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The Salience of Sexuality: Social Meaning-making and Researcher-informant Relations in the Field

Mon, August 22, 10:30am to 12:10pm, TBA

Abstract

The role of sexuality in the field has long been marginalized or ignored in even the most reflexive and intersectional of methodological approaches to ethnographic data interpretation. Drawing upon data from thirteen months of fieldwork in a Chicago pawnshop, I challenge this omission, seeking to better understand the role of a researcher’s sexual status—or one’s perceived and actual sexual availability and preferred sexual practices—in organizing interactions with research participants in the field. In doing so, I demonstrate how attending to sexuality in ethnographic data analysis sheds light on the construction of social meaning by informants and researchers alike and underscoring the role researchers ourselves play in the active (re)creation of salient social categories in a given field site.

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