Critical Reflexivity and Sexuality Studies in Anthropology: Siting Sexuality in Research, Theory,...

CRITICAL REFLEXIVITY AND SEXUALITY STUDIES INANTHROPOLOGY: SITING SEXUALITY IN RESEARCH,THEORY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND PEDAGOGY

Deborah Elliston

Markowitz, Fran, and Michael Ashkenazi. Sex, Sexuality, and theAnthropologist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. 248 pp. $18.95 paper.

Newton, Esther. Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 360 pp. $21.95 paper.

Ristock, Janice L., and Catherine G. Taylor. Inside the Academy and Out:Lesbian=Gay=Queer Studies and Social Action. Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 1998. 416 pp. $24.95 paper.

Over the past decade, critically reflexive approaches to sexuality haveemerged as an increasingly rich site of substantive inquiry and schol-arly production, as evidenced in part by the diversity of projects towhich anthropologists taking such approaches have contributed. Inaddition to contributions to social theory that focus on, for example,subjectivity and identity, difference and power, the self=other binary,and the production of knowledge (among others discussed below),critically reflexive approaches to sexuality have also produced signifi-cant insights into questions of research methodology (includingthe dynamics of fieldwork), pedagogy, and problematics in the poli-tics of representation, ethnographic and otherwise. In addition,more reflexive approaches have produced critical insights intothe relationships between sexuality and cultural politics and, not

DEBORAH ELLISTON is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University=

SUNY. Her research specializations include sexuality, gender and power, feminist theory, cultural

politics, and nationalism, with an area focus on French Polynesia and Oceania.

Address correspondence to Deborah Elliston, Assistant Professor of Anthropology,

Department of Anthropology, Binghamton University=SUNY, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000.

E-mail: [email protected]

Reviews in Anthropology, 34: 21–47, 2005

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc.

ISSN: 0093-8157 print

DOI: 10.1080/00938150590915032

least, into the relationships between sexuality and academic politics inthe U.S.

The recent emergence of this body of work in anthropology wasenabled by specific theoretical developments in anthropology, femin-ist studies, and queer theory. The first development in anthropologywas the formalization of the ‘‘reflexive turn’’ in the late 1980s (Clifford& Marcus, 1986; Marcus & Fischer, 1986). In relation to sexuality,the increased legitimacy of reflexivity as a mode of theorizing effec-tively expanded the terrain of anthropological analysis to encompassquestions previously encoded, and thus ignored and sequestered, asprivate and inappropriate (or unseemly). The reflexive turn also fore-grounded problems with the self=other binary and focused criticalattention more broadly on the production of anthropological knowl-edge. Both of those problematics emerged as central concerns inreflexive approaches to sexuality.

Second were two theoretical developments in feminist studies. Atthe turn of the 1980s, feminists of color launched an interrogationof racism in the U.S. women’s movement that sought to replace thefalsely generic category ‘‘woman,’’ which had been feminism’s sub-ject, with ‘‘women,’’ retheorized and resituated as not only genderedbut gendered in relation to and through other hierarchicallystructured social differences of, in particular, race, class, and sexu-ality (Combahee River Collective, 1983; hooks, 1981; Moraga andAnzaldua, 1983). This interrogation of the subject of feminism helpedto inaugurate a broader feminist retheorization of subjectivity—andits politics—as fluid, multiple, fractured, and inconstant, rather thanessential, fixed, and stable (Alarc�oon, 1990; Butler, 1990; de Lauretis,1987; Sandoval, 1991).

In addition, over the course of the 1980s the loss of the ontolo-gically secure subject of feminism helped to produce (in tandemwith other political and theoretical developments) a pronouncedengagement by feminist scholars with epistemology. In part aspecifically feminist critique of positivism, the approaches to epis-temology that feminist scholars innovated drew on theories of gen-der and power to argue that the knower=researcher is part of theproduction of knowledge—actively involved in, and thus account-able for, his=her knowledge claims—and that all knowledge pro-duction is positioned or ‘‘situated’’ (Haraway, 1988, 1991;Collins, 1990; Harding, 1986, 1987). Relatedly, feminist anthropol-ogists have argued that the reflexive turn in anthropology itselfowed a great deal to these theoretical developments around subjec-tivity and epistemology in feminist studies (Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, &Cohen, 1989).

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The third site enabling more critically reflexive work on sexualityin anthropology was the emergence of queer theory in the U.S. acad-emy by the early 1990s. This interdisciplinary body of scholarship canbe seen as the scholarly wing of a cultural shift in lesbian and gaypolitical work around HIV=AIDS in the U.S. at the turn of the1990s, when the HIV=AIDS activist group ACT UP and its youngersibling Queer Nation began reclaiming (and redefining) the term‘‘queer.’’ Motivated in part by the need to make visible how hete-ronormativity disabled effective interventions into the spread ofHIV=AIDS, ‘‘queer’’ was also developed as a vehicle for movingbeyond identity-based political mobilization to animate political alli-ances on the broader basis of opposition to regimes of sexual normal-ization. In addition to arising out of tensions in identity politics,queer theory emerged in relation to, and at times in contentiousdialogue with, feminist studies of sexuality: queer theory came to besignified as an alternative intellectual home for sexuality studies, onethat sought to theorize sexuality as separate and distinct from gender(Rubin, 1984; Rubin & Butler, 1994). Rather than founding theiranalyses in feminist theories of gender and power, queer theoristsdrew most centrally on Foucauldian approaches to power=knowl-edge, using these analytical tools to interrogate the social and histori-cal production of the discourse of sexuality and its entailments forsexual subjectivity, the production of heteronormativity, and more(Butler, 1990; Duggan, 1992; Sedgwick, 1990; Warner, 1993).

Relatedly, and as the importance of queer theory to it suggests,critically reflexive approaches to sexuality in anthropology have alsohad deep relationships with queer politics. That conjunction hasheightened awareness about the politics and terms of appropriatelyengaged methods for research on sexuality, as well as the receptionand production of scholarly knowledge claims about sexuality. Theconjunction has also been embodied and situated: lesbian and gayscholars have taken central roles in developing critically reflexiveapproaches to sexuality and in developing the scholarship on sexualitymore broadly. The possible reasons for and theoretical ramificationsof this are subjects I take up in the conclusion.

The books on which I focus here—the edited collections byMarkowitz and Ashkenazi (Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist)and by Ristock and Taylor (Inside the Academy and Out), alongwith Esther Newton’s long-awaited collection of essays, MargaretMead Made Me Gay—all put critically reflexive approaches to sexu-ality in the service of examining a variety of problematics. I haveorganized this review to enable both an examination of those pro-blematics and of the volumes on their own. I begin with summaries

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of each of the three books and then move to engage key problematicsin critically reflexive approaches to sexuality by treating selectedindividual essays from the three works. My goals in so organizing thisreview are to provide substantive engagements with both the largerprojects of these volumes and with a sampling of the many essays pub-lishedwithin them, aswell as to clarify the rangeof insights andquestionsthat critically reflexive approaches to sexuality offer to social theory,research methodologies, the politics of representation, and pedagogy.

