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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind John L. Jackson Jr.

Some Thoughts About Ethnography ...

I want to get back to the discussion about race/racism that my last post helped to instigate. And I will. But I have been thinking a lot about what Paul Willis once called, reworking and rewording Mills, “the ethnographic imagination.”

The term “ethnography” describes a literary genre (writings that attempt to capture people’s cultural beliefs and practices) as well as a qualitative research methodology (a way of collecting social scientific data based on long-term, face-to-face interactions). But we are living in a hyperscientific moment now, a time when ethnographic analysis seems to have lost some of its authority, especially since human genomics and the statistical analysis of massive datasets are privileged as holy grails in the search for contemporary solutions to social problems. Ethnography is still alive and well. It just ends up packaged for the public in ways that look vastly different from how other social sciences get framed.

Anthropology and sociology are the two academic disciplines that traditionally cornered the market on ethnographic research, but other social sciences have become more interested in the kinds of nuanced information that gets gathered during intimate and ongoing interactions between qualitative researchers and their research subjects, interactions euphemized as “deep hanging out.” Ethnographers spend time drinking beers with the folks they study, eating meals at their dinner tables, and shadowing them on the job — all in an effort to figure out what people’s everyday lives actually look like and to determine how people make sense of those lives.

When they first start conducting research in a particular community, ethnographers stand out like sore thumbs, drawing attention to themselves and making their research subjects decidedly self-conscious, which means that they run the risk of witnessing things that probably wouldn’t have taken place at all without the conspicuous seductions of an outside audience. But as ethnographers spend more and more time observing and participating in the same community, among the same community members, they eventually begin to lose some of their distracting influence on people’s behaviors. They transform into proverbial “flies on the wall,” at least that’s what we tell our graduate students. The ethnographer is still there, asking questions and watching people’s daily reactions, but they are hardly noticed any more, eventually, not in ways that might compromise the reliability of what they see or hear.

Ethnography’s value is based on the kinds of intimate and unguarded data that researchers gain from extended contact with one particular social group. When the discipline first emerged, this meant relatively small-scale and remote societies. “Father of ethnography” Bronislaw Malinowski’s early 20th century work with Trobrianders is taken as a powerful marker for the birth of full-fledged ethnographic research within anthropology. He crossed the seas, pitched his lonely tent, and found a way to live among people whose cultural world seemed radically different from his own. Part of the point, of course, was about making it clear to the European audience back home that those foreign practices could be understood only with the fullest knowledge of how people’s entire belief systems fit together — even and especially when those cultural systems seemed spectacularly exotic to the Western eye.

Anthropology was traditionally about studying societies unsullied by the advances of modernity. From the romantic attempts at “salvage ethnography” among Native American tribes in the early 19th century (archiving cultural practices before they disappeared forever) to the constructions of primitive societies as examples of the modern Western world’s hypothetical pasts, anthropologists used ethnographic methods to study those populations most removed from the taint of modern living.

Sociologists also embraced ethnographic methods in the early 20th century, and people like Robert Park at the University of Chicago helped to institutionalize “the ethnographic imagination” as a method for studying not just faraway villages but modern urban life in a teeming American city. That dividing line (between the anthropological ethnographer who studies some distant community and the sociological ethnographer who focuses her eyes on the modern Western metropolis) still defines most people’s assumptions about how those two fields carve up the social landscape for qualitative examination (even though there are certainly sociologists who study small-scale societies and anthropologists who have been working in urban America for a very long time).

One thing that both fields seem to emphasize and value amounts to a premium placed on the scientific equivalent of roughing it. They each have the highest regard for the “gonzo” ethnographer, the kind of heroic or mythical figure willing to put his very life at risk for the sake of ethnographic access. The more remote, removed, and potentially dangerous the location of the fieldwork experience, the more explicit and awestruck are the kudos offered up to any ethnographer bold enough to go where few have gone before. This search for dangerous exoticism can lead you halfway around the world, or just to the other side of the tracks, the other end of town. But in either case, an added value is placed on access to the everyday lives of human beings and cultural perspectives that most middle-class Western readers know little about.

