You Have Never Lived a Day Outside of Your Body: Engaging Racialized and Gendered Positionality in Ethnographic Research

Abstract

AbstractAnthropology's well‐known history of racist and colonial practices continues to inform which bodies go (un)marked with regard to researcher and researched subjectivities, with consequences for methodology and analysis. The imagined unmarked body of the researcher in the ethnographic context disallows consideration of any interaction between their subject position, its attendant histories, and how researchers interact with the community under study. And when the researcher's positionality is made explicit, it is rare to find discussions of how the researcher's positionality informed how and what they could observe. This article argues that overtly engaging, not just noting, research positionality in ethnographic texts illuminates underexplored, analytically rich, and pedagogically valuable aspects of the ethnographic process. By highlighting three ethnographic encounters as a Black male ethnographer of young white conservative students, this article explores some of the benefits and challenges of engaging researcher positionality, and how doing so benefited the ethnographic process. This article contains references to sexual assault and sexual violence.