MARGARET MEAD MADE ME GAY (NEWTON)

Esther Newton’s much-anticipated collection of essays, MargaretMead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas (‘‘Made MeGay’’) can be read as a kind of ‘‘intellectual autobiography’’ (p. 3)comprised of selected writings from the past thirty years that detailNewton’s ever-engaged political, ethnographic, feminist, and queerwork. ‘‘My chosen life work,’’ Newton writes, ‘‘has been to chronicleand champion the lesbian and gay cultures in which I have foundboth a home and ever-compelling subject matter’’ (p. 3). It is the con-junction of home=subject matter or, as the book’s subtitle gives it,‘‘Personal Essays, Public Ideas,’’ that iconifies Newton’s vanguardbrand of critical reflexivity. The broader problematics on whichNewton has worked—sexuality and gender, culture and history,power and politics, subjectivity and epistemology—all have beenshaped through her commitment to and practice of incorporatingher own positionings into the process of producing knowledge.

In that and many other respects, Newton has consistently, asJudith Halberstam writes in her Foreword to Made Me Gay, ‘‘takenrisks, big risks, in her work’’ (p. xii). For example, Newton’s first (dis-sertation) fieldwork project in the 1960s, later published as MotherCamp (1972), analyzed the sexual subculture of drag queens in severalU.S. cities, at a time when neither the topic of drag queens nor thegeographical area of the U.S. was considered the stuff of ‘‘real’’anthropology. For taking such risks Newton was made a ‘‘marginalacademic’’ (p. 103) who at times paid dearly, as several of the essaysin Made Me Gay attest: she writes of being denied tenure at her firstjob and, after securing tenure elsewhere, being challenged each timeshe went up for promotion; it took twenty years before an anthro-pology journal published one of her articles (her 1993 CulturalAnthropology essay discussed below). Yet by taking such risks,Newton has created scholarship that has consistently been ‘‘aheadof its time,’’ as Leap (p. xxi) writes in his forward to Made Me Gay.Mother Camp (1972), to give but one example, laid a foundation

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for the 1980s development of the anthropology of homosexuality andeven now stands as a foundational text in queer theory.

The essays included in Newton’s collection are organized aroundfour thematic rubrics that, according to the author, ‘‘represent theconstellations by which I have steered my intellectual life’’ (p. 4):‘‘Drag and Camp,’’ ‘‘Lesbian-Feminism,’’ ‘‘Butch,’’ and ‘‘QueerAnthropology.’’ The first section includes the original (1972) andrevised edition (1979) introductions to, and a well-known chapterfrom, Mother Camp. These essays foreground Newton’s enduringinterest in the theatrical as it intersects with historical and social poli-tics of queer identities and community building. They are comple-mented by an essay on the social contexts and politics that haveanimated gay theatrical sensibilities historically (‘‘Theatre: GayAnti-Church’’). The final essay in this section grew out of Newton’s1980s research for her second ethnography, Cherry Grove (1993a),and examines the more vexed and complex relationships of lesbiansto theatricality, drag, and camp by situating those relationshipswithin gender hierarchies and their politics in queer communities(‘‘Dick(less) Tracy and the Homecoming Queen’’). That introduceswhat is perhaps the hallmark of Newton’s critically reflexiveapproach: her judicious contextualizations (historical, cultural, andpolitical) are analytically articulated with her own experiences andself-positionings as a subject-participant in the cultural productionsshe analyzes.

In the second section, ‘‘Lesbian-Feminism,’’ Newton includes themost explicitly autobiographical essays in the collection, almost allof which were written between 1971 and 1973. Reflecting on herexperiences—of high school alienation and academic marginaliza-tion, and of shifting commitments to and critiques of (lesbian-) fem-inist politics—Newton situates them within larger social, political,and historical contexts, deploying critically reflexive approaches thatuse her experiences to crystallize cultural flashpoints in the shift-ing matrix of U.S. sexual=gender hegemonies as well as politicalmobilizations to change them.

The essays in the third section, ‘‘Butch,’’ showcase analyses of thecomplexities of butch gender in its articulations with sexuality—historically, socially, in contentious relations to U.S. Americanfeminist politics, and to cultural politics more broadly. Newton’sreflections on her own butch identifications substantially extend heranalyses and insights by clarifying, for example, not only the impor-tance of situating the researcher in relation to the research subject butalso the dense (and usually unexplored) mediations between researchchoices, fieldwork pragmatics, and researcher subjectivities.


Both the ‘‘Butch’’ and ‘‘Queer Anthropology’’ sections of MadeMe Gay amount to a treasure-trove of classic essays as well as severalof Newton’s hard-to-find and previously unpublished works: forexample, a little-known 1986 book review of psychiatrist RobertStoler’s works on intersexuality that Newton reviewed in relationto Kessler and McKenna’s Gender: An EthnomethodologicalApproach (1978); an address Newton gave on lesbian and gay issuesin anthropology to the Chairs of Anthropology Departments meetingat the 1993 American Anthropological Association conference; anhomage to David Schneider, Newton’s mentor in graduate schooland beyond; an open letter to ‘‘Manda Cesara’’; and much more.Also included here is the ‘‘My Butch Career’’ invited talk she gaveas the annual David R. Kessler Lecture (of the CUNY Center forLesbian and Gay Studies) in 1999, which Newton is currentlyexpanding into a book-length memoir, and her path-breakingCultural Anthropology (1993b) article, ‘‘My Best Informant’s Dress:The Erotic Equation in Fieldwork.’’

INSIDE THE ACADEMY AND OUT (RISTOCK AND TAYLOR)

Newton’s collection Made Me Gay not only brings together essaysthat work to detail the theoretical productivity of adopting criticallyreflexive approaches to sexuality, but also in the process clarifies thecomplex interpenetrations between research, theory, and politics.Those interpenetrations are made the organizing focus of Ristockand Taylor’s edited collection, Inside the Academy and Out:Lesbian=Gay=Queer Studies and Social ‘‘Action (Inside=Out)’’.

The project of Inside=Out is to put into dialogue and thereby clar-ify the close relationships between the ‘‘social action’’ work that scho-lars undertake in their research, in their university teaching, and intheir lives outside the academy in ‘‘other spheres of social action’’(p. x). The volume is not, however, about scholars in any genericsense: it is about self-identified lesbian, gay, and queer scholarsspecifically, who have fairly recently emerged as ‘‘out’’ or unclosetedacademics. As this suggests, the specific starting point of that volumeis the correlated recent emergence of lesbian=gay=queer studies in theU.S.=Canadian academy.

In the editors’ framing, lesbian=gay=queer (LGQ) studies has as itsgoal ‘‘to change the way people think about sexuality’’ (p. 3) and, as a‘‘social action’’ project specifically, to transform ‘‘the systems ofdomination that keep understandings of sexualities stuck within anoppressive homo=hetero divide’’ (p. 4). Sexual subjectivity and itspolitics is the common ground and key vehicle that contributors

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use (and the editors centralize) for clarifying the connections betweenLGQ research, teaching, and other (nonacademic) venues of socialaction. In this, contributors are working to evaluate, analyze, andbuild on the poststructuralist theories that have been foundationalin queer theory’s analyses of heteronormativity and sexual subjec-tivity in relation to political action. Inside=Out, then, directly tacklesthe challenge of adducing (and finding new pathways to) the politicalefficacy of poststructuralist theory.

