Abstract
This essay critically reflects on challenges and dilemmas I encountered when interviewing white women about their experiences with gender, racialization, and practices of whiteness. These challenges and dilemmas in the research setting relate to the researcher-participant relationship and, in particular, participants’ use of 1) a “rhetorical ethic,” in which their social justice narratives were contradicted by demonstrations of their own racist ideologies; and 2) how whiteness and femininity were sites of power and resources for “social desirability bias” and impression management in response to my positionality as a white woman with a Black spouse and two racially mixed children. Additionally, this essay grapples with the emotionally difficult journey of being a researcher with the feminist commitment of “giving voice” to women by developing a bond of mutual trust, while at the same time feeling compelled to conceal oneself in search of “honest” responses from the research participants. This reflection illuminates how a/symmetries of power between researcher and the researched are inscribed with race and gender dynamics that are not always discernible, yet have a tremendous influence on data gathering. These dynamics require recognizing the agency of the research participants to shape what are considered and interpreted as data. These dynamics also require treating the data with “critical skepticism” and subjecting the participants’ responses to a “radical reflexivity” rooted in understanding how the larger social, political and historical “facts of whiteness” inform the microcosm of the researcher-participant relationship.
Highlights
This essay is a critical race and feminist reflection on the ethical and methodological dilemmas of racism I encountered in my research with white women who claim anti-racist and social justice identities, but, based on the research I conducted, appear to practice its opposite
I elaborate on the concepts of “critical skepticism” and “radical reflexivity” (Gunaratnam, 2003) as I reflect on what the interview context with white women might reveal about a) white racialized power in the research setting; b) ethics in feminist research; and c) strategies of reflexivity for resolving normative conflicts around racism between researcher and research participants
The points raised in this essay underscore the need to continually explicate the actual practices in which feminist researchers are active
Summary
This essay is a critical race and feminist reflection on the ethical and methodological dilemmas of racism I encountered in my research with white women who claim anti-racist and social justice identities, but, based on the research I conducted, appear to practice its opposite. What my experiences suggested (or screamed) was that I needed a different way to think through the raced/gender power dynamics in my research than was typically posited by feminist approaches on reflexivity—one that was better able to capture how power shifts and emotional labour (Hoffman, 2007) in the interview setting affect the raced/gendered interactional and contextual relations of research Speaking to this need, Amy Best (2003) argues that in working towards understanding the social relations of research itself, “the task for the qualitative researcher, feminist or otherwise... Considering the participants’ investments in maintaining extant relations of ruling, be it intended or otherwise, I realized I needed to treat the participants’ responses with what I call “critical skepticism.”
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