Reflections as a Researcher
As a member of the community this study examine, I have had come to consider myself a troubled and troubling “insider”. I am troubled because as a post-operative woman I have come to understand my gender transition as a stabilizing goal-oriented process, a consideration that is deeply challenged contested by my participants’ counter definition of the transgender experience as a destabilizing social process that should highlight indefinite fluidity and creative potentialities for society at large. I expect my presence moving forward to be potential troubling in the field as I seek neither to affirm nor deny institutional intentions nor participants’ politics but rather document the impacts of the former onto the …show more content…
For instance, I find my project correlates to the ethnographic work of Valentine (2007) as it similarly seeks as an agent of social change to locate and ground agency and autonomy to the transgender community - a marginalized population surrounded by a larger and potentially hostile cisgender/ heteronormative society - even at the cost of loss of institutional and academic comprehension. Similarly to Imagining Transgender, this current research finds tensions between institutional definitions and individuals’ identities as both struggle to claim authenticity and authority in the power to name and define. As a corollary, my research notes a tension over contested identities between overlapping social movements (transgender and 2nd Wave/”radical” feminists) in similar ways that Valentine highlights the strain between the transgender and homosexual …show more content…
Queer/ing methodologies articulate the motivational desires for insiders to work within, for, and collaborate with their communities that result in productively problematize the traditional boundaries of “scholar” and “informant” (Dhal 158). As I continue with this research I grow appreciatively aware of the tensions and desires of working increasingly alongside participants with whom I share communal space and politics with. Such work also leaves me increasingly conscious of the ethical quandaries that emerge from this methodology, an awareness both Dahl and Munoz report
As a member of the community this study examine, I have had come to consider myself a troubled and troubling “insider”. I am troubled because as a post-operative woman I have come to understand my gender transition as a stabilizing goal-oriented process, a consideration that is deeply challenged contested by my participants’ counter definition of the transgender experience as a destabilizing social process that should highlight indefinite fluidity and creative potentialities for society at large. I expect my presence moving forward to be potential troubling in the field as I seek neither to affirm nor deny institutional intentions nor participants’ politics but rather document the impacts of the former onto the …show more content…
For instance, I find my project correlates to the ethnographic work of Valentine (2007) as it similarly seeks as an agent of social change to locate and ground agency and autonomy to the transgender community - a marginalized population surrounded by a larger and potentially hostile cisgender/ heteronormative society - even at the cost of loss of institutional and academic comprehension. Similarly to Imagining Transgender, this current research finds tensions between institutional definitions and individuals’ identities as both struggle to claim authenticity and authority in the power to name and define. As a corollary, my research notes a tension over contested identities between overlapping social movements (transgender and 2nd Wave/”radical” feminists) in similar ways that Valentine highlights the strain between the transgender and homosexual …show more content…
Queer/ing methodologies articulate the motivational desires for insiders to work within, for, and collaborate with their communities that result in productively problematize the traditional boundaries of “scholar” and “informant” (Dhal 158). As I continue with this research I grow appreciatively aware of the tensions and desires of working increasingly alongside participants with whom I share communal space and politics with. Such work also leaves me increasingly conscious of the ethical quandaries that emerge from this methodology, an awareness both Dahl and Munoz report