Going Home: A Feminist Anthropologist's Reflections on Dilemmas of Power and Positionality in the Field

In this essay, I draw on my fieldwork in Lima, Peru to critically explore the power relationships within my own feminist research and practice and illustrate what feminist research in one's own society might include. I pay special attention to my roles as academic and advocate and reflect on how power asymmetries based on race, educational status, and class were both reproduced and reshaped during my fieldwork, and how my feminist research agenda and partial insider status were directly tied to the creation and continuation of these power asymmetries. As I illuminate potential dilemmas, rewards, and difficulties that may result from feminist research in one's own society, I foreground the potential for effecting social change from within, the researcher's social responsibility and engagement in the field, and the blurring of boundaries between insider and outsider.