The fallacy of the instrumental gate? Contextualising the process of gaining access through gatekeepers

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research concerned with the phenomenon of migrant prostitution in Italy, this article problematises the mechanistic model in social research that reduces the gatekeeper to a static and instrumental figure to be gotten past and the passage through the metaphorical gate as a matter of course. Moving beyond this, it suggests approaching gatekeepers as social actors embedded, participating in and influencing relations of power, and gaining access through gatekeepers as a dynamic process that is shaped by transformative encounters in the field.

Keywords:

• gatekeepers
• access
• research encounters
• research process
• migrant prostitution

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [PTA-026-27-2755].

Notes

1. I should specify that I am a white woman, who was born and grew up in Italy, and that I hold both Italian and British citizenship.

2. To simplify the terminology adopted, I use the term ‘migrant women’ here and in the rest of article to refer to migrant women who had operated in abusive and exploitative conditions in the sex industry and were, therefore, entitled to participate in ‘programmes of assistance and social integration’. When I conducted my fieldwork in Italy, in four different stages between 2002 and 2005, migrant women participating in the programmes in the organisation I visited were mostly from: Albania, Moldova, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine.

3. Drawing on O’Connell Davidson’s (1998, p. 162) work, and as discussed further in my thesis, the power that allowed Leonardo to eroticise Monica and other migrant women can be understood as resting upon ‘economic and political inequalities structured along lines of class, gender and “racialized” identity and upon the legal and ideological construction of prostitute women as sexual and social Others’.

4. I should specify that when I challenged my interviewees over their racist and sexist comments, even more intolerance was displayed on their part. In these instances, I was repositioned as an ‘outsider’ and was told that because I had lived in England for too long, I did not understand the different Italian context in which their racism and sexism, they seemed to suggest, was justified.