During the 1960s, anthropologists and sociologists in the United States wrote classic ethnographic offerings on the urban poor — specifically, the Black poor — who were struggling to make ends meet in America’s ghettos. Ethnographers were trying to explain the hidden realities of urban poverty, a tradition that continues today. Anthropologists and sociologists working in American cities still disproportionately study poor minority communities. That’s because it is harder to sweeten the deal enough for wealthier Americans to accept such scholarly intrusions. A crisp $20 bill might suffice as incentive for an unemployed urbanite to answer some open-ended questions about her life history, but it is hardly enough to compel more decidedly middle-class citizens into exposing their raw lives to an ethnographic gaze. Middle-class and wealthier Americans also sometimes live in actual gated communities or attend the kinds of restricted social clubs that can keep prying anthropological eyes at bay.

Of course, most ethnographers will tell you that any valuable ethnographic work must be based on respect for the people researched, and that the most powerful studies of the poor decidedly humanize them, fending off insensitive attempts at reducing poverty to the cold numerical instances of this or that pathology. These ethnographic researchers carry a double burden, however. Besides making sense of people’s daily lives and future life chances, they are also asked to continue impressing readers with their fearlessness, with their courageous forays into the heart of darkness, offering first-hand “thick descriptions” of poor and dilapidated minority communities, the kinds of places that terrorize mainstream America’s imagination. And that is part of the trap. This formula usually means that even as urban ethnographers try to challenge middle-class cultural chauvinism, arguing that ostensible “cultures of poverty” are sometimes little different from more mainstream cultural groups, they are also asked to justify the value of their work by claiming to provide access to otherwise inaccessible locations.

This is exactly what the authority of some memoirs (about former gangbangers or drug dealers or welfare queens) traffic in: proffering the learned public first-person renditions of the kinds of social existence that they have never experienced — and would not want to. But, unlike the memoirist, a social scientist is supposed to be objective, politically and personally disinterested, and so it is supposed to help the case for scientific legitimacy that you are not conducting research in your own backyard. You have no axe to grind, no biases linked to prior investments in that community.

In some of our most recent and highly popular versions of ethnographic research, we have suburbanites from southern California studying gangs in Chicago (Sudhir Venkatesh conducting research on the south side), middle-class journalists working side-by-side with low-wage service-sector employees (Barbara Ehrenreich modeling her undercover reporting on something akin to what George Orwell attempted in Paris), and white researchers studying the ins and outs of Latino drug culture (Phillipe Bourgeois moving his family into one of the most crack-infested parts of Spanish Harlem). These authors are examples of careful and holistic ethnographic research that is both rigorous and politically committed. The problem has to do with the way we sometimes read them, how we unconsciously tap into the expectation that what makes ethnographies valuable is not the scientific rigor and meticulousness that all three of these ethnographers (and so many more) duly demonstrate, but instead any ethnography’s singular ability to take us into what we still imagine as that “heart of darkness,” whether the jungles of the Congo or the sidewalks of South Central Los Angeles.

It isn’t enough for ethnographers to study the world. For anyone to care nowadays, they have to titillate us, too. Give us a window into “the other” that will blow our minds. To accept this double-standard is to enter into a Faustian pact with a sensationalist contemporary ethos that demeans the true significance of careful, honest listening as a powerful methodological tool for social analysis when chronicling the experiences of nerdy video gamers as much as the most violent of gang members. Ethnography works in either case, even if only the latter fully satisfies our collective predilections for sensationalist storytelling. Number crunchers are asked to stick to the facts. If ethnographers want anyone else to care, it seems that they had better shock us with them.

Posted at 11:42:16 PM on May 16, 2008 | All postings by John L. Jackson Jr.

Comments

  1. “Sensationalism” in ethnography also cuts another way. Sometimes it goes in the opposite direction, away from “shock,” and attempts to warm the cockles of our hearts with tales of the “nobility” of the people under study. That, too, sells memoirs.

    — LuckyJim · May 17, 06:31 AM · #

  2. Good point.

    — John L. Jackson, Jr. · May 17, 11:14 PM · #

  3. Ethics and Research

    1. Responsible conduct guiding researchers. Universities, federal and state government as well as professional organizations have guidelines on ethical behavior and research.

    2. Informed consent – Participants must be informed and voluntarily give their consent to participate in a study.

    - Participants must be fully informed about all procedures and possible risks. – Participants informed of purpose of research and how data will be used. – Benefits of study. – Alternative treatments and potential compensation. – They must understand and arrive at a decision without coercion. (Voluntary participation) – Starts before the research begins. – Privacy and confidentiality of research subjects and data . – Contacts – Approval of the IRB (Internal Review Board)

    3. Termination of research if harm is likely. Risk-benefit assessments.

    4. Special protection for vulnerable populations of research subjects.

    5. Equitable recruitment of participants.

    6. Results should be for the good of society and unattainable by any other means.

    7. Beneficence – To promote understanding and shed light on the human condition. Protection of those participating in the study.

