Feminist Facts1: Interview Strategies and Political Subjects in Ethnography

Abstract

In this essay, I propose that strategies for avoiding, obtaining, and managing research interviews are data and that treating interview strategies as data enables the researcher to see how the researched are active participants in, rather than passive objects of, the ethnographic interview. This analysis is grounded in feminism and used to critique the recent focus on ethnography as literary form. I argue that in valorizing ethnographer-authors as individualized personas and psyches, this formalism both directs attention away from research subjects and what they are trying to say, and fails to account adequately for the political subjectivities of researchers. Ultimately I argue that the kind of political accounting I call for is as necessary for feminism as for other analytic standpoints if we are to come to terms with how theory and methodology preserve and extend social and cultural hierarchies.