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Imagining feminist ethnography
Women's Studies Int. Forum, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 417--419, 1994 Copyright © 1994 ElsevierScienceLtd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0277-5395/94 $6.00 + .00
Pergamon
0277-5395(94)E003S-V
IMAGINING
FEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHY
A Response to Elizabeth E. Wheatley JUDITH STACEY Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA; E-mail: stacey3 @ garnet.berkeley.edu
What a source of w o n d e r - t w o parts flattery, one part dismay--that, "Can There be a Feminist Ethnography?," a short polemical speech I prepared, rather hastily, for a Women's Studies conference in 1987, should still appear to merit so thorough a "rejoinder," more than double its length, more than 7 years later. What academic would not be pleased to discover some of her casual utterances enjoying far more than their fragile 15 minutes of scholarly shelf life? Not this one, certainly. At the same time, I must admit to some disappointment that my benefactor, Elizabeth Wheatley, appears to have overlooked the dusty shelves housing, Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late-Twentieth Century America, my 1990 book-length attempt to engender an ethnography with the sort of feminist imagination that my earlier brief essay seems to have misled Wheatley to imagine that I myself could neither imagine nor write. Such are the mysterious vagaries of academic publishing. Yet it seems a pity. For, had my "actually existing" partially feminist ethnography enjoyed as much notice as the little, cathartic essay by which I relieved some of the ethical, epistemological, and political birth pangs that once impeded its parturition, much of this dialogue between Wheatley and me might not seem necessary. Were Wheatley to read Brave New Families (as I, self-servingly, cannot resist hoping she will do), she might still find worthy grounds for rejoinder, but our dialogue could commence on higher and firmer common ground. Clearly, Wheatley and I share much common ground, as she kindly acknowledges in a sisterly tone, far too scarce these days, alas, among even feminist academics. In fact, I believe that there is far more agreement than disparity, indeed,
far more agreement than Wheatley imagines, in the perspectives we hold on relationships between ethnographic and feminist projects that seem possible and desirable. To begin with, Wheatley is correct that I aimed my polemical slingshot primarily at what I had come to perceive as the naivete of early feminist enthusiasm, including my own, for the ethical egalitarianism of ethnographic research. For this very reason, I directed my essay primarily to a feminist audience, but I did so in complete agreement with Wheatley that the generic, ethical dilemmas of exploitation, duplicity, betrayal, and abandonment that I discussed are by no means peculiar to feminist ethnography, but are, as I argued, "an inescapable feature of ethnographic method" (Stacey, 1988, p. 23), never fully soluble. Hence, like Wheatley, I answered my own question, not by dismissing ethnography, as she seems to have inferred (surely a masochistic gesture for an author on the verge of composing one), but by embracing many'of the "postmodern" epistemological stances that she affirms. Indeed, like Wheatley, I endorsed James Clifford's view that, like all truths, "ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial-committed and incomplete" (Clifford in Stacey, 1988, p. 25). Moreover, I concluded that, "there can be (indeed there are) ethnographies that are partially feminist, accounts of culture enhanced by the application of feminist perspectives" (Stacey, 1988, p. 26). Then I proceeded to define, and to defend as valuable, albeit fraught, the endeavor of selfconsciously constructing partially feminist ethnography, in the identical two senses of partisan and perspectival that Wheatley employs. Finally, I also whole-heartedly share
417
418
JUDITH STACEY
Wheatley's feminist commitment to demysti- graphic sensibilities, it resides in the muddy fying ethnographic research, as well as her in- waters that confound epistemology with policreasingly unfashionable, feminist commit- tics, and politics with ethics. Wheatley conment to writing ethnography in accessible fuses two of the feminist political dilemmas prose, amenable to multiple audiences and I discussed for an absolutist epistemological readings. Indeed, these very goals explicitly stance. Because I was troubled by the need to motivated the diverse, rather "postmodern- omit explicit discussion of a former lesbian ist," textual strategies with which I experi- relationship between two of my "subjects," mented in Brave New Families: documentary and by a death that released me to disclose novellas; reflexively, self-critical position- the physical abuse that the deceased had visings; parodic epigraphs and cartoons; multi- ited upon his wife and children, Wheatley ple, Rashomanesque renderings of an indi- conjures me a realist, fretting over the omisvidual nuclear family's collective biography; sion of data in my quest for complete, and historical sociological, provisional metanar- essential truth. She seems to worry that I ratives; polemical political advocacy; and the subscribe to an "ideological separatism" govintentionally, deconstructive prologue and erned by a "monolithic vision for feminist epilogue that frame my book in order to