Through Queers' Eyes: Critical Educational Ethnography in Queer Studies

Abstract

Methodology is too important to be left to methodologists.

—Howard S. Becker, Sociological Work (1970, 3)

Ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial—committed and incomplete.

—James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths” (1986, 7)

Like poems and hypotheses, ethnographies can only be judged ex post facto, after someone has brought them into being.

—Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives (1988, 147)

Notes

Theoretical backgrounds of critical pedagogy are diverse. Daeder, Baltodano, and Torres (2003) analyze the five major influences in the formation of currently practiced critical pedagogy: 1) Twentieth-century educators and activists in U.S. tradition: John Dewey, Myles Horton, Herbert Kohl, Maxine Greene, Ivan Illich, and so on; 2) The Brazilian influence: Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal; 3) Gramsci and Foucault; 4) The Frankfurt School: Max Horkeimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal, Eric Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas; and 5) Contemporary theoretical modes of thought: postmodernism, postcolonialism, cultural studies, and feminism. In other words, there are many different articulations of critical pedagogy nowadays, but, by most accounts, it was born originally from Paulo Freire's discourse. Freire's thinking insists on a deep connection between the culture of everyday life and radical politics. He defines culture as a field of struggle over meaning resulting in action with reflection, which integrates critical pedagogy into culture and politics. The plural forms are important here, because each of these approaches has different contributions within critical pedagogies. Generally speaking, critical pedagogy is a collective and diverse term including different viewpoints on the political implications of education as cultural formations to challenge traditional pedagogic thinking, which simply produces those forms of subjectivity preferred by the dominant culture. Although critical pedagogies propose principles to challenge the deadlock of knowledge, power, and instructional content in traditional pedagogy, the development trend seems toward romantic discourses, characteristic of hyper-postmodernism, which lack a grounded or material base. Thus, Apple names this phenomenon “romantic possibilitarian” rhetoric and maintains that we need to make closer connections between theoretical and critical discourses (Apple 2001, 63). In my position, I maintain transforming critical theoretical and political insights into practices depends on ethnographic studies rather than abstracted discourses.

McLaren (1994, 173) points out that recent works from a critical approach can generally be divided into two categories: theoretically based works such as Henry Giroux, Stanley Aronowitz, William Pinar, and Michael Apple; and critical ethnographies and case studies of schools, such as those by Paul Willis, Kathleen Wieler, Barry Kanpol, himself, and others, which have begun to problematize categories of gender, race, and class.

Ebert (1996, 147–148) considers postmodernism to have two different approaches. One is ludic postmodernism; the other is resistance postmodernism. Ludic postmodernism is a discursive practice that seeks open access to the free play of signification in order to dissemble the dominant cultural policy, which tries to restrict and stabilize meanings. In contrast, resistance postmodernism insists on a historical materialist political practice that works for the equal distribution of social resources to all and for the ending the exploitation of labor. Such social transformation cannot result simply from a semiotic freedom but requires a radical reconstructing of the social relations of production through class struggle. In my standpoint, I also insist on resistance postmodernism, and I think queer literacy must develop an awareness of material conditions.

Qualitative research includes different methods. Creswell (1998) proposes five traditions in qualitative inquiry: biography, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study. In addition, Carspecken (2001, 2) points out that the qualitative research community is divided into competing camps distinguished by different beliefs concerning the concept of validity and the very idea of method itself. Many qualitative researchers who consider themselves “constructivists,” “poststructuralists,” “postmodernists,” “postcolonialists,” “feminist theorists,” and “critical race theorists” argue that any effort to specify a method and a concept of truth or validity will at bottom be nothing more than a claim to power that attempts to erase real differences between people and cultures. Though differences between people and cultures may be described, the description itself will be based on a signal view constructed by the gendered, classed, and raced position of the theorist.

Hammersley and Atkinson (1995) provide a basic definition of ethnography: “In its most characteristic form it involves the ethnographer participating, overtly or covertly, in people's daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions—in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research (1).

