the transgendered and transgressive student in the writing classroom -- as a
mentor for Lindsey who embarked on
her own reflexive examination of transgendered identity. As the
instructor, what are my own concerns about ethics and auto-ethnography?
About the risks of reflexive writing? About gender identity, sexual
politics, and concern for the welfare of students who walk that thin
line between hazardous visibility and silent safety. As Michael Bronski (1998) points
out, "The line between perceived tolerance and incipient violence [is]
often shifting, and the need to be mindful of the code [is] important. To
overstep or misperceive the line could lead to harassment or physical
attack" (p. 55). What are my own ethical obligations when students engage
in and share self-reflexive research on sexual identity that transgresses
community norms?
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Background
For the Winter of
2002, as a relatively new tenure-track faculty member at Oakland
University in Rochester, Michigan, I was asked to teach a newly developed,
upper-level course in Rhetoric titled "Advanced Writing: Ethnography."
This would be the first time the course had run, having recently been
approved by the university’s Committee on Instruction. The university
catalogue describes the course as "development of analytic and
collaborative writing skills in the context of ethnographic study –
analytical description and examination of a cultural setting, a
subculture, or a cultural event."
I would emphasize in this particular
course the ethnographic notion of subverting what is normal by "making the
strange familiar and the familiar strange" in an attempt to show students
the relationship between perspective, knowledge, and judgment.
In my
own background, ethnography had been a steadily growing interest since my
experiences after my B.A. as a teacher in a psychiatric hospital and as a
juvenile probation officer in Louisiana -- both being experiences that
raised concerns for me over power dynamics among individuals within
institutional settings and the influences of such differences as race and
class, for example, on those dynamics. My training and background in
ethnography came through the field of composition and literacy studies,
which can be quite a bit less formal (and rely less on strict coding and
quantitative analysis) than in sociology and anthropology and much less
structured than ethno-methodology and conversational analysis.
I had
recently completed my Ph.D. at Wayne State University in Detroit on
Literacy, Technology, and Justice in Postindustrial Detroit -- a rather
grand title for a project much narrower in scope than the title implies.
My dissertation involved self-reflexive educational ethnography
(participant-observation research in the computer classroom and at a local
senior citizen community center); observations, interviews, and surveys
concerning student experiences with and attitudes toward computers and the
Internet; and pilot classroom projects that asked students to employ
ethnographic research strategies to provide multi-vocal accounts of
Detroit's local and historical cultures. These projects relied heavily on
interviews and oral histories and involved building web sites to archive
their work.
In my
teaching, I focused on the ways in which principles of ethnographic
research can provide students with sophisticated writing and reasoning
strategies -- introducing students to basic principles of ethnographic
fieldwork and leading them into research and writing projects in which
they put some of those principles into practice by investigating specific
sites for such issues as negotiations of power, symbolic meaning, social
construction of group identity or member roles, or a combination of those
issues.
Because of my own
interests in technology, the ethnography course I was asked to teach at
Oakland was designated as a computer intensive course, meeting in a
computer classroom and utilizing WebCT, email, and the web. During the
first half of the semester, we would
discuss ethnographic inquiry
as a
research methodology, examine various contemporary ethnographies, and
engage in online writing assignments, including a review of a published
ethnographic study and their own mini-ethnographic projects. Students
would post ideas and responses to the readings to the class discussion
board and ideally read each others’ posts. During the second half of the
project, each student would design his or her own ethnographic project and
execute it in multiple stages -- a literature review, a proposal for IRB
approval, a site study, field observations, interviews/case studies, an
ethnographic essay, and a self-reflection, much of which would also be
posted to the discussion board. Students were also offered the option of
converting their final projects to web sites.
The
role of technology in the course was to bring the different perspectives
and experiences into contact with each other, allowing them to reflect on
and respond to each others virtual bodies of evidence and reflection.
We
used WebCT to establish a mailing list and resource archive, but also
created a discussion board for student reflections, and a Reading Notebook
for each student in which they posted reading reflections and field notes.
