Where am I am
Mar. 6th, 2004 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jawnbcA recent thread in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
that_dang_otter’s LJ (which is here), has given me pause to think. About where I am, where I perceive myself, and perhaps how others perceive my location.
In social science literature the question of a researcher’s relationship to the community he researches is often discussed in terms of positionality or in terms of being an insider/outsider. My academic work was preceded by nearly two decades’ activism, so this notion of location--the degree to which a researcher claims membership, affiliation or affinity with a group or community--is of critical importance to me.
In unpacking my positionality, I’ve had to deal with the paradoxes, contradictions and inconsistencies between where I perceive myself to be located and where others perceive me to be located. It’s meant not merely hearing (or presenting as hearing) critical or even hostile things said about me. It’s meant seeking such perspective out, giving them fair consideration, and making meaning of it all.
Queer young men in Sydney and Vancouver are the participants in my current project. Granted I am male, an adult and queer (gay specifically, but I embrace both terms). But I’m certainly not a youth, and didn’t grow up in Sydney or Vancouver (or Australia or Canada, for that matter). And I’m years beyond the formative period of “becoming” gay--so to what extent am I researching peers? To a significant extent.
I’ve also researched people who work with injection drug users (IDUs), including public health workers, drug treatment staff and grassroots activists. My selection of the topic was currency (a huge issue of IDU-related HIV, hepatitis C and drug overdoses in Vancouver), but equally due to my experience as an activist: my experiences and perspectives regarding my work were never integrated into policy-making when I was working at the grassroots level. My study was designed to allow comparisons between paid and unpaid workers (activists rarely get paid), and those working in medical or social justice paradigms (the lines were less clear than I anticipated). While I shared some affinities with many participants in this project, I am not a peer in any professional or collegial sense.
My research training was complicated by my obsession with avoid exploitation--to the point of paralysis. My fears of co-opting stories made collecting them troubling. And analyzing them nearly untenable. Eventually I decided that, were someone to take on these questions, I would prefer that someone whose sensibilities are informed by a broad range of life experiences do so. Like me. And mine.
My family’s solidly working class, though they view themselves as middle-class (perhaps the great myth of North America--everyone’s middle class in a consumer-oriented culture). Norms in our community were that males were athletic, rambunctious and “preferred” to work with our hands. So very nearly all of the guys from our neighbourhood “chose” to drop out of high school, and/or join the military, eschewed college or university and sought masculinized work: cops, firefighters, construction.
Growing up with a normal to which I could not aspire meant being a border crosser, as a means to survive. I learned to perform masculinity on local terms, whilst plotting my escape (via education). Only to find that mere intellect would not guarantee success in university: both a profound sense of foreignness, and a pull back to what I viewed as “normal,” but what I see know merely as “familiar.” It never was normal--or very functional--for queer little brainy me. Still, I “get” both sides. I read Foucault and I listen to Springsteen. I’m naturally polysyllabic, but can speak Queens just as naturally.
So where am I? I’m right here.
that_dang_otter’s LJ (which is here), has given me pause to think. About where I am, where I perceive myself, and perhaps how others perceive my location.In social science literature the question of a researcher’s relationship to the community he researches is often discussed in terms of positionality or in terms of being an insider/outsider. My academic work was preceded by nearly two decades’ activism, so this notion of location--the degree to which a researcher claims membership, affiliation or affinity with a group or community--is of critical importance to me.
In unpacking my positionality, I’ve had to deal with the paradoxes, contradictions and inconsistencies between where I perceive myself to be located and where others perceive me to be located. It’s meant not merely hearing (or presenting as hearing) critical or even hostile things said about me. It’s meant seeking such perspective out, giving them fair consideration, and making meaning of it all.
Queer young men in Sydney and Vancouver are the participants in my current project. Granted I am male, an adult and queer (gay specifically, but I embrace both terms). But I’m certainly not a youth, and didn’t grow up in Sydney or Vancouver (or Australia or Canada, for that matter). And I’m years beyond the formative period of “becoming” gay--so to what extent am I researching peers? To a significant extent.
I’ve also researched people who work with injection drug users (IDUs), including public health workers, drug treatment staff and grassroots activists. My selection of the topic was currency (a huge issue of IDU-related HIV, hepatitis C and drug overdoses in Vancouver), but equally due to my experience as an activist: my experiences and perspectives regarding my work were never integrated into policy-making when I was working at the grassroots level. My study was designed to allow comparisons between paid and unpaid workers (activists rarely get paid), and those working in medical or social justice paradigms (the lines were less clear than I anticipated). While I shared some affinities with many participants in this project, I am not a peer in any professional or collegial sense.
My research training was complicated by my obsession with avoid exploitation--to the point of paralysis. My fears of co-opting stories made collecting them troubling. And analyzing them nearly untenable. Eventually I decided that, were someone to take on these questions, I would prefer that someone whose sensibilities are informed by a broad range of life experiences do so. Like me. And mine.
My family’s solidly working class, though they view themselves as middle-class (perhaps the great myth of North America--everyone’s middle class in a consumer-oriented culture). Norms in our community were that males were athletic, rambunctious and “preferred” to work with our hands. So very nearly all of the guys from our neighbourhood “chose” to drop out of high school, and/or join the military, eschewed college or university and sought masculinized work: cops, firefighters, construction.
Growing up with a normal to which I could not aspire meant being a border crosser, as a means to survive. I learned to perform masculinity on local terms, whilst plotting my escape (via education). Only to find that mere intellect would not guarantee success in university: both a profound sense of foreignness, and a pull back to what I viewed as “normal,” but what I see know merely as “familiar.” It never was normal--or very functional--for queer little brainy me. Still, I “get” both sides. I read Foucault and I listen to Springsteen. I’m naturally polysyllabic, but can speak Queens just as naturally.
So where am I? I’m right here.