    8. Honesty – No data to be suppressed, data should be reported as collected.

    9. Misconduct

    - Fabrication – Falsification – Plagiarism

    William Allan Kritsonis, PhD
    PhD Program in Educational Leadership
    Prairie View A&M University
    The Texas A&M University System

    — William Allan Kritsonis, PhD · May 19, 02:25 PM · #

  4. Ignoring Kritsonis’ ongoing campaign to maximize his CHE post count, I would like to point out that there is, in fact, also a viable market for the ethnography of the quotidian. Perhaps the greatest ethnographic film work, in terms of hours produced, is the Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch” which is now in its fourth season. Sure, the show wishes to draw you in with shots of waves washing over decks and tough men shouting at each other, but along the way you see an endless number of traps pulled up and pushed over the side, you learn about superstitions and rituals, and a host of other cultural forms that ethnographers have long focused on. Even more interesting is the fact that with their journalistic eye for “human interest” they end up making some of the material more vivid because there are people so clearly manifesting social and cultural structures.

    Now, it could be my own training as a folklorist, and one who regularly does ethnographic research, blinds me to some of the work that appears to haunt the original text. Just as I tend to avoid “Gangland” documentaries on television, I tend to avoid them in the ethnographic literature — and for all the reasons that Jackson state. On the other side of the ethnographic enterprise, there has been a steady — if less visible — stream of texts that have made the case for their authenticity through the quiet compilation of detail. But you’re right, they are less visible, less voluble, and less rewarded.

    — John Laudun · May 20, 09:51 AM · #

  5. Of course, in the end, it’s all in the “editing”, is it not?

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 20, 10:42 AM · #

  6. Re: #5: It always has been “all in the editing,” hasn’t it? From “Nanook ot the North” to “Titticutt Follies” to today’s documentaries (inc. YouTube), we see and infer, just as we read and infer, from a preselected frame overlaid with what we bring to the table. Hate going metaphysical, but how can we ever choose that single point in the flow and say“this is the stream”?

    — anne · May 20, 11:00 AM · #

  7. Yes, and in the physical sciences, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle formally described the fact that all matter responds to the manner in which it is perceived — that, thus, one never observes anything in its original state.

    Of course, there have been experiments in physics to try to “trick” matter into revealing itself. I remember there was one using the direction of the opposite spins of parts of a nucleus which seemed rather compelling.

    In the end, “esse est percipi” was far more prescient a maxim than even Berkeley could have thought – and one which we must bear in mind in all ethnographic research. Ethnographers are creating an endless series of cultural “stories” which are, in essence, always, to a lesser or greater degree, personal fictions subject to all the uses and abuses of the genre – and where “truth” is only asymptotically approached.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 20, 12:16 PM · #

  8. Jackson’s piece is one of the nicest overviews of ethnography I’ve read in a while. I’ve written a bit about the politics of writing ethnography for an academic audience, and the ways in which that continues the practice of colonization — representing someone else’s story in language and venues that they have no access to. So I’m delighted to see Jackson citing Barbara Ehrenreich, for instance, who puts the work on the Barnes & Noble shelves instead of the Sage Publications backlist. I think that Joan Didion is perhaps the premier ethnographer of the past fifty years.

    And I’ve also given up on the notion of “truth.” I can be accurate, and have a responsibility to be accurate. But what I choose to study, the other texts and contexts I place my work within, and the interpretive and advocacy purposes I bring as my interests all mean that my account is selective. I hung out with this kid and not that kid because I thought this kid was more interesting, and I get to define “interesting.” I think my readers get a pretty strong sense pretty quickly about my values, and those who disagree with my interpretations usually disagree because of values. We just believe different things about the nature of “the good life,” and so believe different things about the meaning of the events I’ve portrayed.

    — Herb · May 20, 01:42 PM · #

  9. The only problem with the “implicit values understanding” argument is that ethnography (as even our blog host has described it) seeks to convince itself that the observer indeed ceases to disturb and that that is the beginning of what I have called the search for the “truth” in the research.

