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appendix: fieldwork processes From 1992 to 1993, I attended an American university, Lawrence University, as an undergraduate. During that year, I became fascinated with the ways notions of “the family” crystallize moral and structural issues around race, gender , and sexuality in U.S. politics. When I returned to the United States in 1996 to prepare for my graduate fieldwork, I wanted to investigate U.S. debates on “the family” and “family values” in relation to cultural notions of gender, sexuality , race, and socioeconomic class. I focused on the intersecting dimensions of family politics partly because of feminist and queer interests,1 but I was not sure exactly how these theoretical interests would apply to my specific field of study. In the beginning of my graduate project, I became involved in the international and cross-disciplinary book project and workshop series “Fatherhood and the State” at Stockholm University, headed by the sociologist BarbaraHobson (seeGavanas2002).Collaboratingwiththedistinguishedscholars involved in this project helped me focus on men and fathers in relation to family policy and the labor market.2 Hobson’s book project also enabled me to include cross-disciplinary discussions from the inception of my anthropological study. Policy anthropology takes power relations, discourses, and practices as its objects of study in investigating political institutions (Shore and Wright 1997). In this study I combine policy anthropology with men’s studies and queer studies to analyze not only traditional anthropological ethnography based on interviews and participant observation but also articles, newsletters, policy material, and reports. I contextualize policy material and political/academic discourse through formal and informal interviews, ethnographic accounts of my interaction with representatives, and accounts of representatives ’ interaction with one another. This anthropological study contributes to cross-disciplinary discussions by bringing together several empirical di169 mensions instead of being based only on literary and other secondary sources or solely on ethnographic fieldwork. Throughout my fieldwork, I revised my approaches and adjusted my research questions on the basis of my continuous interaction and dialogue with representatives of the fatherhood responsibility movement. For instance, after spending time in the field, I realized the centrality of religion, sport, and notions of male sexuality to the fatherhood responsibility movement. I had not set out to focus on these issues, but I revised my research questions to include them. The sexual aspects of my interaction with representatives affected my fieldwork and added another dimension to my analysis of representatives’ gendered, racial, and sexual politics. Before and during fieldwork, I was determined not to take an adversarial approach to the fatherhood responsibility movement despite my biases about gendered and sexual equality. Although I approached my study from critical theoretical perspectives, I did not see the point of doing fieldwork merely to confirm preconceived ideas. My aim was to listen closely to the diverse voices of the actors in the fatherhood responsibility movement. While I carried out interviews and participant observation, I tried to maintain a sympathetic and open approach to the movement and its representatives. For instance, rather than conceive of masculinity politics as a unified interest in maintaining “traditional ” male privileges, I sought to nuance the competing and ambivalent claims and stakes of men in different positions and to highlight egalitarian tendencies as much as sexist and heterosexist ones. Not unexpectedly, it was a struggle to obtain access to the internal activities and meetings of the fatherhood responsibility movement. A large part of my fieldwork consisted of trying to get past the secretaries and assistants of representatives to get just a moment of their time. When I did get to talk to representatives, they often tried to make routine statements I had heard previously in conferences and texts. The organizations under study, especially the national ones, were very skilled in managing media and researcher representations of the movement. Representatives of the fatherhood responsibility movement had good reasons not to be accessible for studies. However, many representatives did express an interest in the international book project of which my study was a part (Hobson 2002) and were willing to participate in an international and comparative project. Representatives of fatherhood organizations were generally interested in research about fatherhood, and some even used earlier versions of my texts in their own presentations. For instance, Ronald Mincy from the Ford Foundation’s Strengthening Fragile Families Initiative quoted one of my earlier texts at a congressional hearing on fatherhood (Committee on Ways and Means 1999, 46). 170 / appendix [3.15.151.214] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 14:24 GMT...

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