dis- scholarship and politics" (p. 407). rupt any illusion that it aspires to monovocal, If this is her concern, I hope to set her at ethnographic authority or meaning. ease. My distress over if and how I could repTo be sure, my assessment of the moral resent lesbianism and male domestic violence might of such postmodernist, textual strate- in my ethnography was not occasioned by a gies is somewhat less sanguine than Wheat- desire to tell the truth, the "whole" truth, and ley's, partly because I harbour a suspicion, nothing but the truth, but by my wish to repsimilar to one recently articulated by Francis resent certain feminist truths that are as poMascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe, that an ex- tent as they are partial. I was attempting to oticizing gaze may be as inescapable a feature articulate a particular, situated, feminist, poof ethnography as is its partial vision (Mas- litical concern about how adhering to ethnocia-Lees & Sharpe, 1994, in press). My view graphic ethics would compel me to collude in of postmodernism also seems less reified than the homophobic and antifeminist silencing of does Wheatley's. Certainly, I do not "adopt significant forms of female desire and disthe postmodernist positions (my emphasis)," tress. Omissions like these would signifiwholesale, as Wheatley seems to advise. Still, cantly shape, and misshape, the very situated neither have I ever "dismissed," or sought to political meanings and effects that my avowban from my feminist clubhouse, most of edly, "partially" feminist ethnography sought what she identifies by this term, as she seems to achieve. Fear that I would commit a femito believe. nist "sin of omission" was a political, rather Because Wheatley has not had the plea- than an epistemological, anxiety. sure or burden of comparing her projection Nonetheless, I do perceive at least one lap of my ethnographic proclivities with (dare I of epistemological distance between Wheatsay it?), the "real" ethnographic McCoy, I, in ley and me. She appears content to graze exturn, can only conjecture if and how the fem- clusively in "postmodernist" pastures, while I inist imagination Wheatley calls for might di- continue to straddle those uncomfortable verge from the one(s) I actually engendered pickets atop the fence that divides realist in Brave New Families. To do so, I must read from postmodernist terrain. Although I do from the relevant shards of her critique of share Wheatley's postmodernist view that all what she conjectured would be the limita- representations and knowledge are situated tions of my imaginary feminist imagination. and partial, she is also correct to judge me, In other words, each of us must rely on an "reluctant to embrace fully the assumptions overheated, feminist imagination to compen- implicit in postmodernist ethnography." I resate for the flimsy basis she has for meaning- main neither willing nor able to relinquish all ful intellectual exchange with the other. "metanarratives," nor to relativize the relaIf my end of this fantasy, epistemological tionships between all representations and "redig yields any meaningful residue of disagree- ality" or "truth." Frankly, I doubt that such ment between our respective feminist ethno- a radically relativist conception of knowledge
Imagining Feminist Ethnography
or truth is compatible with any form of committed politics or ethics. Seldom are multiple truths equally ethical truths. Certainly, committed politico-ethical investments, however compromised by personal and professional dividends, brokered my feminist, ethnographic quest. That is why I have reservations about Wheatley's worthy effort to reframe my (partially) rhetorical, title question, "can there be a feminist ethnography?" Were we to ask instead, as Wheatley proposes, "how can we engender ethnography with a feminist imagination?" we would invite a compromised, ethnographic cart to drive a frustrated, feminist horse. In this formulation, feminist politics becomes just a conduit for ethnographic scholarship, a spritely means to a dispassionate end. I doubt that Wheatley wishes to subordinate feminist to ethnographic priorities in this way, but this seems an unwitting effect of ignoring asymmetrical political relations endemic to ethnographic research. She appears still to affirm that romantic feminist conceit I have relinquished, that, "ethnographic methods call for egalitarian relations that require authenticity, reciprocity, and
419
mutual respect between the researcher and 'subjects' of research (p. 404)." Ironically, this is the very virginal, feminist, ethnographic illusion that "Can There be a Feminist Ethnography?" sought to call into question. Brave New Families remains the most fully, partial answer to that question that I have yet been able to imagine. Were I to reformulate my question today, I would ask, "can gendered ethnography foster feminist imagination and politics?" I would love to read whatever ethnographic responses to our shared challenge (however one words it), that Wheatley's fine, feminist imagination dares to engender. REFERENCES Mascia-Lees, Frances E., & Sharpe, Patricia. (1994, in press). The anthropological unconscious: Anthropology and erotic/exotic desires. American Anthropologist, 96. Stacey, Judith. (1988). Can there be a feminist ethnography? Women's Studies International Forum, 11, 23. Stacey, Judith. (1990). Brave new families: Stories o f domestic upheaval in late-twentieth century America. New York: Basic Books.