Poststructuralist theory has not always translated well into socialscience inquiry (which is partly why most queer theorists have beenbased in the humanities), and its utility for political activism hasbeen the site of much debate. Indeed, one of the major criticismsof postructuralism has been precisely that it disables the groundfor large-scale political struggle. But the contributors to InsideOut take on those challenges directly: their essays explicitly analyzethe challenges of deploying poststructuralist theories of sexualsubjects to, for example, classroom dynamics and pedagogicalprojects, as well as to political activism and in research contexts,and they offer case studies as well as some quite brilliant analysesof ways in which and contexts in which poststructuralist approacheswork and do not work.

Specifically, across a wide range of topical foci—from coming outin the classroom to the failure of safer sex education projects—con-tributors analyze the entailments, ramifications, possibilities, andproductivity of poststructuralist theories of sexual subjectivity whilealso analyzing the tensions between such approaches and the ubiqui-tous, problematic, yet politically quite effective more essentialistapproach to sexual identity. In the editors’ words, this creates ashared concern among contributors with questions of ‘‘how to focuson lesbian and gay identities in research and how to teach [aboutthose identities] without essentializing them’’ as well as ‘‘how to takeup [the] deconstructive practices central to queer theory . . . whilemobilizing our work for social action in the here and now’’ (p. vix).

The ‘‘Inside’’ and ‘‘Out’’ of the title memorialize what the editorsdescribe as the both=and positioning of queer academics, who areboth ‘‘inside’’ the academy and also, to echo Newton, ‘‘marginal’’to it as well. The ‘‘outside’’ to which the editors refer is, in part,the complex identifications—variably of alliance, opposition, andambivalence—that LGQ academics often have to students, the acad-emy, and their research projects. In addition, the editors see LGQacademics as being ‘‘outside’’ the academy in terms of their ‘‘pressingsense of connection to social issues,’’ and thus in their political under-standings as well as their social relations (p. 5).


As that may suggest, while the editors do not frame Inside=Out asshowcasing critically reflexive approaches to sexuality, the project ofthe volume is effectively formulated to require such approaches. Theeditors direct attention to, for example, the conditions of work inLGQ studies, the conditions of learning in LGQ classrooms, the con-texts of reception for LGQ scholarship, the contexts of engagementfor LGQ research, and, more generally, the need to analyze the insti-tutions, practices, and discourses in which (and in relation to which)LGQ scholars and scholarship are sited.

In addition, critically reflexive approaches are motivated by thecomplex identifications that contributors to Inside=Out have withthe subjects about which they write: lesbian professors grapple withthe theoretical, pedagogical, and ethical issues surrounding whetherto come out in the classroom (Taylor, Khayatt), while others analyzehow to develop pedagogies that effectively challenge heteronormativ-ity (Britzman, Francis); queer scholars conduct undercover researchwith right-wing and Christian groups organizing anti-gay=lesbianinitiatives (Esterberg and Longhofer); a gay graduate student ana-lyzes the resurgence of unsafe sexual practices among young gaymen (Rehkopf ); a lesbian women’s studies professor analyzes dom-estic violence in lesbian relationships (Ristock); a lesbian professorof social work researches the social organization of lesbian caregiving(Aronson); a gay sociologist studies community-based HIV=AIDSorganizations (Cain); and a lesbian lawyer analyzes representationsof lesbian and gays in the law (Majury). Each contributor, then, isinvested or implicated in one or more of the following researchquestions they are posing, the contexts where they are researching,the sexual subjectivities they are theorizing, or the political changethey are calling for or undertaking.

SEX, SEXUALITY, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGIST(MARKOWITZ AND ASHKENAZI)

If Inside Out tries to clarify how theory, research, and pedagogyaround sexuality can be conceived as ‘‘transformative work relevantto the larger social world’’ (p. 5), then Markowitz and Ashkenazi’sSex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist (‘‘Sex’’) aims more modestlyto clarify how accounting for the anthropologist’s sexuality can con-tribute to the discipline of anthropology. Framed by its editors asinitially geared to ‘‘breaking the silence’’ (p. 5) around the anthropo-logist’s sexuality in the field, Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologisthad its genesis at a 1994 session of the American AnthropologicalAssociation meetings. The silence to which Markowitz and

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Ashkenazi refer was the quite striking absence of scholarly attentionto the anthropologist’s sexuality in the field in terms of anthropologi-cal research, ethnographic analysis, and theory building for most ofthe discipline’s history. By the time Sex was published five years afterthat 1994 AAA session, however, one path-breaking journal articleand two major edited volumes had appeared in print to introduceand detail many of the epistemological and methodological stakesin theorizing fieldworkers as sexual subjects: Esther Newton’s ‘‘MyBest Informant’s Dress’’ (Cultural Anthropology, 1993b, reprintedinMade Me Gay), Don Kulick and Margaret Willson’s (1995) Taboo:Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork,and Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap’s (1996a) Out in the Field:Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists.

Thus with the ‘‘silence’’ already broken, the editors of Sex soughtto ‘‘redirect’’ their volume’s project to foreground ‘‘experimentationwith a variety of intersections where sexuality and epistemologymeet’’ (p. 5). That said, across the essays the editors’ original goalof ‘‘breaking the silence’’ remains prominent, usually taking the formof critiquing the orthodoxy that fieldworkers adhere to an ‘‘asexualethnographic presence’’ in the field (p. 16). That continues to be animportant critique to offer and develop, not least because we haveyet to see a broader shift away from that orthodoxy. The editorsand contributors to Sex thus seek to carve out space for treating field-workers as sexual subjects and incorporating fieldworkers’ sexualitywithin the purview of research methods and ethnography—including,to varying degrees, arguments for the legitimacy of anthropologistsengaging in sexual relations in the field. As part of resituating theanthropologist as a sexual (and also, for some contributors, gen-dered) subject in the field, contributors pursue questions about theramifications of that for the production of anthropological knowl-edge, the self=other binary, theories of power and the hierarchiesout of which ethnographic knowledge is built, the politics of ethno-graphic representation, and fieldwork methods, and other proble-matics. In the sections that follow, I take those and relatedproblematics as the organizing structure for treating in more depthselected essays from the Sex volume as well as from the Made MeGay and Inside=Out collections.

THEORIZING THE EROTIC DIMENSION OF FIELDWORK

Newton’s ‘‘My Best Informant’s Dress: The Erotic Equation in Field-work’’ (1993b) was a path-breaking article (Kulick, 1995, p. 4) inopening up the terrain of the ethnographer’s sexual subjectivity in


the field and arguing that eroticism and deep emotional involvementplay central roles in ethnographic research. The ‘‘best informants’’of Newton’s title are, at base, ‘‘best’’ because they are loved. In thisessay, Newton explores the relationship between fieldworker and‘‘key informant’’ to develop her argument for analyzing how love,romance, and eroticism figure into that relationship and howemotional involvements may indeed be foundational in creatingethnographic knowledge about other cultural worlds.

In fleshing out the erotic equation in fieldwork, Newton criti-cally reflects upon her relationships with key informants from hermost recent fieldwork in Cherry Grove (Newton, 1993a) as well asher 1960s research with drag queens (1972). She writes, ‘‘[m]y field-work has been fraught with sexual dangers and attractions that weremuch more like leitmotifs than light distractions’’ (p. 250). ForNewton, eroticism flowed in part from the assumptions she and herresearch subjects shared, ‘‘that women are attracted to women andmen to men’’ and its correlate, that ‘‘people who were objects ofmy research were also potential sexual partners’’ (p. 251). Her ownidentifications and involvements with lesbians and gay men, then,mean for her that ‘‘key informants . . . have usually been more tome than an expedient way of getting information, and something dif-ferent from ‘just’ friends’’ (p. 251). Critically reflecting on herrelationship with a key informant from her Cherry Grove research,Newton finds that ethnographic data ‘‘has always flowed to me ina medium of emotion, ranging from passionate—although never con-summated—erotic attachment through profound affection to livelyinterest’’ (p. 251).

