Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research by Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards (review)

As a graduate student conducting interviews alone in rural locations, I experienced flirtatious comments (directed to me, or between men talking about me) and physical contact from participants that made me uncomfortable; some of my friends faced far worse. We occasionally talked about these incidents among ourselves and developed some strategies to feel safer—sharing a list of our expected locations for the day or agreeing to call each other by a certain time to check in. But mostly we just hoped for the best. Our focus was on proving we were capable researchers, able to get worthwhile data. Besides, our training about human subjects protection taught us that we were in positions of power over the people we interviewed; if anything, we needed to be sure we weren't harming them.

As I read Harassed, I recognized myself. Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards interviewed ethnographers who reported flirting by interview participants, requests for sexual favors from local informants, groping and other unwanted contact, attempted break-ins to their rooms, and sexual assault. The authors analyze these experiences not just to highlight risks women face while doing fieldwork but to critique common understandings of "good" ethnographic research: that it is solitary, dangerous, and requires intimacy to create authentic connections between the researcher and participants. These are common features of popular ethnographies that receive mainstream media attention, win book awards, and appear frequently on course syllabi.

These "ethnographic fixations" (p. 25), Hanson and Richards argue, assume a neutral (male) researcher and encourage ethnographers to put themselves at risk, presenting danger as an inherent, or even exciting, element of meaningful fieldwork. They also contribute to the silence around the violence and other inappropriate and unwanted behaviors that women, in particular, face in the field. Women rarely include such incidents in their published work, and they often don't ask for advice from advisors, mentors, or colleagues, fearing they will be seen as incompetent or that they will reinforce negative stereotypes about the groups they study.

This book draws on data from interviews with 56 researchers recruited via listservs and snowball sampling; most were graduate students or early-career faculty members, primarily sociologists. The 47 ciswomen, 8 cismen, and 1 trans man are diverse regarding their racial/ethnic identities (non-White n = 21) and sexual orientations, allowing the authors to illustrate how the intersection of identities and characteristics influence embodied experiences in the field. The research sites include locations in the United States and in other countries—an intentional choice to challenge stereotypes that harassment and violence are only problems for ethnographers studying in another culture or in a context perceived as obviously dangerous (e.g., research on street gangs). The fact that harassment and violence occurred across a wide range of study sites reinforces the authors' argument that they must become standard topics for study and training in ethnographic fieldwork.

Hanson and Richards begin by deconstructing the three ethnographic fixations, which they argue are pervasive despite the growth in critical analyses of ethnographic practice. They use their interviews (along with their personal experiences) to demonstrate how scholars are gendered and embodied in ways that impact the research process. For instance, the authors suggest that when women create the expected researcher-subject intimacy in ethnographic research, participants who identify as men may misinterpret these behaviors as sexual. On the other hand, stereotypes of women as "sweet" and nonthreatening can give them access or allow them to build a level of trust that might not be available to men in the same situation. Hanson and Richards also describe the strategies women used—often unsuccessfully—to manage harassment and violence, and the damage caused by the lack of open conversations in academia about these problems.

Ultimately, Hanson and Richards call for embodied ethnography that recognizes and explicitly acknowledges that the bodies engaged in fieldwork affect the data collected and the knowledge created from the process. An embodied ethnography requires us to write...