Ethnomusicology beyond #MeToo: Listening for the Violences of the Field

Abstract

Responding to an increasing sense of urgency about sexual harassment and assault during ethnographic fieldwork in the era of #MeToo, this article offers a lesson plan for effecting systemic change in the discipline of ethnomusicology. We show how disciplinary assumptions about the field where harassment occurs reify colonizing histories of racial othering, reinscribe heteronormativity, and alternately conflate or erase specific types of violences. We identify feminist scholarly genealogies that provide alternate models for theorizing in and through personal experience. We argue that this analytical work cannot and must not be absent from the important questions of how we practically approach and prepare students for fieldwork in ethnomusicology.

“What’s She Doing Here?!”: Negotiating Gender Identity and Harassment in Gendered, Sexualized, and “Taboo” Research Spaces

“…The #MeToo movement has brought greater public attention to the problem of sexual harassment in workplaces and there has been significant literature examining industry specific consequences. This increased public awareness of the problem has made its way to academe and research spaces (Appert & Lawrence, 2020; King et al, 2020), with scholars from sociology and anthropology bringing the issue to the fore. Here, we have argued that criminology needs to follow-suit with the goal of improving the experiences of women researchers.…”

“…In the tradition of Van Maanen's (1988) "confessional tale," the focus here is to reflect on the barriers gender poses in our own feminist research conducted in the United States, in an era where there has arguably been increased public consciousness about issues surrounding gender discrimination and sexual harassment. There is a small, yet growing literature that addresses the impact of the #MeToo movement on academic and research spaces (Appert & Lawrence, 2020;King et al, 2020), as well as the inadequacies of the neoliberal university in dealing with the uncertainties, that can include sexual violence, that are core to ethnographic research (Schneider, 2020). Therefore, drawing on field notes from feminist ethnographic research that situated the authors in predominantly male-dominated, "taboo" and sexualized spaces, we examine the emotional labor and techniques employed when navigating situations that impede on feelings of safety, bodily autonomy, and sexualization, that occurred both during and outside our research.…”

“…Expectedly, the issue of safety, especially as it relates to the threat of sexual violence is of particular importance to women researchers, has been well documented (Gailey & Prohaska, 2011; Green et al, 1993; Huff, 1997; Huggins & Glebbeek, 2009; Mugge, 2013; Yassour-Borochowitz, 2012). Furthermore, there is now a small but growing body of sociological and anthropological literature that has begun to contend with the larger structural and cultural happenings of the last decade, that markedly impact broader understandings of gender, sexism, and discrimination in the United States (Appert & Lawrence, 2020; King, et al, 2020).…”

How do You Desire to Dance? A Methodological Assemblage to Foster Consent in Dance Higher Education in Ecuador

“…Among the concepts that we have found shaping the discourse on consent and personal boundaries are words such as 'safety', 'intimacy', 'desire', 'harassment', and 'privilege'. Much of this terminology was introduced into the anglophone pedagogical jargon through the popularity of the #MeToo movement in 2017 (McMains 2021;Appert & Lawrence 2020;Clarke-Vivier & Stearns 2019), and the Latin American movements #NiUnaMenos from Argentina (Marturet 2020), and #MiPrimerAcoso and #NoCallamosMas from Ecuador (Loaiza 2017). As global trends under the information society, the "fluidity of the social dimensions implies a major extension, deepness and density of communication" (Casado in Figueroa, 2020: 265) and the appearance of these movements via the hashtagization of reality permeates the pedagogical discourses and practices.…”

Disturbing hierarchies. Sexual harassment and the politics of intimacy in fieldwork

“…More recently, the #metoo movement has given momentum to open up discussions about violence in fieldwork settings in ways that draw connections to the machoistic and neoliberal culture of academic institutions more broadly whilst also calling for systemic and institutional change (e.g. Appert and Lawrence 2020; Berry et al, 2017; King et al, 2020; Schneider 2020). These more recent contributions have also begun to shift focus away from solely those types of gendered relations in which hierarchical features appear more pronounced.…”