Among the ramifications of this, for Newton, is that the mediumof emotion ‘‘empowers me in my projects and, when it is recipro-cated, helps motivate informants to put up with my questions andintrusions’’ (p. 251). Here Newton raises questions anthropologistsrarely pose: Why do our research subjects tolerate us? How do wemanage to plug away at fieldwork for months and years in whatare oftentimes unfamiliar and stressful social contexts? The ‘‘eroticequation,’’ Newton argues, is the unacknowledged and vital basisfor such work. It not only ‘‘empowers’’ fieldwork but also the writingof ethnography, which, for Newton, ‘‘has always been inspired byand addressed to an interior audience of loved ones like informantsand mentors . . . as if the work were a form of courting andseduction’’ (p. 256).

Newton’s 1993 article opened up numerous pathways that consid-erations of fieldworkers’ sexualities could take. In Markowitz andAshkenazi’s Sex collection, Rose Jones charts one such pathway

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as she argues against the disciplinary denial of the fieldworker as asexual subject.

NEGOTIATING SEXUAL SUBJECTIVITIES

Jones’ contribution to Sex helps to clarify both the culturally spe-cific and the broader theoretical insights to be gained when the field-worker’s sexuality is brought within the purview of ethnographicanalysis. When Jones began her research on the biomedical and eth-nomedical dimensions of STDs in St. Lucia, she, like many anthro-pologists, assumed she could bracket her sexuality as ‘‘removedfrom the data-collecting process’’ (p. 26). The Lucian villagers amongwhom she lived, however, refused to accept such an asexual self-presentation and Jones was compelled to adjust to their positioningsof her. It was precisely through the process of adducing Lucians’expectations of her and negotiating her sexual positioning in herfield relations that Jones gained significant insights into local under-standings and ideologies of sexual (and gender) mores, insights thatproved vital for her ethnographic analysis.

For example, Jones’ Lucian women friends encouraged her tosecure a local ‘‘husband’’–in the person of an elderly neighbor–toprovide her with economic resources (masculine-coded labors) andsocial resources (defending her reputation when village men talkedabout her). From Jones, her local ‘‘husband’’ in turn secured econ-omic resources (access to luxury food items; women’s labor in theform of Jones cooking meals for him) and social resources (respect;status). The women also tried to get Jones to take a (man) lover: theirreasoning was that her (actual yet absent) husband was away in theU.S. making babies with other women and, since men give economicresources to the mothers of their children, his baby-making wouldcause him to divert economic resources away from her. Jones thusneeded to have her own child(ren) with a local man (or men) in orderto secure economic resources ‘‘to compensate for what they [thewomen] perceived to be an imminently bleak economic situationfor me’’ (p. 32).

Through these and other negotiations around her sexuality, Jonescame to see that Lucians’ cross-gender relations operated in andthrough certain cultural ‘‘precepts’’, of sexuality (p. 34), includingthe presumption that one must establish sexual and reproductive alli-ances with multiple partners in order to ‘‘generate and secure sexualand economic resources’’ (p. 28). Moreover, when Jones proved unre-sponsive to the various prospective men lovers the Lucian womenwere sending her way, the women abandoned that strategy only to


begin sending to her prospective women lovers (zameze). Thus didJones also come to apprehend ‘‘the local conviction that humansare sexual creatures,’’ and its correlate that ‘‘only social deviants failto engage in sexual activities’’ (p. 35): if men were not to her liking,women lovers were the obvious solution.

DISJUNCTURES AND=IN THE PRODUCTION OFANTHROPOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE

Jones’ analysis reveals that she was able to develop her knowledge ofLucian sexual ideologies only because Lucians insistently inserted herinto their sexual universe; her ability to apprehend Lucian sexualideologies was ‘‘largely contingent on their understanding of me’’(p. 36). A primary source of ethnographic understanding, then,may reside precisely in the disjunctures between an ethnographer’sculturally based sexual ideologies and those of the people with whomshe=he works—disjunctures that are only accessible if the ethnogra-pher eschews an asexual self-positioning.

Ashkenazi and Rotenberg’s essay on ‘‘going naked into fieldwork’’(p. 112) in Sex also centers on such disjunctures as these authors ana-lyze nude public bathing in Japan and Vienna. While also providingcompelling ethnographic analyses of the social organization of publicbathing and the cultural work sited at the baths at their respectivefield sites, the authors focus their essay on their reflections on thechallenges of participating in naked fieldwork. Their awkwardnessaround the nudity at the baths—their own and that of everyoneelse—grew out of their deep-seated cultural readings of nudity as hav-ing de facto sexual valences. It was precisely their discomfort withnaked fieldwork at the baths, however, that enabled them to appre-hend and to analyze the varied Viennese and Japanese cultural pro-jects that contextualize and animate the local meanings of nudity atthe baths and that work to produce such nudity as nonsexual.

The analysis Ashkenazi and Rotenberg develop also works to com-plicate and, through that, to deepen the central argument of the Sexvolume—that fieldworker sexual subjectivity needs to be incorpor-ated into fieldwork and ethnographic analysis. The complication liesin the fact that, at one level (that of fieldwork), their analysis is notabout the anthropologist’s sexuality in the field but rather about itsabsence: they are coping with the pragmatics of treating as nonsexual(its local meaning) a practice that for the authors is resolutely sexual.The deepening, however, lies at the next level (of ethnographic analy-sis); the authors must critically analyze their sexual subjectivities inthe context of the baths in order to clear space for developing

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ethnographic accounts of nude bathing that are not only faithful toits nonsexual meanings in Japan and Vienna but also able toapprehend the cultural projects at work in its local productionand practice.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND THE SELF=OTHERRELATIONSHIP

Attending to sexual subjectification in the field—the ways in whichfieldworkers are positioned as sexual subjects by the people withwhom they work—provides insights not only for the productionof anthropological knowledge (Jones’ apprehension of Lucian sex-ual ideologies, for example) but also, as Kulick (1995, p. 5) hasemphasized, insights into the production of anthropological knowl-edge. Among those latter insights is, first, the need for fieldwor-kers to be willing to engage with and analyze the ways they arelocally positioned and signified as sexual. Second, fleshing outthe sexual subjectivities of fieldworkers also stands to reveal‘‘the intersubjectivity of self with other’’ (Jones, p. 41) and,through that, to serve as a productive intervention into the long-standing binary of (unmarked) anthropological Western Self=non-Western cultural Other.

Such an intervention is made all the more pressing by the radicalsexual difference that has so often been ascribed to the non-WesternOther vis-a-vis the Western Self and that has been upheld, in no smallpart, by the correlated disciplinary silence around the fieldworker’ssexuality. The longstanding silence around the Western Self as a sex-ual subject, in other words, contrasts profoundly with the densityof scholarly discourse on the sexuality of the non-Western Other,historically often represented to the point of sexual excess.