    To draw an analogy with an anthropological study of primates, I believe (but I cannot cite with precision the studies involved – it may have been Jane Goodall – my apologies):

    The predominant theory of the social organization of a particular species had always been one organized around male-dominance. And then, the same facts were turned around by the female anthropologist “resident among them” to show that, in fact, the society was matriarchally-structured.

    Did the men who preceded her see what they looked for? Did she? Somehow it seems to be important to know. If it’s just a question of “interesting” and a guessing game of “values”, well, is it science?

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 20, 03:26 PM · #

  10. Having lived in some abnormal situations before joining “mainstream” middle class American culture, I think we might benefit by having gangs in Chicago study suburbanites from Southern California and low-wage service-sector employees study middle-class journalists.

    I remember going to a scholarship meeting at an upscale restaurant attached to a golf course when I was young and was spending as much time on the streets as in class. I was wearing my leather and there was a sign in the building that said “No spikes or clubs allowed in the restaurant.” Now, the first part made sense to me and I did a quick once-over of my leather, because you wouldn’t want someone like a skinhead with a bunch of metal spikes or razors or something causing trouble, but the second part seriously confused me because what kind of person would carry a club around for a fight? It didn’t look dangerous around there and the whole idea seemed really awkward and unweildy. It took me a minute to realize they were talking about golf clubs and therefore probably about spikes on somebody’s shoes. I’m not normally an idiot, but the abrupt face-first full immersion culture change led to a complete misinterpretation of a message. Realizing the difference between what I initially thought that sign meant and what it really meant was an abrupt and clear guide to several differences I could expect in the two worlds (and I quietly hid the leather entirely in a cloakroom before the meeting).

    The point at which two cultures clash can hold a lot of information. I think there could be much to be gained by turning ethnography inside-out.

    — bta (probably far too amused by people-things) · May 20, 05:37 PM · #

  11. On Comment 10:

    Absolutely. The basic stance of traditional ethnography is, as Comment 8 also points out, that of the colonizer – therefore, of the master who studies the slave in order to further master.

    Of course, it is precisely the gang member who studies the suburbanite who would make the very best middle-class journalist! Ethnography is indeed, in a sense, “standing on its head” – waiting to be righted at last.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 20, 05:54 PM · #

  12. #10 and #11: All very nice for the “What If…” symposium at Model U.N., or a college-town dinner party where middle-class white people feel good because, gosh, they can laugh at themselves, but really a little silly. Notice that bta has, mais oui, come in from the cold. And what in hell makes AHA put “of course” in front of the totally whack assertion that “the gang member who studies the suburbanite who would make the best middle-class journalist”? Too many inspirational Denzel Washington movies, maybe? Anyway, it’s all just a species of PC Axiom #1: the knowOR (physicist, chemist, sociologist, comp. lit. prof., art historian, ethnographer, et al.) is always the colonizer/villain and the knowEE (atoms, methane gas, the working class, Brazilian novelists, post-Impressionist painters, gang members, etc.) is always the colonized victim. Andrea Dworkin applied the same reasoning to heterosexual intercourse: penetration was colonization. I guess we’re all the products of imperialist daddies.

    — LuckyJim · May 20, 07:57 PM · #

  13. These comments are amazingly helpful—and compelling. You all are adding some much-needed nuance to the more flat-footed definitions of “ethnography” that most students get taught. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and insight.

    — John Jackson · May 20, 09:17 PM · #

  14. On Comment 12:

    The description of a cross-class, cross-culture, down-up “advantage” is in the same vein as the observation by a Yale business school dean (during a C-SPAN interview several years ago) who remarked that yes, America offers the best graduate education in the world – but it is only really profited from by the international students who bring to it different perspectives (and languages) and thereby are better prepared to explore it.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 20, 09:51 PM · #

  15. P.S. Andrea Dworkin’s “mistake” was that she did not take the “objective” facts and re-metaphorize them. She accepted the “dominant” metaphor of intercourse (itself a rather “egalitarian” word) as “penetration” and thereafter extended the metaphor into “colonization”.

    Of course, this controlling sexual metaphor has even been extended into areas of daily life where there is no sex involved at all (e.g. the electrician’s male and female plugs and sockets).

    Dworkin might have instead viewed the human sexual interaction as “enclosure”, “envelopment”, etc. – a completely different metaphoric vein, if you will – and thereby re-situated the dialogue between the sexes.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 20, 10:11 PM · #

  16. Right. A person who’s stabbed or shot isn’t “penetrated” by the blade or bullet, but rather the victim “encloses” or “envelopes” the offending metal. And in a rape trial, the prosecutor asks the accused if he indeed held the victim down to be “enveloped” by her.

