Negotiating Sex Work: Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism

1. Researching Sexuality: The Politics-of-Location Approach for Studying Sex Work

· 3 ·· CHAPTER 1 · Researching Sexuality The Politics-of-Location Approach for Studying Sex Work Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz Qualitative researchers customarily consider how the visible aspects of their identity (i.e., race and gender) affect how their interviewees might respond to them. Other aspects of the researcher’s identity, such as sexuality, are concealable and likely to remain invisible throughout the research encounter. However, qualitative social science research on sex work often brings the issue of sexuality (for both the researcher and the researched) to the front and center in unanticipated ways. Yet researchers’ silence around sexuality seems to be the norm, and with a few exceptions (Bellamy, Gott, and Hinchliff 2011; Brak-Lamy 2012; Manalansan 2006) scholars’ published works do not address the methodological questions concerning the range of potential sexual encounters and expressions in field research. This chapter reflects a collaboration of our thinking about the politics of sexuality in conducting sex work research from a critical feminist perspective.1 In the past thirty years, anthropologists and sociologists have expressed reservations about including qualitative field reflections that focused on certain identity categories such as race, social class, and gender. Today, however, it is unthinkable for social science researchers not only to ignore how all aspects of their identities shape field experiences but also not to grapple with the complicated role of identity (e.g., gender, race, nationality ) in the field. Conceptualizing sexual identities, behaviors, and desires is important in the research encounter, and we propose a politics-oflocation approach (Anthias 2002; Lorenz- Meyer 2004; Mohanty 1995; Rich 1986) as part of the methodological preparation in feminist sex work research. Adrienne Rich (1986) and later Chandra Mohanty (1995) were 4 MICHELE TRACY BERGER AND KATHLEEN GUIDROZ the first to acknowledge how one’s locations or positions serve as a source of knowledge—as “the historical, geographical, cultural, psychic, and imaginative boundaries which provide the ground for political definition and self-definition” (Mohanty 1995, 68). Anthropologists were the first scholars to rethink the importance of the researcher’s stance vis-à-vis sexuality in fieldwork (see Kulick and Willson 1995; Markowitz and Ashkenazi 1999). They called for a reconsideration of sexuality in relation to field research, and they challenged earlier positivist theories that make sexuality suspect or abstract or relegate it to unanalyzed field notes. A politics-of-location approach extends anthropologists’ ethnographic inroads into thinking about how a researcher’s own views on sexuality shape research outcomes and could further help prepare researchers—before they formally begin their research on sex work—to anticipate and comprehend challenges that may arise during the research process. As Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer (2004) concedes, “practical methodological questions usually take precedence over a thorough inquiry into the researchers’ own epistemic locations, agency and convictions” (1). We believe when researchers acknowledge that their sexuality is embedded in the multiple stages of qualitative research, this acknowledgment benefits socialscienceresearchonsexwork.Feministresearchers,inparticular,will realize their goal of reflexivity (see Callaway 1992; Harding 1993) toward sexuality and understanding sex workers in their various environments.2 The politics-of-location approach to sex work research that we develop here builds on the more general framework developed by feminist selfreflexive researchers (Bloom 1997; Flowers 1998; Gluck and Patai 1991; Haraway 1988; Harding 1993; Harstock 1988; Kirsch 1999; Letherby 2003; Naples 2003; Seymour 1998; Visweswaran 1994; 1997; Wolf 1996). From this work our approach specifically acknowledges the importance of recognizing one’s “positionality” (Anthias 2002)—the ongoing shifting locations of the self—throughout the research process to the “finished” product (Thapar-Björkert and Henry 2004; see also Geller and Stockett 2006). What our approach adds to the positionality framework is an explanation of how sexuality is coconstitutively produced in the research encounter with the potential to shape both data collection and analysis. Where the positionality literature emphasizes “multivocality” and the interview encounter as a “partnership” (Hesse-Biber and Leavy 2004, 141), a “coconstruction of . . . understanding” (Miller and Crabtree 2004, 188), or an opportunity for “erasing boundaries” (Visweswaran 1997), the RESEARCHING SEXUALITY 5 politics-of-location approach in sex work research posits both researcher and respondent sexualities as shifting positions vis-à-vis each other and the knowledge they are (co)producing. And yet despite advances by feminist anthropological research on subjectivities and selfhood (see Boellstorff 2007) and by positivist-oriented social science research on the sex industry, neither approach has looked specifically at sexual subjectivities when researching sex work...