Attending to the intersubjective dimensions of fieldwork caninstead reveal the dynamic production of fieldworker sexual subjec-tivity through social relationships in the field. In the Sex volume,for example, Climo reflects on his research with members of a Pente-costal group in Mexico and writes of the new sense of self that maydevelop during fieldwork in part because the fieldworker’s sense ofidentity ‘‘depends significantly on reactions from other people’’(Sex, p. 45). While Climo opts to examine those dynamics by limitingthem to the ‘‘unconscious sexual baggage and desires’’ (p. 53) thatanthropologists bring to the field, Lewin and Leap (1996b, p. 5)in their introduction to Out in the Field, have provided more socio-logically nuanced tools for analyzing what they frame as the socialdynamics of ‘‘manag[ing] one’s identity’’ in the field. Emphasizing,


like Climo, that it is a conflict-ridden process of negotiation, Lewinand Leap highlight not the unconscious as the motor of such con-flicts, but rather the social nature of subjectivity: ‘‘the identities ofall people—anthropologists included—are shifting, multiplex, andsituated in specific historical and sociological contexts’’ (Lewin andLeap, 1996b, p. 7).

THE SOCIALITY OF SEX AND SUBJECTIVITY

Many of the essays in Inside=Out explore the usefulness of such a(poststructuralist) theorization of subjectivity, usually by contrastingit with essentialist theories of identity that posit it as fixed and stable.In their contributions to Inside=Out, for example, Taylor andKhayatt each explore identity in relation to the issue of coming outas lesbian professors in the university classroom, including in classesthat are part of LGQ programs: whether a professor should or shouldnot come out, what it means to come out in the classroom, and whatis at stake in coming out or not coming out. Addressing the issuebecause of the pressures on LGQ professors to come out in theirclasses, these authors ask in what sense an assertion of one’s sexualidentity can bridge distances between professor and students. Eachauthor, in different ways, argues that coming out ‘‘performs itsown set of assumptions’’ (Khayatt, p. 37): it fixes identity, namingit in stable form and, in so doing, forecloses at least as much, ifnot more, than it opens. The reason for that, they argue, is that ident-ity is not singular: as a result of a professor coming out in class, somestudents may forge identifications with her, but it is equally likelythat other axes of difference between the professor and student willremain or even be foregrounded.

Britzman’s essay in Inside=Out delves more deeply into the utilityof such poststructuralist (Lacanian and Foucauldian) theories of sub-jectivity as relational, i.e., forged through (varied and multiple) iden-tifications, in her reflections on how to create university classroomsthat are not sites of sexual normalization, that is, heteronormative.Building on the theory of the subject as fluid, shifting, and relational,Britzman explores possible ways of (and the challenges of ) openingstudents’ identificatory possibilities; that is, expanding the possibleidentifications students may find in course readings and classroomdiscussions with instructors. Presenting some of her own pedagogicalvehicles for that, she calls on professors to emphasize pedagogicalpractices that ‘‘unleash new subject positions’’ (p. 59) for students,that help students to ‘‘exceed’’ themselves and to question their

34 D. Elliston

own ‘‘impulse to normalize’’ (p. 63), as an alternative to narrowingthe horizon of identificatory possibilities to the heteronormative.

Poststructuralist theories of the subject are also explored inrelation to research problems by other contributors to Inside=Out.Rehkopf’s brilliant essay, for example, examines why, after morethan a decade of safer sex education campaigns, increasing numbersof young gay men are having unprotected sex and thus elevating andincreasing rates of HIV infection. Rehkopf begins with a critique ofsafer sex education campaigns’ reliance on a theory of the personas a ‘‘rational maximizer’’ (p. 222) who needs only to be givenrelevant information on HIV transmission routes and risks in orderto change his=her sexual practices (‘‘do not have unprotected analsex’’). Absented in such campaigns, he counters, are the social mean-ings (and uses) of those very sexual practices.

Drawing on Lacanian and Foucauldian approaches to sexual sub-jectivity, Rehkopf argues that sex cannot be approached as merepractice or behavior. Rather, he argues, sex in Western modernityis a fundamental medium for self-constitution, indeed a primarymedium for gay subjects’ self-constitution in such homophobic socie-ties. That is because, he argues, sex is social: it sometimes involveslove and romance, but it always involves connection and emotion.‘‘Those who identify as gay or lesbian,’’ he explains, ‘‘do not considertheir identifications [as gay=lesbian] to be based simply on their abil-ity or desire merely to satiate drives, but rather to forge positive andhealthy identifications, whether to love and=or to connect deeply withand through other people, to become selves’’ (pp. 234–235, emphasisin original). By ‘‘the sociality of sex,’’ then, Rehkopf means ‘‘theaffirming and productive aspect of relational, sexual identifications’’(p. 228). In contrast, the reductive ‘‘risk behaviors’’ approach of safersex campaigns does not address any of these constitutive meanings ofgay sex. And while Rehkopf recognizes the political antihomophobicvalue of the safer sex campaigns’ focus on ‘‘risk behaviors’’ ratherthan ‘‘risk groups,’’ he demonstrates quite convincingly that sex can-not be so separated from the social contexts and meanings withinwhich it is practiced. Thus, he writes, in order to be effective in reduc-ing rates of HIV infection, ‘‘educators must focus upon meaning atleast as much as they have focused on moaning’’ (p. 229).

Rehkopf’s analysis in Inside=Out then, offers a politically andempirically useful application of theorizing the subject in processualrather than essential terms, as ‘‘inchoate’’ rather than ‘‘always-already existent’’ (p. 239): it is only through such a fluid, shifting,relational theorization of subjectivity that ‘‘the formative role ofsexual interactions’’ (p. 240) becomes apparent; that is, that gay sex


becomes visible as a vital medium for the ongoing project of self-constitution (and reconstitution) of queer subjects.

THEORIZING IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE

Among the contributors to Sex, two also deploy a sociologicallydynamic (postructuralist) theorization of identity: Fitzgerald inreflecting on his fieldwork with members of gay and lesbian organiza-tions in Sweden and Finland at the turn of the 1980s, and Chao in heressay on fieldwork with Taiwanese lesbians. To the extent that suchan approach highlights the dynamic operation of axes of samenessand difference, that is, of the bases and variability of identificationsand nonidentifications between fieldworkers and research subjects,it can help to operationalize the insights of poststructuralist theoryat the same time that it further complicates the self=other binary.

In his essay in Sex, for example, Fitzgerald reflects on his pre-fieldwork assumption that his being gay would serve as a primarypoint of identification with gay and lesbian Finns and Swedes,and thus ‘‘assure easy acceptance and rapport’’ (p. 120). Instead,what proved far more salient were the differences—of generation,class, and gender—between him and his research subjects as thosesignified in local social histories and politics. His age, for example,positioned him as part of an ‘‘older [gay] generation,’’ distancinghim from the younger one that had alienated their elders with theirpolitical activism. His status as a professor signified along an axis ofclass difference for his relationships with these mostly working classgays and lesbians. And, in Sweden, his gender entered the gay socialfield as a difference that positioned him on one side of a pronouncedearly 1980s split between gay men and lesbians. For Fitzgerald, thesocial salience of these differences in contrast to his expectation ofthe shared primacy of gay identity clarified ‘‘the limits of trying toshare a common identity’’ (p. 127), and led him to reject essentialistapproaches to subjectivity in favor of foregrounding its ‘‘socialcomplexity’’ (p. 127).