Critical ethnography is a research tradition that draws from critical social theory. Georgious and Carspecken (2002, 689) point out that critical ethnography is distinguished from other research traditions: 1) through its explicit adaptation of pragmatic models of meaning to epistemological issues; 2) through its advocacy of a critical-realist rather than a constructivist social ontology; and 3) through its placement of power concepts within the center of its epistemology. Critical ethnography has rejected theories of meaning that take perceptual experience as a paradigm for knowledge. It seeks to understand the relationship of culture to social structures that largely escape the awareness of actors while influencing how they act. Knowledge, in critical ethnography, is always understood to be a social product formed within social relations involving power. Thus, the truth can only be formulated if they take the power relations inherent to research acts in account.

However, Skeggs (quoted in Mac An Ghaill 1994, 55) argues that Willis failed to theorize how sexuality pervades the power structure of the classroom, and in so doing adopts a reductionist reading of anti-school lads behavior towards women as a product of their resistance rather than as a legitimation and articulation of power and domination Although suffering this challenge, Willis opens a discussion of profane culture with a testimony on his commitment to fieldwork that immediately serves to distance him from a textual analysis. As he famously argues: “the sheer surprise of a living culture is a slap to reverie. Real, bustling, startling cultures move. They exist. They are something in the world. They suddenly leave behind—empty, exposed, ugly—ideas of poverty, deprivation, existence and culture. Real events can save us as much philosophy” (Willis 1978, 1). He also states that the researcher should be as flexible as possible, and suspend so far as possible specific theories—while admitting his general theoretical orientation—about what he expects to encounter. In my mind, this is a good example of critical ethnography.

In the mid-1970s, Everhart (1988) conducted a study of junior high schools wherein he utilized a neo-Marxist framework to understand junior high school student life. In this study, he argues that the existence arranged for students by the school centered primarily on what he called technical interests. These interests, which consist of basic assumptions of what constitutes knowledge, are called technical because they focus on how to accomplish an objective within the acceptable patterns defined by the larger environment. In contrast to the technical interest of the school, a student's social and cultural life was characterized by a practical interest. Practical interests concern knowledge that grows out of the collective social interaction (Everhart 1988, 197). Thus, ideology can be seen as a practice of representation, a practice that produces certain meanings and necessitates certain subjects as its support.

This work concentrates on the dynamic of class and gender and on the way these two factors came together in the day-to-day lives of small groups of girls. McRobbie (1989) considers that culture is a site for struggle and conflict, and challenges the argument that girls simply follow the same cultural trajectory as boys. Through her ethnography, we can find that in practice girls set themselves apart from boys.

Carspecken and Apple's (1991) ethnography of a community's attempt to transform the educational mismanagement of an unresponsive bureaucracy, in which they were personally involved as participants, is a rare exception to critical ethnographers. But this is the radical implication for educational praxis.

Although the goal of ethnography is to describe the ways of living of a social group, a group in which there is in-group recognition of the individuals living together and working together as a social unit, Bourdieu (1979) utilizes multiple methods in his fieldwork including ethnographic description and statistical data. As he says, “If anthropologists so rarely resort to statistical method, this is not only because their training and the tradition of their discipline do not encourage them to use this unfamiliar technique even when it would seem to be essential, as in the study of cultural changes, but also, it would appear, because they almost always think in terms of the “model” and the “rule” (Bourdieu 1979, 2 n2). In the same way, if we want to master queer issues, we need to build multiple resources for collecting data which are based on participant observation, open-ended interviewing, ethnography, and other multiple techniques. Using only one research strategy—for example, only observation, or worse, only one kind of observation—introduces bias into the data record. Triangulation is commonly stressed in treatments of qualitative research, and it contains views “from as many perspectives as possible.” With technological development, some new techniques apply to ethnographic studies such as “video study group.” Tochon (1999) stresses participation in video study groups to analyze narrative experience, which is a lived message. The video study group is a new technique to record ethnographies. However, we need to consider the specific situation of queerness in everyday life. Although Tochon (1999, 43) also mentions ethical considerations since, whereas the recording of data on video is in general permitted public places, written authorization is required for private or enclosed places. Informed consent must be obtained from participants and from anyone who appears on the screen, or from their legal representative.

