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C H A P T E R T H R E E Capturing the Research Journey/ Listening to Women’s Lives In this chapter I review the methodology that informed my approach to the writing of this book. I characterize throughout that the process of the women’s participation as a journey; so too was the research for me. I was involved as a witness, seeker, recorder, researcher, and narrator of their conditions. The outcome of this journey for me is a sustained commitment to help explicate the insights stigmatized women bring to their understanding of politics. I used multiple methods (a combination of life history and oral history approaches, ethnographic fieldwork, and observation ) to obtain the oral narratives on which to base my analysis. Each method helped clarify and bring into focus aspects of the women’s lives. Section One discusses the multiple steps I took to gain access to the women, and section Two discusses the process of analysis. This is a comprehensive accounting of the key components of methods including the process of fieldwork, the interviewing of respondents, coding , and analysis. The first section concerns itself with recounting how the actual gathering of data about female lawbreakers evolved into questions about stigmatized HIV-positive women’s political activities in Detroit, which is the central focus of the book. The second section explores the range of interpretative issues in researching stigmatized women. Researchers have tried to find appropriate metaphors for the process and verisimilitudes of qualitative research, in particular, the ethnographic experience (see such diverse accounts as Geertz 1973, 1983; Abu-Lughod 1988; Anderson 1990; Behar 1993; Maher 1997). The ability to illuminate such a distinctive process often requires an appeal to the senses and to metaphorical language. Researchers struggle to convey not merely the mechanics of these experiences, but to capture how they arrived at knowledge about their respondents (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983). Section One: Finding the Women Constructing the Study Sample In the course of my research, I officially interviewed sixty women and informally observed the lives of a dozen more. Sixteen of the sixty women are HIV-positive and constitute the deep sample, and the focus of the book. These sixteen women were the only ones, I believe, in the overall sample who were HIV-positive during the time of my research. The entire population who participated in this research shared two similarities : they all had a self-defined problem with crack cocaine and had some experience with sex work. This net was initially cast wide in order to fulfill three basic goals: understand the meanings women attach to crack cocaine use, explore women of color’s participation in street-level sex work, and investigate male violence toward female drug users. As I discuss in detail later, my research interests grew to incorporate an analytical snapshot of HIV-positive women crack cocaine users through active use, recovery , and empowerment that include a wide range of activism. Among my specific techniques for identifying respondents were self-identification, snowballing, chains of referral, and theoretical sampling. Gaining Access and Defining the Field When I first entered the field in Detroit I was filled with loathing, fear, and dread. Some of these feelings were characteristic of someone just beginning fieldwork—as evidence of an uncomfortable process where nothing is familiar and the researcher is introduced to new norms and behaviors. In the qualitative literature this process is typically referred to as “gaining access” and “getting into the field” (Goffman 1989; Hammersley and Atkinson 1983; Feldman, Bell, and Berger 2003). At the onset of fieldwork the researcher must recalibrate herself or himself into a new “sense” instrument— you learn in context about your new environment, absorbing new smells, sounds, body language, speech, and codes of behaviors (see Hammersley and Atkinson 1983; Burgess 1982). Contributing to my sense of discomfort was my feeling of being “sentenced” to what I considered the worst city in the United States. I had been to Detroit several times, and had formed negative opinions about it. Detroit has been described as a metropolis that is not a city or, rather, as a “post-industrial city.”1 As Herron argues in AfterCulture, Detroit occupies a special place in the American imagination as a “city [that] embodies everything the rest of the country wants to forget” (1995, 9). He frames Detroit as quintessentially postmodern because of its modernist tale of success, enfranchisement, and the promise of the American dream that marked it...

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