Chao also grapples with axes of sameness and difference in criti-cally reflecting on her research with lesbians in Taiwan’s T-bars inthe early 1990s. Unlike Fitzgerald, though, Chao did not assume thather lesbian (or her Taiwanese) identity would be the ‘‘same’’ as thatof her research subjects. In fact it was her feeling ‘‘mostly disturbedand out of place’’ (pp. 130–131) at her first prefieldwork visit to aT-bar that prompted her, like Jones and Ashkenazi and Rotenberg,to use her own discomfort as a research tool. Through that, shewas able to critically apprehend ‘‘the distinct rules of performance

36 D. Elliston

that all insiders must abide by’’ (p. 132) and that Chao—much to herown dismay, but invaluably for her research—kept violating.

The result is an insightful analysis of fieldworker sexual subjec-tivity that also provides a theoretically and ethnographically richanalysis of same-sex sexuality among female-bodied Taiwanese inthe 1990s. Chao analyzes how, for example, her commitment to adesexualized fieldworker role butted up against the performativecodes of conduct at the T-bars. There, sexualized gender perfor-mances were the very medium of social interaction between the self-styled supra-femininity of the P’o’s and supra-masculinity of the T’s,and the performative medium for T and P’o self-constitution as sex-ual subjects. The performative codes required that Chao position her-self as either P’o or T in and through correlated codes of conduct thatinvolved engaging convincingly in the semiscripted T–P’o flirtatiousconversational play.

Chao, however, found herself consistently falling short in her per-formance as a P’o, especially in ‘‘the implicitly erotic discursiveexchanges’’ with T’s (p. 143). That, combined with her commitmentto an asexual fieldworker presence, created a ‘‘doubly asexualized . . .ethnographic performance in the field . . . [that] greatly underminedthe effectiveness of my research’’ (p. 139). Similar to Jones’ experi-ences in St. Lucia, Chao found she had to reposition herself as a sex-ual subject in the terms her research subjects laid out. Unlike Jones,however, Chao also had to perform her new sexual subject position,and was never fully able to succeed: ‘‘I . . . was tentatively but nothappily accepted by my informants as a P’o’’ (p. 132). As a result,Chao began searching for alternative P’o subject positions that mightbetter suit her, and eventually found one in the role of P’o ‘‘big sister’’(chieh-chieh) to T ‘‘little brothers’’ (ti-ti). Structured across ‘‘genera-tions’’ (defined by decade) and T=P’o genders, these ‘‘fictive’’ kinrelationships, Chao learned, served as the primary medium for socialrelations between T’s and P’o’s outside of the T-bars. Chao’s searchfor a more comfortable P’o role thus led her to discover the kinshipsocial system that, for T’s and P’o’s, connected the performative barcontext to their daily lives, and thus too led Chao to a more compre-hensive ethnographic analysis.

RELATING SEXUALITY TO GENDER

As Chao’s essay demonstrates by way of her difficulties performingconvincingly as a suprafeminine P’o, among the variable axes ofdifference that structure sexual subjectivity, gender is oftentimescentral. This introduces a fourth problematic that critically reflexive


approaches to sexuality can help to clarify: the relationship betweensexuality and gender. Newton offers sophisticated analyzes of therelationships between gender and sexuality in several of her essaysin Made Me Gay, and in ways that foreground not only variabilityin their interrelations but also the operations of power. In analyzingdrag and camp performances among lesbians in Cherry Grove, forexample, Newton innovates the concept of ‘‘gay gender,’’ a kind of‘‘compound drag, whereby [gay men] queens could parody . . . ‘realmen’ or butches, and butches [lesbian women] could parody either‘real women’ or drag queens’’ (p. 86). Such performances of gay gen-der, she argues, ‘‘serve to multiply and elaborate gender’s meanings’’(p. 87) in ways that harness gender performances to sexual subjectiv-ities—for example, for lesbians by drawing on butch–femme sexualaesthetics—at the same time that they rely, foundationally, on theidea that there is an authentic gay self that drag either covers orreveals (p. 86). Yet Newton argues that the performance of gay gen-der among Cherry Grove lesbians, specifically, only emerged recentlyas a result of lesbians’ increasing economic and social power inthat community. Thus does Newton argue that gay gender cannotbe approached merely as style, sexual or otherwise, but must be seenin relation to larger shifting constellations of gender and power.

In the Sex volume, Markowitz’s contribution focuses most directlyon the relationship between gender and sexuality in her reflections onfieldwork with Russian immigrants in New York and Russian Jews inIsrael. The reflections motivate her argument for incorporating ‘‘thesexed anthropologist’’ into ethnographic methodologies and analysisto create ‘‘sexed ethnography’’ (p. 162). Markowitz’s notion of ‘‘sex-ing’’ introduces her provocative assertion that there is a necessaryrelationship between a fieldworker’s claim to asexuality in the fieldand a fieldworker’s claim to genderlessness. The discipline, she writes,has required anthropologists ‘‘to conform to the convention of asex-ual fieldwork by assuming a position of gender-neutrality with infor-mants’’ (p. 164, emphasis added). Suggesting that it is only by beinggendered in the field (in their relations with research subjects) thatfieldworkers are able to be slotted into the local sexual universe,Markowitz argues against anthropologists trying to achieve asexualidentities in the field by positioning themselves as genderless. Asthe terms of those arguments indicate, for Markowitz the sexual sub-ject is always and necessarily a sexually gendered subject: she asserts,unequivocally, that without gender positioning there can be no entryinto the sexual universe—any sexual universe.

As provocative as her assertion may be, it has been primarilywomen anthropologists who have made reference to trying to

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position themselves in the field as gender-neutral or, almost as often,as ‘‘honorary men’’ (which is not a case of gender neutrality) (Golde,1986); rarely have men anthropologists addressed trying to achievea nongendered status in the field. Perhaps, then, instead of sitinggender-neutrality as the necessary basis for an asexual self-represen-tation, Markowitz’s linking of these two fieldworker self-positioningsmight be more usefully posed as an empirical question: How havefieldworkers asserted a (non)gendered positioning, a (non)sexualone, and how have they forged relationships between the two? Relat-edly, in the arena of the fieldworker’s relationships in the field, whiletreating sexual subjects as necessarily gendered subjects may seemlike commonsense to U.S. American readers, such resonance shouldalso raise some suspicion about its cultural specificity. We mightconsider which ethnographic lines of pursuit would be disabled,what ways of organizing sexuality could become inapprehensiblewere anthropologists to adopt as credo the position that sexualsubjectivity—theirs and others’—is always built on a genderedsubject1. In other words, anthropologists may want to hold out moreconceptual space around the relationships of gender to sexual subjec-tivity in the field, enough to allow us to apprehend the various wayspeoples may and may not relate the two.

SEX IN THE FIELD

Markowitz’s arguments that gender neutrality is the necessary path-way to fieldworker asexuality and that assuming a gendered positionis necessary to enter a sexual universe both speak of her fieldworkexperiences: initially seeking gender neutrality to secure her owndesexualization; finding that self-presentation rejected by herresearch subjects; taking up a gendered position and finding that, withit, she was entered into the local sexual universe. Markowitz then fol-lowed her gendered and sexual positionings into sexual relations in thefield. Thus she, along with several other contributors to Sex, arguesfor the acceptability of fieldworkers having sexual relationships withresearch subjects; that is, they call for anthropology to reject theinjunction against sexual involvements in the field and instead toresituate them as a legitimate aspect of the conduct of fieldwork.