Ethnographers need to deploy, and encourage readers to adopt, what Willis (2000) calls the “ethnographic imagination.” That is, an ethnographically imagined emphasis on human creativity, producing something that was not there before, brings some form of agency into the picture, as practices, struggling forms, and materials. As Stewart (1998) says, “culture is not so much informative as it is performative. Thus, the ethnographer not only needs to have opportunities to witness a variety of performances, but also more fundamentally, needs to experience culture personally”(25). Because culture is not homogeneous, it is distributed across diverse social contexts; the ethnographer needs experience in multiple contexts. In other words, ethnography is affected, to a greater or lesser extent, by the personal characteristics and orientations of researchers and of insider informants. It is also affected by the interpersonal dynamic and interactions between researchers and insiders. Ethnographic understanding is situated by the myriad historical, local minutiae that may be needed to interpret the native's point of view. In my opinion, ethnographic imagination has an elective affinity with ideas of semiotics. Tochon (2002, 4) considers that semiotics is the dynamic of transformation constructing links between objects and grounds ad infinitum. That is, semiotics is a way of interpretion for meaning. In advance, Scheff (1990, 39–40) compares interpretation between Mead and Peirce. For Mead (1949), meaning is created in the process of role taking: in an encounter, each person can solve problem, of reference by a method of successive approximation, which involves shuttling back and forth between imagination and observation. In the same way, according to Peirce (1940), the scientist also is involved in a movement between observation and imagination. He shows that the creative scientist is involved not only in observation (induction), and not only in imagination (deduction), but also in a process which combines both: abduction, that is, cycling rapidly between observation and imagination.

Whitty's (1985) idea is a good example here: “as texts, policies can be subject to a variety of readings, they will have a different effectivity in relation to different groups of readers: readers are interpellated by a whole range of intra- and extra-textual discourses that prevent even the most closed of texts from absolutely determining its reading by readers who bring different knowledges, prejudices and resistances” (43). In other words, particular readings can be asserted and the texts captured for particular interests.

What does the text mean? I think a text produces meaning through reading/observing social phenomena, and that this is an act between reader and text that also can reflect, deliberate on, and even redefine/rewrite all possible meanings of the social phenomena in question. Thus, this social phenomenon as text can read by someone, and one usually reads extra meanings, into it beyond commonsense ones. Every social phenomenon, such as educational policy, ideology, and even homophobia can become readable texts. Sumner (1979) has a similar idea: “We would need to engage in a semiological reading of the cultural artifact to ’extract the structure of significations within the object which provides the parameter’ for a possible reading of it. One must still be aware that reading a text is an active process of signification…. Thus, every discourse, all content, may have a surplus of meaning” (134).

This also means “hidden transcript” described by James Scott. Hidden transcript also refers to hidden texts between subordinate and dominant. Scott (1990) mentions, “Every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a ‘hidden transcript’ that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant. The powerful, for their part, also develop a hidden transcript representing the practices and claims of their rule that cannot be openly avowed.” (xii). That is, a comparison for hidden transcripts between subordinate and dominant offers a substantially new way of understanding multiple features of resistance to domination.

Gee (1996) writes “Discourses are ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions and clothes…what is important is not language, and surely not grammar, but saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” (142). Applying Gee's idea to queer studies, everyday life discourse becomes more and more crucial, because the existing discourses are too abstract, lacking detailed discussion about differences between queer folks. For instance, all autobiographical and biographical texts are shaped by cultural apparatuses that regulate sexuality, sexual identity, and sexual desire.

If selective tradition is the mechanism for selection and exclusion, normative structure is the material condition that facilitates selective tradition. For instance, Carspecken and Apple (1992, 533) mention the importance of “normative structure,” which is analogous to the generative grammar implicated in speech acts. Each speech act implicitly refers to an entire grammar, and an understanding of this grammar is necessary both to produce the act and to understand it. They use Paul Willis's research as an example. Lads translate certain existing themes such as masculinity, antagonism to authority, nonconformity with the establishment, and a dislike of mental work into diverse types of people, and so on. These are the sorts of things they have been calling “normative structure.” Through analyzing narratives, one is aware of broad contrasts, usually presented as dichotomies. Hymes (1996) considers that Bernstein's concepts of elaborated and restricted codes can be added into narrative analysis (6). For instance, Bernstein points out that linguistic features affect the transmission and transformation of social realities through their organization into what he calls codes. He is noted for his twin notions of elaborated and restricted codes. Narrative tells not only about past actions but how individuals understand those actions, namely, meaning as a kind of performance. Thus, narrative analysis has to do with “how protagonists interpret things” (Bruner 1990, 51). For instance, respondents narrate particular experiences in their lives, often when there has been a breach between ideal and real, self and society.