I didn’t expect
most students to come in to the course with much exposure to cultural
diversity. Oakland University is a suburban Detroit public university
founded in 1956 that primarily serves students from Oakland County, a
relatively affluent area in Metro-Detroit, recently deemed the most
segregated metropolitan area in the country. Most students are commuters
from their home communities, largely upper-middle class and predominantly
white. Racial demographics for the student population are on par with
national averages (over 80% white and around 12% African American) and
have a slightly higher ratio of females to males (60% female to 40% male).
The university mythology is that affluent Oakland County families sent
their sons off to Ivy League and state universities, and kept their
daughters close to home. The general expectation of faculty for students
is that they are usually homogeneous and inexperienced with alternate
viewpoints. However, I’ve discovered that if you scratch at the surface
some, this isn’t quite the case: many students are 2nd or 3rd
generation Americans, having grandparents who immigrated from Eastern
Europe or the Middle East. Many have languages other than English spoken
in their homes. Though there is a conservative slant among them, their
immigrant and working class heritages offer them avenues to understand
identity politics and social stratification.
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The
Semester
In this particular
course, there was very low enrollment for a number of reasons. Only 9
students signed up and 6 finished the course. But beyond the surface-level
"whiteness" of the class, there was quite a bit of diversity. Two students identified as bi-ethnic (Latina and Arabic) and one
other identified as Ukrainian American. One student was a young mother. Lindsey, early in
the course articulated interest in and sympathy with queer culture – from
discussions of Furries (a sexual fetish involving animal role play), to a
review of Laud Humphries’ Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Pubic Places,
to her own auto-ethnography on Drag King culture. However, Lindsey never
expressly out-ed herself as queer or as transgendered or as a lesbian to
the rest of the class, though she did frequently talk about queer culture
and her own project on drag kings, and she did perform as
Luke,
her drag alter-ego, during her presentation of her project at the end of
the semester. Clearly the students had different experiences and
understandings in terms of identity and group affiliation that ruptured
the illusion of homogeneity among them.
One of my goals in
the course was to bring students to a complex understanding of
ethnography, beyond a “study of culture.” In addition to traditional
ethnographic methods,
we would talk about feminist ethnographies vis-à-vis
Margaret Wolf
, postmodern ethnographies, the role of phenomenology in
ethnography, the social construction of identity, poly-vocal texts, and
Mary Louis Pratt’s notion of auto-ethnographic texts, an often
misunderstood label for a particular form of ethnography. Pratt explains
that an ethnographic text is one in which "European metropolitan subjects
represent to themselves their others" – a detached scientist reporting
observations about the exotic Other. The auto-ethnographic text, on the
other hand, isn’t just autobiographical. It’s written from the inside in
response to the colonial ethnography. As she explains, "such texts often
constitute a marginalized group’s point of entry into the dominant
circuits of print culture." This notion of auto-ethnography is similar to
De Castell and Bryson’s call for the queering of ethnography. Indeed, much
of the course revolved around what it means to know reality, around the
tension between empiricism and anti-essentialism and the ways in which
observation is filtered by experience, especially among groups with uneven
dynamics of power. One student, looking stunned one rainy Tuesday morning
after a discussion of
phenomenology, remarked that he felt like he was in
a philosophy class.
Power
and knowledge played an important role in this course. I focused in many
ways on this tension between insider and outsider knowledge, between etic and emic
perspectives. In his 1957 essay, "A Stereoscopic View of the World," Anthropologist
Kenneth Pike describes etic as outsider and emic as insider. The etic perspective is the perspective of scientific analysis -- the outsider
coming in to observe and analyze with preset criteria. The etic
perspective relies on cross-cultural awareness, the use of classifying
grids, the application of a template to the culture in order to analyze,
evaluate, and critique cultural practices. Its value lies in its
comparative analysis. Its weakness is its distance from the object of
analysis -- its failure to address insider knowledge. The emic
perspective, according to Pike, is "insider knowledge." It's mono-cultural
and structural rather than cross-cultural and typological. Its value is
in its reflexivity, its attention to native understanding and shared
knowledge. According to Pike,
it's not a matter of striking a balance between these two positions, but
of being able to simultaneously hold both positions in order to see stereoscopically. Once students begin to transcribe their data and produce a written
description of the culture, they are forced to position themselves in
relation to the object of study.