Pergamon
0277-5395(94)E003S-V
IMAGINING
FEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHY
A Response to Elizabeth E. Wheatley JUDITH STACEY Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA; E-mail: stacey3 @ garnet.berkeley.edu
What a source of w o n d e r - t w o parts flattery, one part dismay--that, "Can There be a Feminist Ethnography?," a short polemical speech I prepared, rather hastily, for a Women's Studies conference in 1987, should still appear to merit so thorough a "rejoinder," more than double its length, more than 7 years later. What academic would not be pleased to discover some of her casual utterances enjoying far more than their fragile 15 minutes of scholarly shelf life? Not this one, certainly. At the same time, I must admit to some disappointment that my benefactor, Elizabeth Wheatley, appears to have overlooked the dusty shelves housing, Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late-Twentieth Century America, my 1990 book-length attempt to engender an ethnography with the sort of feminist imagination that my earlier brief essay seems to have misled Wheatley to imagine that I myself could neither imagine nor write. Such are the mysterious vagaries of academic publishing. Yet it seems a pity. For, had my "actually existing" partially feminist ethnography enjoyed as much notice as the little, cathartic essay by which I relieved some of the ethical, epistemological, and political birth pangs that once impeded its parturition, much of this dialogue between Wheatley and me might not seem necessary. Were Wheatley to read Brave New Families (as I, self-servingly, cannot resist hoping she will do), she might still find worthy grounds for rejoinder, but our dialogue could commence on higher and firmer common ground. Clearly, Wheatley and I share much common ground, as she kindly acknowledges in a sisterly tone, far too scarce these days, alas, among even feminist academics. In fact, I believe that there is far more agreement than disparity, indeed,
far more agreement than Wheatley imagines, in the perspectives we hold on relationships between ethnographic and feminist projects that seem possible and desirable. To begin with, Wheatley is correct that I aimed my polemical slingshot primarily at what I had come to perceive as the naivete of early feminist enthusiasm, including my own, for the ethical egalitarianism of ethnographic research. For this very reason, I directed my essay primarily to a feminist audience, but I did so in complete agreement with Wheatley that the generic, ethical dilemmas of exploitation, duplicity, betrayal, and abandonment that I discussed are by no means peculiar to feminist ethnography, but are, as I argued, "an inescapable feature of ethnographic method" (Stacey, 1988, p. 23), never fully soluble. Hence, like Wheatley, I answered my own question, not by dismissing ethnography, as she seems to have inferred (surely a masochistic gesture for an author on the verge of composing one), but by embracing many'of the "postmodern" epistemological stances that she affirms. Indeed, like Wheatley, I endorsed James Clifford's view that, like all truths, "ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial-committed and incomplete" (Clifford in Stacey, 1988, p. 25). Moreover, I concluded that, "there can be (indeed there are) ethnographies that are partially feminist, accounts of culture enhanced by the application of feminist perspectives" (Stacey, 1988, p. 26). Then I proceeded to define, and to defend as valuable, albeit fraught, the endeavor of selfconsciously constructing partially feminist ethnography, in the identical two senses of partisan and perspectival that Wheatley employs. Finally, I also whole-heartedly share
417
418
JUDITH STACEY
Wheatley's feminist commitment to demysti- graphic sensibilities, it resides in the muddy fying ethnographic research, as well as her in- waters that confound epistemology with policreasingly unfashionable, feminist commit- tics, and politics with ethics. Wheatley conment to writing ethnography in accessible fuses two of the feminist political dilemmas prose, amenable to multiple audiences and I discussed for an absolutist epistemological readings. Indeed, these very goals explicitly stance. Because I was troubled by the need to motivated the diverse, rather "postmodern- omit explicit discussion of a former lesbian ist," textual strategies with which I experi- relationship between two of my "subjects," mented in Brave New Families: documentary and by a death that released me to disclose novellas; reflexively, self-critical position- the physical abuse that the deceased had visings; parodic epigraphs and cartoons; multi- ited upon his wife and children, Wheatley ple, Rashomanesque renderings of an indi- conjures me a realist, fretting over the omisvidual nuclear family's collective biography; sion of data in my quest for complete, and historical sociological, provisional metanar- essential truth. She seems to worry that I ratives; polemical political advocacy; and the subscribe to an "ideological separatism" govintentionally, deconstructive prologue and erned by a "monolithic vision for feminist epilogue that frame my book in order to dis- scholarship and politics" (p. 407). rupt any illusion that it aspires to monovocal, If this is her concern, I hope to set her at ethnographic