McLaren (1997) also compares differences between deconstructive and reflexive ethnography in advance. He says, “Deconstructive ethnography enacts the interrogative mode through constant deferral or a refusal to explain or interpret. Within deconstructive ethnography, the identity of the reader with a unified subject of enunciation is discouraged. Whereas reflexive ethnography argues that the ethnographer is not separate from the object of investigation, the ethnographer is still viewed as unified subject of knowledge that can make hermeneutic efforts to establish identification between the observer and the observed. Deconstructive ethnography, in contrast, often disrupts such identification in favor of articulating a fractured, destabilized, multiply-positioned subjectivity. Whereas reflexive anthropology questions its authority, deconstructive anthropology forfeits its authority. Both forms of anthropological practice are useful in developing a critical sociological self-reflexivity” (98). In other words, critical ethnographers recognize the arrogance of speaking for others, and also the presumptuousness that feeds the notion that men and women can speak for themselves. Knowledge is never transparent to the speaking subject, so we can never be sure who is really served by our words, or whom we nourish and fortify with our criticism.

For instance, Bennett (1992) thinks that the public museum serves as an instrument for relaying to the citizens of modern democratic polities a power that is represented to them as their own. In other words, the museum might be regarded as a textbook instance of the relations between people and state, namely, the ideological state apparatus.

The theoretical background of multi-sited fieldwork could be restored to Clifford's concept of “traveling.” James Clifford (1997) explains the early anthropologists' devotion to extend fieldwork in a single place, their concern with dwelling rather than traveling, as an attempt to demarcate themselves from missionaries, travels, and colonial administrators, who also indulged in descriptions of the tribes and peoples they came in touch with. Systematic observation, sustained over time in one place, was to make them scientists as distinct from dilettantes (Burawoy, 2000, 35–36ff). Then, as Burawoy expresses in the radical perspective, anthropology turns away from the study of locality to reflections on “epistemological and political issues of location” (Burawoy 2000, 341).

This idea can be restored to the Marxist tradition. For instance, Marx's “circuits of capital” concept is revamped to fit the realities of the cultural economy, to investigate the convergence of producer and consumer in order to understand the changes made to a product (Marx 1973). In addition, Raymond Williams (1977) emphasizes, “large-scale capitalist economic activity and cultural production are now inseparable” (136).

Hine (2000, 12) considers that authenticity in Internet studies is constructed as a discursive performance, in which accounts are organized to promote perceptions of their authenticity. For example, newsgroup discussions are a particular testing ground for authenticity performance, since it is routine for posters to challenge previous messages. Thus, Internet inquiry develops cyborg anthropology. Haraway (1997, 211) says cyborg anthropology's attempts to refigure provocatively the border relations among specific humans, other organisms, and machines turns out to be an excellent field site for ethnographic inquiry into what counts as self-acting and as collective empowerment. She calls that field site the cultural practice and practical culture of technoscience. In addition, Williams and Klemmer (1997, 167) argue the difference between cyborg anthropology and more traditional anthropology is not that the practice of cyborg anthropology in any way evades the anthropological usurpation of totemic potencies, but rather that, insofar as cyborg anthropology reflexively recognizes its participation within the same processes of cultural enunciation and signification it serves to objectify, it is led to be more rather than less explicit in this usurpation.

Skocpol (1984) builds comparative historical analysis on two approaches—the method of agreement and the method of difference. The method of agreement supposes that several cases sharing the phenomenon to be explained also have in common the hypothesized causal factors, even though they vary in other ways that might seem causally relevant according to alternative hypotheses. The method of difference contrasts cases in which the phenomenon to be explained and the hypothesized causes are present with other cases in which the phenomenon and the causes are absent, even though those negative cases are as similar as possible to the positive cases in other respects (378). In addition, Barnes (1987) complains that “anthropology is permanently in crisis about the comparative method” (119), this is also a crucial point. Similarly, Bowen (1999, 136) points out two ways to contrast widely differing cultures, such as in Geertz's Islam Observed. One way highlights broad cultural contrasts but downplays the processes by which ideas and institutions are differentially transmitted and shaped; another way, which answers the global/local challenge, focuses on the processes by which particular social forms have been historically differentiated.