In this course, students mainly examined
cultures in which they already participated or in which they had a vested
interest: a young mother focusing on a Montessori classroom; a Latina
student focusing on Fuerza, one of the university's Latin American social
organizations, another student wrote an ethnography of Clutch Cargo's – a
local nightclub. One wrote about the tensions between new Ukrainian
immigrants and more assimilated immigrants at a local Ukrainian cultural
center.
Lindsey early in the semester seemed interested in everything all at once and was
having difficulty focusing on a topic. At one point, she had settled on an
ethnography of "Furries," a fetish group whose sexual practices
involve the incorporation of cartoon characters and stuffed animals. She
said that she knew several members personally and that they met once a
month. She would interview group members and observing group meetings. Lindsey
presented this idea to the class during a fairly informal session in which
we elected to meet over coffee in the student center. Noting slightly
shocked expressions on the faces of a few of the students, this raised one
of my first major ethical questions of the semester. As an instructor
performing multiple positions of power, what are my ethical and academic
and legal responsibilities in a student-centered classroom when one
student proposes a project that transgresses the social and sexual mores
of other students? What is my role and responsibility as facilitator in
that classroom?
This
question seems quite large and complicated, but it's not one that I really
even fully articulated to myself. Of course I was keen on the project.
This is what college research and the college experience is supposed to be
about. As Karen Yescavage and Jonathan Alexander (1997) have pointed out,
the issue of sexual identities is always already present in the classroom,
we only "draw attention to them by commenting on the ways in which
sexuality can be socially constructed" (p. 113). So to me, rather quickly,
I saw myself ethically and academically obligated to support free inquiry
into sexual identity, and in the interest of academic freedom regarded
this to be within legal guidelines. Since this time, I have known of at
least one instructor to be accused of sexual harassment by a straight
student for allowing an online discussion of BDSM to go unchecked. A formal complaint was filed,
but it was investigated and found
unsubstantiated since the discussion occurred in the spirit of academic
inquiry. So while it may be politically problematic to facilitate, the
legal, ethical, and academic issues, in my opinion, are much more
supportive of inquiry.
My
decision to support Lindsey's choice of research was much more an innate
position than a conscious deliberation. So when later in the
semester she decided to refocus on transgendered issues, and drag king
culture in particular, I was equally supportive. I did stress, how
ever, the students' own ethical obligations as researchers. In class, we
discussed the
Belmont Report, the American Anthropological Association's "Code
of Ethics," notions of informed consent, and the tension between
risks and benefits in research, including social/psychological risks. My
advice to Lindsey and the others was "be careful." I asked them to think
about potential risks of exposure as carefully as possible, including
self-exposure.
Lindsey and I talked on a number of occasions about
possible consequences of out-ing others or herself. And Lindsey expressed
her own internal conflict and misgivings over the ethics of her research.
So by the time students began the
IRB process for Human Participants, they had all already deeply
considered their own ethical implications for research.
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Ethnography and Authorial
Voice
In
constructing these ethnographies, we considered
John Van Maanen's (1988)
classification of ethnographic tales into three categories: Realist,
Confessional, and Impressionist. The differences in these categories
correspond to debates in social anthropology between positivism and
phenomenology -- of whether or not there is an objective, observable
truth out there in the social world, or if experience is always already
mediated by perception. I proposed that students need not resolve this
debate, but that by being aware of the debate, they can make more
conscious and ethically informed decisions in their research and writing.
The Realist ethnography,
according to Van Maanen, is the bread and
butter of anthropology and sociology. In the realist tale, the narrator is
both invisible and omnipotent. The subjective "I" is replaced by the eye
of god, the eye of T.J. Eckleburg, if you recall the billboard in The
Great Gatsby that looked down on Wilson's garage, the eye of dispassionate
judgment.