There are a number of resting points along what might be envi-sioned as a ‘‘sex in fieldwork continuum’’ that begins, at one end,with the orthodoxy of the anthropologist’s asexuality and correlatedcelibacy. Near that end would be fieldworkers (Salamone and Climoin Sex) who are celibate at their field sites, but who go off to nearbycities or towns (or otherwise get away from their research subjects) to


get their sexual ‘‘needs’’ met (Salamone, p. 66). Bringing a spouse orpartner to the field may lie around the midpoint of the continuum: itsituates the fieldworker as a sexual subject but circumscribes his=hersexuality to interactions with the spouse=partner, once again enablingthe desexualization of interactions with research subjects.Markowitz’scall for legitimizing sexual relations with research subjects, which isechoed by other contributors to Sex (Winkelman; Poewe; Ashkenaziand Markowitz), could be sited somewhere past the continuum’smidpoint, heading towards the end opposite celibacy: these authorscall for an accepting stance towards anthropologists becoming sexu-ally involved with research subjects. Markowitz frames sex withresearch subjects as legitimate in part because it may produce deepercultural understandings but also because it offers a way to ‘‘minimizethe distance and reduce the hierarchy that separate investigator frominvestigated’’ (pp. 172–173); that is, she and others position it as astrategy for intervening in the self=other binary.

Neither Markowitz or the other contributors mentioned aboveposition sex with research subjects as a research method per se: Thatis, none takes the step from the claim that sex with informants shouldbe accepted to the position that sex with informants should be advo-cated or adopted as a research method for, for example, deepeningcultural understandings. At the opposite end of the continuum fromfieldworker celibacy, as that may suggest, can be placed those who doadvocate sex with research subjects as a research method and, in theSex volume, Lunsing is the sole advocate of that position. His field-work in Japan, motivated by the ‘‘socially prevalent idea that every-one should marry,’’ investigated ‘‘the extent to which it limitspeople’s freedom’’ by asking ‘‘whether it was possible in Japan to livemore or less as I did in the Netherlands’’ (p. 175). How Lunsing livedin both places was ‘‘out’’ as a sexually active gayman: he had aNether-lands boyfriend, a Japanese boyfriend, and other Japanese loversthroughout his fieldwork. Indeed, he describes himself as educatinghis Japanese friends and lovers about the practice of nonmonogamy,such that they ‘‘began to question matters such as promiscuity andjealousy’’ (p. 189).

Lunsing authorizes his sexual relationships in the field by asserting,‘‘If participant observation means participating in all aspects of thelives of those with whom one conducts research, that should includelove and sex’’ (p. 183). A similar point has been made by otheranthropologists in Sex and elsewhere (Newton, 1993b; Kulick,1995): usually, however, it is offered as a challenge to the self=otherbinary and other hierarchies underpinning ethnographic knowledge,and in some cases it is offered to clarify the exceptionalism (and costs)

40 D. Elliston

of bounding off sexuality, setting it apart from all of the otherdomains of practical activity in which fieldworkers routinely partici-pate and which provide the empirical basis for ethnographic analysis.Lunsing, however, does not head in either of those directions.Instead, hemoves to position sexwith ‘‘informants’’ as completely non-problematic. On the ethics of it, for example, Lunsing writes, ‘‘I tooka light-hearted view of the ethical matters . . . and gradually aban-doned the idea that a researcher’s ethics prescribe avoiding hurtinginformants. Pain is part of life’’ (p. 183). He suggests that using sexas a research method is not only productive for research but goodfor informants: ‘‘one even thanked me for being chosen as part ofmy research sample after we had sex’’ (p. 185). Ultimately, he (posi-tively) characterizes his ‘‘(sexual) activities’’ as ‘‘being amoral, with-out values’’ (p. 193): ‘‘Amorality and the lack of values increasinglymarked my activities, which were checked only by avoiding hurtingpeople deliberately except . . . in sadomasochistic play’’ (p. 193).

Lunsing’s attempts to position ethics and power as nonissues infieldwork would be contested by many anthropologists. Newton, forexample, has written, ‘‘it is hard to see why, if our power as anthropol-ogists to name the subordinated ‘other’ poses an ethical problem, thepower to ‘screw’ them doesn’t’’ (1993b, p. 15; 2000, p. 255). Lunsing’sbreezy dismissal of the possibility that perhaps having sex with one’sresearch subjects raises some complex issues stands in sharp contrastto the classic formulation of the argument for siting sex as a researchsource developed by Bolton (1994, 1995, 1996). In a series of articles,Bolton has laid out in considered detail the ethical, political, epistemo-logical, and ethnographic stakes of what he terms ‘‘sexual participantobservation’’: siting sex with research subjects as a legitimate source ofresearch insights. In developing his position, Bolton draws a clear dis-tinction between seeking out sex ‘‘for the purpose of obtaining data’’(which he does not endorse) and using the understandings gained fromsex and its intimacies as research sources after the fact (which he doesendorse) (1995, p. 151). Finally, Bolton’s arguments, and particularlyhis stronger one that sex may be a necessary research source if theproject concerns sexual behavior, is framed by the HIV=AIDSpandemic and the need to generate knowledge about actual sexualbehavior in order to develop effective HIV prevention strategies.

THE LIMITS OF REFLEXIVITY

In contrast to works along the lines of Bolton’s and Newton’s, Lun-sing’s analysis may be most useful for clarifying the limits ofreflexivity or, more accurately, problems that may arise in works


framed under the sign of reflexivity. Even as the ‘‘reflexive turn’’ inanthropology was gaining momentum in the 1980s, some were raisingconcerns about ethnographic analysis giving way to mere ‘‘navel-gazing’’ (Jarvie, 1988, p. 428; Sangren, 1988):A focus on the anthropol-ogist, self-absorbed confession, the evacuation of cultural analysis.While that is certainly a danger, I suggest that the danger emergesonly if reflexivity is seriously misconstrued—as experiential report-age, as confessional performance; that is, it becomes a danger onlyif the fieldworker’s ‘‘experience’’ becomes the focus and substanceof the narrative and the crucial element of analysis is set aside. Asit turns out, however, that really is not reflexivity at all: reflexivityrequires locating the ‘‘experiences’’ about which one writes withinfieldwork pragmatics and drawing out their sociocultural insights,theoretical ramifications, and significances. It requires, in otherwords, critical analysis.

It is unfortunate that several of the contributors to Markowitz andAshkenazi’s Sex anthology end up bound within a narrative mode ofconfession or reportage and unable to find their way to the criticalanalysis that marks a reflexive approach. Sex, overall, is less adeptat avoiding the pitfalls of a misconstrued reflexivity, less able thanits predecessor volumes on sexuality in the field (Kulick and Willson,1995; Lewin and Leap, 1996a) to mine the experiential complexitiesof fieldwork for specifically cultural and theoretical contributions.In addition to Lunsing’s essay, for example, Salamone’s contributionto the anthology and, to some extent, Climo’s as well, are to varyingdegrees caught within such an untheorized confessional mode.

