We, too: contending with the sexual politics of fieldwork in China

Abstract

This paper contributes to a feminist politics of fieldwork by elevating narratives that have been pushed to the periphery of academic and methodological debates, particularly in China Studies. Inspired by feminist geographers' understandings of positionality, as well as the global #MeToo movement, we detail how China's current historical moment-when patriarchy, the market, and growing authoritarianism intersect to commodify bodies and quell dissent-shapes gendered and sexualized fieldwork relationships. Drawing on our own experiences, as well as interviews with other China Studies researchers, the paper engages specific sites where researchers' bodies are sexualized and sometimes threatened. This includes banquets, karaoke bars, and the virtual spaces of messaging platforms and social media. We explore methodological implications of such relationships and share strategies that researchers have adopted as they attempt to make grim tradeoffs between personal security and 'getting the data.' The paper calls for more frank discussions of the sexual politics of field-based research, particularly with early-career researchers, and for a valorization of less-than-heroic approaches to fieldwork.

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“…As a male researcher, I never felt like the object of 'sexual conquest', as described by three female authors in a landmark paper (Schneider et al 2021), even when I had to 'sing for my data', as they call it, in a karaoke parlour. But refusing to play along and accept an offered sexual service does potentially risk continued access to the field because the refusal may cause the host to lose face.…”

The Weight Women Carry: Research on the Visible and Invisible Baggage in Suitcase Trade between China and Africa

“…1 All names in this text are changed to protect the anonymity of the participants. 2 See M. Schneider, Lord, and Wilczak (2021) for a discussion about sexual harassment in the context of China studies. 3 For an elaborated discussion about flirtation during the research process, see Kaspar and Landolt (2016).…”

Decolonizing surf tourism: alternatives to development, surfer subjectivity, and surfscape commons governance

“…Specifically, this bricolage of research methods includes: a) a review of secondary sources relevant to surfing culture and surf tourism discourse, including popular surf media, such as magazines, film, advertisements, interviews, social media, podcasts, websites and blogs; as well as academic texts specific to critical trends in surfing culture and surf tourism scholarship; b) critical surfscape ethnography (Ruttenberg & Brosius, 2019), which centers empirical methods of self-reflective, "unorthodox" and critical ethnography (Canniford, 2005;Stranger, 2011;Koot, 2016), along with a critical review of secondary texts rooted in modern surfing discourse, representing a mixed-methods approach honoring a long-term 'participant-as-observer' role for critical surfer-researchers which "take[s] account of the relationship between the observer and the observed, but also the relationship between the… worlds they belong to" (Stranger, 2011, p. 11); c) community-based poststructuralist participatory action research (PAR) aligned with an assets-based community development approach (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993) and diverse economies assessment (Cameron, 2003;Cameron & Gibson-Graham, 2005;Gibson-Graham, 2005) to explore alternatives to development in surfing tourism; and d) self-reflexive autoethnography to critically reflect on my "multiplex" researcher positionality related to gender and racial subjectivity as an "outsider-within" community-based decolonial surf tourism research (Collins, as cited in Smith, 1999;Gibson-Graham, 1994;Rose, 1997;Sato, 2004;Sultana, 2007;Faria & Mollett, 2016;Olive & Thorpe, 2011;Olive, 2016Olive, , 2020Olive et al, 2018;Schneider et al, 2020). Together, this bricolage of research methods was selected in effort to transgress colonial patterns of representing 'local' people by instead highlighting alternative development possibilities and self-determined representations of culture and community, such that the studies presented here might be "respectful, ethical, sympathetic and useful" within a decolonizing approach to research (Smith, 1999, p. 10).…”

“…Contributing to the existing literature, this article offers a reflexive inquiry into the field-based implications of researcher positionality in critical surf tourism studies across multiple axes of difference, power, and privilege, including race, gender, nationality, and class. This analysis draws from existing studies in feminist geography highlighting the multifaceted gendered and racialized power dynamics inherent in conducting ethnographic and participatory research (Rose, 1993;Gibson-Graham, 1994;1997;Cahill et al, 2007;Sultana, 2007;Mollett & Faria, 2018;Schneider et al, 2020). Aligned with intersectional feminist research in critical surf studies (Nemani, 2015;Comley, 2018;Olive et al, 2018;Gilio-Whitaker, 2019), this line of scholarship honors calls for postcolonial intersectionality as a means of "messing with gender" by acknowledging the power implications of racialized colonial legacies across multiple axes of gendered privilege/oppression in development research interventions in the Global South (Sultana, 2007;Mollett & Faria, 2013;Faria & Mollett, 2016;Schneider et al, 2020).…”

“…This analysis draws from existing studies in feminist geography highlighting the multifaceted gendered and racialized power dynamics inherent in conducting ethnographic and participatory research (Rose, 1993;Gibson-Graham, 1994;1997;Cahill et al, 2007;Sultana, 2007;Mollett & Faria, 2018;Schneider et al, 2020). Aligned with intersectional feminist research in critical surf studies (Nemani, 2015;Comley, 2018;Olive et al, 2018;Gilio-Whitaker, 2019), this line of scholarship honors calls for postcolonial intersectionality as a means of "messing with gender" by acknowledging the power implications of racialized colonial legacies across multiple axes of gendered privilege/oppression in development research interventions in the Global South (Sultana, 2007;Mollett & Faria, 2013;Faria & Mollett, 2016;Schneider et al, 2020). Self-reflexive conclusions from the field research experience connect these decolonial and feminist contributions on researcher positionality to critical surf tourism studies, with relevant lessons for feminist geographic sports tourism studies more broadly.…”