Van Maanen describes some of the
primary conventions of the realist tale: the invisible author, thick
descriptions of the mundane, and interpretive omnipotence. He adds,
Realist tales are not multi-vocal texts
where an event is given meaning first one way, then another, and then
still another. Rather a realist tale offers one reading and culls its
facts carefully to support that reading. Little can be discovered in such
texts that has not been put there by the fieldworker as a way of
supporting a particular interpretation."(53)
The Impressionist
tale, on the other hand, draws its conventions from phenomenology, post-structural theory, and
feminist theory and attempts to present a multi-vocal view of the culture,
one that is clearly responsible to the natives for ethical treatment. As
Van Maanen explains, "The idea is to draw an audience into an unfamiliar
story world and allow it, as far as possible, to see, hear, and feel as
the fieldworker saw, heard, and felt." Knowledge, in this
impressionist view, is often fragmented, contradictory, and many
theoretical questions are left unresolved and un-resolvable.
The Result
While
most
students chose a “realist” rhetorical strategy, Lindsey instead chose
to exploit the potential of the Impressionist ethnography -- a strategy
that suited her purpose in destabilizing gender identity, evoking the
social construction of knowledge, and transgressing norms.
Lindsey
presented her project in a purple binder on which she created a collage
using images of gender bending, fragments of her handwritten field notes,
newspaper clippings, and a handwritten admonition: "Gender confusion is a
small price to pay for social justice." In this project, Lindsey went
native. Exploring her own issues of sexual identity, Lindsey experimented
with cross-dressing, constructing a male alter-ego named Luke. Lindsey's
ethnographic essay itself contained fragmented bits of narrative,
self-reflection, interview and exposition. She transgressed traditional
notions of research and understanding through this impressionistic method.
She transcribed internal monologue, she exposed herself as vulnerable and
unsure, she reflected on her own uncertainties about what she was doing
and her motivation for doing so. She blended history and social analysis
with personal performance and exploration. She drew heavy from feminist
theory to construct an impressionist tale of gender bending in metro
Detroit, attempting to provide evocative knowledge rather than imposing an
interpretation.
By academic and
scholarly standards, Lindsey's ethnography was adequate, given the time
constraints of the semester. There were a number of areas in which she
could have explored more fully, drawn more clear connections, developed
her analysis and reflection more richly. But as a personal exploration if
identity and the construction of knowledge, Lindsey's project was a
superior product.
As
Jonathan
Alexander (1997) proposes, we should "encourage all students --
both gay and straight -- to think of ways each identity is shaped by the
stories and narratives that surround and permeate us through the social
clusters of family, friends, colleagues, city, state, country, and
culture" (p. 215). While
Lindsey's final project may have fallen a bit short in terms of
traditional academic
rigor, the project certainly revealed her own insight and promises as a
scholar of gender and identity, and the sophisticated ways in which she
was arriving at her own understanding of cultural power.
As she said later, she was more interested
at the time in coming to her own terms than in persuading others.
However, as Lindsey puts it, perhaps through interacting with her project,
others' "perspectives on the dominant
culture will have been queered, as they look for themselves in the other,
and find the other in themselves."
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References
Alexander, Jonathan. (1997).
"Out of
the closet and into the network: Sexual orientation and the
computerized classroom." Computers and Composition, 14
(2), 207-216. Retrieved 30 May 2004 from
http://www.hu.mtu.edu/%7Ecandc/archives/v14/14_2_html/14_2_Feature.html
Bronski, Michael (1998). The
Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom.
New York: St. Martin’s Press.
De Castell, Suzanne and
Mary
Bryson (1998). "Queer
Ethnography: Identity, authority, narrativity, and a
geopolitics of text." In J. Ristock & C. Taylor (Eds.),
Inside the Academy and Out: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies and
Social Action (pp. 97-110). Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.
Rose, Dan (1987). Black
American Street Life: South Philadelphia, 1969-1971. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Van Maanen, John (1988).
Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Yescavage, Karen and Alexander, Jonathan. (1997). "The
Pedagogy of Marking: Addressing Sexual Orientation in the
Classroom."
Feminist Teacher, 11 (2), 113-122.