Salamone’s essay, for example, looks back on his various periodsof fieldwork in Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s only to describe suchexperiences as his ambivalence about slipping off to see prostitutes;his ambivalence about being away from his wife and five children;his ambivalence about passing off as his wife in the field (‘‘sheinsisted,’’ p. 63) the graduate student with whom he was having anaffair; his revelation that abstinence was good for ‘‘creativity’’ thesummer his ‘‘sexual needs were not met in any manner’’ (p. 66); hisremarriage and angst about bringing that wife to the field; his ambiv-alence about leaving her back at home. His offerings to the broaderproject of rethinking sexuality and fieldwork are thus along the linesof ‘‘what people say and what they actually do are quite different’’(p. 58) and ‘‘real life is both this and that’’ (p. 71). In his conclusion,Salamone clarifies the misconstrued reflexivity that shaped his essay,writing, ‘‘Each period of my fieldwork holds some truth about mysexuality’’ (p. 71). It is also in his conclusion that he reveals theepistemological commitments that disabled his developing a critically

42 D. Elliston

reflexive analysis: ‘‘my generation . . . sought to understand the sub-jectivity of fieldwork in order to control for it’’ (p. 70) because ‘‘wemaintained that seeking truth was a worthy enterprise’’ (p. 71). Suchan epistemology, as Salamone’s essay unfortunately demonstrates,seeks ‘‘truth’’ not within the messy dynamics of fieldworknegotiations but in spite of them.

QUEERING SEXUAL SUBJECTIVITIES

Salamone entitled his essay, ‘‘The Heterosexual Anthropologist,’’ andin his conclusion reveals his reasoning: ‘‘The assumption on the partof many feminist and gay authors that being a male heterosexual inthe field is nonproblematic is wrong if not wrong-headed’’ (p. 69).He explains:

Some anthropologists argue that an ideal anthropologist must be

reflective at all times and, if possible, be a woman, gay, and a minority.

Somehow a white male anthropologist is ‘‘unproblematically’’ per-

ceived as being insensitive, unreflective, and domineering. My

experiences, and I am sure those of others, argue strongly against such

a facile and biased position. (p. 70)

No feminist scholar or queer scholar, to the best of my knowledge,has ever argued that hetero-masculinity is nonproblematic. Rather,some feminist and queer scholars have argued that straight whitemen anthropologists have all too often represented themselves as iftheir heterosexuality and masculinity (and, in some cases, their white-ness as well) were nonissues (‘‘nonproblematic’’). Newton (1993b),for example, makes just such an argument, as I discuss subsequently.Thus, setting aside the disingenuousness of Salamone’s allegationabout feminist and gay authors’ assumptions about heterosexualmale anthropologists, and taking it in an altogether different direc-tion, it speaks to an important experiential dynamic that is evidentin most (all but two) of the essays in Sex: heterosexual anthropolo-gists, who never before gave much thought to the specificity of their(hetero)sexual subjectivity, becoming aware—oftentimes uneasily oruncomfortably so—in the field of their (hetero)sexuality as non-normative and thus problematic.

Fieldwork can lead to such a problematizing of a researcher’s(hetero)sexual subjectivity in part because prior to fieldwork hetero-sexual anthropologists may experience their sexuality as unmarked,‘‘normal,’’ and relatively nonproblematic. In the field, however, such


a researcher’s sexuality may well become marked as different or non-normative relative to the sexual universe of the research subjects. Inthe essays in Sex, such a denormalization may arise because, forexample, the ‘‘same’’ heterosexuality is organized quite differentlyamong the research subjects (Jones, Winkelman); it may arisethrough the intersubjective negotiations of the fieldworker’s subjec-tivity more generally (Climo, Huseby-Darvas, Poewe); or it may arisebecause the work involved in fieldworkers presenting themselves asasexual subjects produces heightened awareness of that which isbeing denied, the fieldworker’s sexual subjectivity (Ashkenazi andRotenberg, Markowitz). When this occurs in the field, heterosexualsubjectivity is effectively ‘‘queered’’: It becomes strange unto itself,objectified by the fieldworker, different from that of everyone elsearound, nonnormative. The fieldworker becomes aware ofhim=herself as a (hetero)sexual subject, and that may be a new andunderstandably not altogether comfortable experience.

It also points to what may be a key reason why queer scholars havedeveloped most of the critically reflexive work on sexuality in anthro-pology. As Newton writes in her ‘‘My Best Informant’s Dress’’ essay,for women and queers, ‘‘matters of sexuality and gender can never beunproblematic’’ (1993b, p. 8; 2000, p. 248). Newton argues that thelongstanding silence around fieldworker sexuality has worked to pro-duce both a masculine-gendered subject position and heterosexualityas ‘‘the cultural givens, the unmarked categories’’ (2000, p. 244) inanthropological representations and in our theories as well. She thuscharacterizes the silence around fieldworker sexual subjectivity, itsunmarked masculinity and heterosexuality, as a ‘‘coercive silence’’(p. 248). In so doing, she links the legacy of the disciplinary refusalto reflect critically on sexual subjectivity to power: The cost of erasinganthropologists’ sexuality, she suggests, has been to fortify asunmarked the subject positions of heterosexual men anthropologists.The theoretical ramifications of attending to ethnographers’ sexualitythus opens into questions of power, of the hierarchies of difference onwhich ethnographic knowledge has been built and which sustaininequalities not only in the field but also ‘‘at home,’’ in the contextsof reception for anthropological texts, including the academy.

Newton concludes with a cautionary note signaling the need foradditional works like the ones reviewed here. She emphasizes whatis at stake in developing critically reflexive approaches to sexualitynot only for the project of producing ethnographic knowledge lesswedded to hierarchies but for producing social justice in the societiesthat most often send anthropologists out to do their research:‘‘Coercive silence regarding the unwritten rules of the sex and gender

44 D. Elliston

system,’’ she writes (p. 248), ‘‘makes changing them impossible. Asthe issues crystallize out of our history, anthropologists must beginto acknowledge eroticism, our own and that of others, if we areto reflect on its meanings for our work and perhaps help alter ourcultural system for the better.’’

NOTES

1. For example, despite the rather relentlessly engendering thrust of U.S. American cultural

productions around sexuality, in the practices of sadomasochism in the U.S. sexual subjec-

tivity is not produced through any necessary relation to gender. Sadomasochists constitute

their sexual pleasure and their sexual subjectivities through extended and wide-ranging

engagements with power. Both pleasure and power may, of course, in some cases be gen-

dered within or through the constituting practices of S=M, but not necessarily so. Take,

for example, Pat Califia’s (1994 [1983]) account of herself—a self-identified lesbian and

S=M practitioner at the time—finding specifically sexual pleasure in the practice of anally

fisting gay men. Califia’s sexual subjectivity in relation to anal fisting (an S=M practice

for her) does not invoke, rely or draw on gender difference—her own or that of her part-

ners—either for constituting the practice as sexual or for constituting herself as a sexual sub-

ject who finds sexual pleasure in the practice. If such an example of nongendered sexual

subjectivity can be found in U.S. American society, what of the many other societies in which

gender is not endowed with such profound powers to define subjects and structure desire?

S=M, moreover, does not stand alone in U.S. American cultural productions of sexuality

as having a nonexistent or tangential relation to gender: consider fetishism, bondage and

discipline, a preference for group sex, a preference for sex partners of a certain age group

or ethnic identification, etc. I suggest these point, minimally, to the need to hold out space

for anthropologists to be able to apprehend ways of organizing and constituting sexuality

(and sexual subjectivity) in which gender may not be foundational and in which it may, in-

deed, be irrelevant.

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