A linear series means history as it has actually occurred in a sequential temporal framework, and as it is reconstructed and revised through the narrative of the historian. Thompson (1978) is careful to add that a narrative view of history does not imply that it can be fully known. A lateral series is a specific instance of historical evidence as it occurs in a number of different forms of social relation, such as the political and the social, which enables us to grasp a provisional section of a given society in the past—its characteristic relations of power, domination, kinship, servitude, market relations, and the rest (Thompson 1978, 29). The lateral series contributes to the view of a sociocultural formation in its individual moment as an integrated whole.

Eliasoph and Lichterman (1999) extend this method more culturally and focus on three levels to dialogue with Burawoy: 1) culture and social structures interpenetrate; 2) people apprehend social structures only through culture and culture structures people's way of interpreting their own conditions; 3) culture is itself a structure and culture structures people's ways of not only interpreting, but also producing their own conditions. In addition, the extended case method is similar to the term “a peopled ethnography” proposed by Gary Fine (2003, 45–46); the purpose for both methods is movement toward theorization. In a peopled ethno-graphy, the text is neither descriptive narrative nor conceptual theory; rather, the understanding of the setting and its theoretical implications are grounded in a set of detailed vignettes, based on field notes, interview extracts, and the texts that group members produce. In other words, a peopled ethnography relies on multiple research sites. Fine labels studies that focus attention on theoretical development, with empirical description left as a minor feature, as postulated ethnographies; ethnographies primarily concerned with description and local, substantive analysis he labels personal ethnographies. These are hardly precise labels, but the first emphasizes the development of theory, while the second recognizes the importance of the personal descriptions that constitute the heart of the text—it is the personal relationship between observer and observed that vouches for the legitimacy of the ethnographic endeavor in such cases. In contrast, the term peopled ethnography suggests that it is not the individuals being observed who direct our interests but rather their position within a group or social system: the set of actors and their groups “peoples” the ethnographic analysis and description.

• Table

Source: Fine (2003, 45)

For instance, both Malinowski (1929) and Mead (1949) focused on the sexual lives of primitive societies.

Coffey (1999) quotes Sara Delamont's ideas to argue that the methodological exercise had substantive significance, drawing attention to the pervasiveness of the body in educational encounters. As Delamont says, “the social body has remained largely implicit in most educational ethnographies. The embodied nature of educational work, the expressive body of teachers, and the taught, the disciplined body in the school or classroom regime, the embodied enactment of pedagogic performances—these have all remained part of the taken-for-granted of educational research. Retrospective and secondary analysis of ethnographic data can help to rescue and render visible such embodied phenomena” (quoted in Coffey 1999, 62).

The term “transference” refers to the patient's relationship to the analyst as it develops in the treatment. Lacan later describes transference as “positive” and “negative.” Positive transference refers to loving affects and negative transference to aggressive ones.

Shields (1994) emphasizes that the figure of the flâneur/flâneuse, as “the detective of street life who carefully and scrupulously observes the sights and sounds of metropolitan life, thereby calling the world's bluff of civilized existence, and who engages in a discernment of the subtle pleasures of urban life—a type of ‘pedestrian connoisseurship and consumption of the urban environment’—is not a monadic subject or detached, autonomous voyeur of the world of asphalt and brick but a situated observer, located in material relations of power and privilege” (61). Bauman (1994, 142), says the goal of the flâneur/flâneuse is to rehearse contingency of meaning. It is to rehearse the unrehearsable. The flâneuse is in tacit agreement with herself to live the fiction of her emptiness as the empty fullness to the real. There is a distinction between flâneur and flâneuse, as Wilson (1992) refers to flâneur as masculine throughout. Flâneuse is the name of a kind of reclining chair, of which there is a line illustration. It looks like an extended deck chair and welcomes its occupant with womanly passivity (Wilson 1992, 94n). Thus, we need to look at the importance of the “male or straight gaze”—the gaze of the flâneur articulates and produces a masculine sexuality which in the modern sexual economy enjoys the freedom to look, appraise, and possess.