The Implications of an Ethnographer’s Sexuality

Abstract

This article discusses the implications of an ethnographer’s sexuality with regard to his fieldwork. Adopting a self-reflexive stance, the author discusses how his queer identity and the fear of repercussions against his intellectual and physical body affected his fieldwork. As a native Brazilian, he was still an outsider in the rural community in which he did his fieldwork. But more than his outsider status, his memories of growing up in the closet in Brazil informed some of his research choices and shaped his reactions to the experience of returning to the closet to conduct research in a community where machista attitudes, notions of queerness, and his own internalized homophobia positioned his queer self as an outsider.