“Telling Masculine Tales”: Tracing My Embodied Experience as a Psychiatric Ward Security Guard through Ethnographic Narrative Writing

Abstract

This article unfolds the culture of hyper-masculinity I witnessed and ultimately rejected during my sixteen-month career working as a private security officer in an Ottawa hospital. I draw on two ethnographic narratives to "distribute", in Rancièrian terms, the embodied and emotional experiences that accompanied my struggles to achieve hegemonic masculine status, and resist military-like hierarchies inside an institutional setting. Such a creative methodological exercise allows researchers to freely explore their delicate, complex and messy feelings that may otherwise be ethically suppressed or co-opted through less corporeal representations of academic writing. Moreover, by revealing the sensitive and coercive interactions that steered my gendered relationships with psychiatric patients, ward nurses and other security agents, I demonstrate how embodied research can transform our uncritical heteronormative positions on masculinity and violence, as well as contest the unequal, gendered and medicalized judgments that are imposed on incarcerated mental health patients.

Restraint minimisation in mental health care: legitimate or illegitimate force? An ethnographic study

“…2018). This was powerfully noted in Johnston's (: 170) auto‐ethnographic account of an epiphany in realising the violent trauma of restraint:

It was only when I witnessed the tears and felt emotion pouring down the man's cheek that I realized the performative act and fear behind all of our gestures, commands, and established authority.

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Dirty Work, Dirty Resistance: Digital Warfare in the Era of Precarious Labor

“…Years of reflection and storytelling about this job as well as my recorded observations in other precarious work taught me about the pains and sufferings that capitalism, hypermasculinities, and discourses of hatred and exploitation perpetuate, especially by people in positions of power (see Johnston , ; Johnston and Kilty , ). I also saw the kinds of abuse employees can receive from customers.…”

You Gotta Kick Ass a Little Harder Than That

“…The impetus for this research emerged from the first author's experience working as a private security guard in two hospital settings and his or her decision to terminate that line of employment because of personal feelings regarding the use of force against patients. Given those lived experiences the first author began the larger project by drafting a series of six autoethnographic vignettes about particular incidents and the institutional practices that contributed to forming his or her views about the nature of security work in hospital settings (see Johnston 2014). The vignettes enabled the first author to ''become in touch'' with the data through a ''process of reengagement'' (Krieger 1985) that required careful reflexive examination of his or her personal feelings and responses to these events and to his or her relationships with other guards, nurses, and patients, which he or she documented through intensive memo writing.…”