authority or meaning. ease. My distress over if and how I could repTo be sure, my assessment of the moral resent lesbianism and male domestic violence might of such postmodernist, textual strate- in my ethnography was not occasioned by a gies is somewhat less sanguine than Wheat- desire to tell the truth, the "whole" truth, and ley's, partly because I harbour a suspicion, nothing but the truth, but by my wish to repsimilar to one recently articulated by Francis resent certain feminist truths that are as poMascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe, that an ex- tent as they are partial. I was attempting to oticizing gaze may be as inescapable a feature articulate a particular, situated, feminist, poof ethnography as is its partial vision (Mas- litical concern about how adhering to ethnocia-Lees & Sharpe, 1994, in press). My view graphic ethics would compel me to collude in of postmodernism also seems less reified than the homophobic and antifeminist silencing of does Wheatley's. Certainly, I do not "adopt significant forms of female desire and disthe postmodernist positions (my emphasis)," tress. Omissions like these would signifiwholesale, as Wheatley seems to advise. Still, cantly shape, and misshape, the very situated neither have I ever "dismissed," or sought to political meanings and effects that my avowban from my feminist clubhouse, most of edly, "partially" feminist ethnography sought what she identifies by this term, as she seems to achieve. Fear that I would commit a femito believe. nist "sin of omission" was a political, rather Because Wheatley has not had the plea- than an epistemological, anxiety. sure or burden of comparing her projection Nonetheless, I do perceive at least one lap of my ethnographic proclivities with (dare I of epistemological distance between Wheatsay it?), the "real" ethnographic McCoy, I, in ley and me. She appears content to graze exturn, can only conjecture if and how the fem- clusively in "postmodernist" pastures, while I inist imagination Wheatley calls for might di- continue to straddle those uncomfortable verge from the one(s) I actually engendered pickets atop the fence that divides realist in Brave New Families. To do so, I must read from postmodernist terrain. Although I do from the relevant shards of her critique of share Wheatley's postmodernist view that all what she conjectured would be the limita- representations and knowledge are situated tions of my imaginary feminist imagination. and partial, she is also correct to judge me, In other words, each of us must rely on an "reluctant to embrace fully the assumptions overheated, feminist imagination to compen- implicit in postmodernist ethnography." I resate for the flimsy basis she has for meaning- main neither willing nor able to relinquish all ful intellectual exchange with the other. "metanarratives," nor to relativize the relaIf my end of this fantasy, epistemological tionships between all representations and "redig yields any meaningful residue of disagree- ality" or "truth." Frankly, I doubt that such ment between our respective feminist ethno- a radically relativist conception of knowledge
Imagining Feminist Ethnography
or truth is compatible with any form of committed politics or ethics. Seldom are multiple truths equally ethical truths. Certainly, committed politico-ethical investments, however compromised by personal and professional dividends, brokered my feminist, ethnographic quest. That is why I have reservations about Wheatley's worthy effort to reframe my (partially) rhetorical, title question, "can there be a feminist ethnography?" Were we to ask instead, as Wheatley proposes, "how can we engender ethnography with a feminist imagination?" we would invite a compromised, ethnographic cart to drive a frustrated, feminist horse. In this formulation, feminist politics becomes just a conduit for ethnographic scholarship, a spritely means to a dispassionate end. I doubt that Wheatley wishes to subordinate feminist to ethnographic priorities in this way, but this seems an unwitting effect of ignoring asymmetrical political relations endemic to ethnographic research. She appears still to affirm that romantic feminist conceit I have relinquished, that, "ethnographic methods call for egalitarian relations that require authenticity, reciprocity, and
419
mutual respect between the researcher and 'subjects' of research (p. 404)." Ironically, this is the very virginal, feminist, ethnographic illusion that "Can There be a Feminist Ethnography?" sought to call into question. Brave New Families remains the most fully, partial answer to that question that I have yet been able to imagine. Were I to reformulate my question today, I would ask, "can gendered ethnography foster feminist imagination and politics?" I would love to read whatever ethnographic responses to our shared challenge (however one words it), that Wheatley's fine, feminist imagination dares to engender. REFERENCES Mascia-Lees, Frances E., & Sharpe, Patricia. (1994, in press). The anthropological unconscious: Anthropology and erotic/exotic desires. American Anthropologist, 96. Stacey, Judith. (1988). Can there be a feminist ethnography? Women's Studies International Forum, 11, 23. Stacey, Judith. (1990). Brave new families: Stories o f domestic upheaval in late-twentieth century America. New York: Basic Books.