    Given those paradigm-shifting revelations, I can’t wait for the full interview feature on AHA (who somehow strikes me as a suburanite or college-townie) by that intrepid journalist from the Latin Kings.

    — LuckyJim · May 21, 06:32 AM · #

  17. By the definitions (actually extensions of the “male organ as weapon” metaphor) in Comment 16, no female could ever be found guilty of raping a male – which would come as a surprise to many a court judge.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 21, 07:44 AM · #

  18. Anthropology as a discipline grappled with the “studying down” nature of ethnography throughout much of the 1970’s and 80’s, with Larua Nader’s “Studying Up” perspective becoming a challenge to rethink and address ethnography and power.

    Experiments with first-person ‘biographies’ (putative ‘in their own words’ ethnographies) and ethnographies of “us” rather than “them” (of ‘the West’ rather than ‘the Rest’) began to be considered as legitimate research.

    In the early 1990’s an official group actually emerged within the Americian Anthropological Association— the Society for Anthropology of North America— that at least initially reflected this ‘studying up’ shift. It seems, nonetheless that the predominant perception of ethnography as an anthropological hallmark, continues to be framed in terms of studying ‘the non-western,’ ‘the marginal,’ ‘the powerless,’ and ‘the exotic.’

    — anthrodocz · May 21, 07:53 AM · #

  19. AHA: That corner of rare exceptions gets tinier and tinier, doesn’t it? Can you, while of necessity standing on the tip of one big toe, tell me how many cases of forcible rape of a male victim by a female perp (not statutory, and not where the female penetrates the male with some sort of object; where she forcibly “envelopes” him) have you ever really heard about? Links welcome. And if you don’t want to tell me, just include it in your interview by the Crips, and I’ll read it there.

    — LuckyJim · May 21, 08:22 AM · #

  20. Catherine A. MacKinnon, one of Andrea Dworkin’s best friends, revolutionized the entire domain of law in the field of sexual harassment precisely by disconnecting sexual violence from sex and linking it instead to an analysis of abuse of power.

    In fact, her theories have been used to reconceptualize anti-pornography laws as well, again, concerning power and sex discimination – whether the “perpetrator” is a male or female or the “victim” is a male or female.

    Even statutory rape laws, as applied against women, understand that the issue is one of power so their exclusion from discussions of rape are not as “exceptions” but rather at the very heart of the matter.

    Laslty, cognitive behavioral therapy tells us that the words we use to describe the world have an effect upon the emotions and behavior.

    The desire to retain male-oriented power-laden terminology to describe all human sexual intercourse (not just rape) is what other words describing the same actions both challenge and subvert.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 21, 09:25 AM · #

  21. In Post #9, AHA said, “If it’s just a question of “interesting” and a guessing game of “values”, well, is it science?” Three responses come to mind. First, I’m not sure how values is a “guessing game.” We all have them, we can probably describe them, and they seem to matter. Why shouldn’t they matter in our scholarship?

    Second, I expect that people will argue with my interpretations and not my evidence. They may argue that I don’t have ENOUGH evidence, which is always true. They may argue that I’ve idiosyncratically interpreted the evidence, or that other readings are possible. But I work really hard to ensure that the evidence itself passes the test of factual accuracy. (One of the problems with so much ethnographic writing is that the actual stuff of life — the scene, the dialogue, the body language — isn’t brought to the table, but rather replaced with a smokescreen of theoretical language and summaries.)

    Finally, I make no claims at all that what I do is science. Neil Postman’s chapter “Social Science as Moral Theology” was helpful in my thinking about that… I leave the scientists to study things that have right answers, and focus instead on the things that are murky and arguable and tacit.

    — Herb · May 21, 09:29 AM · #

  22. On Post 12, I think you’re reading in your own prejudices here. Saying that it might be a good idea to take a look occasionally from the other side of the looking glass is a far cry from saying our current ethnographers are villians of some kind. Come back to talk without the chip on your shoulder, because I don’t think I’ve ever advocated the reducto ad absurdem approach you’re coming up with in number 16, so maybe you’re not really talking to me but to some perconceived arguments you already have prepped for your debates with other people on the fora.

    Re: Post 21 – Herb, it’s interesting that you reference that chapter, as my first thought on reading the question was “Well, social science.” I doubt that in studying human interactions we are ever likely to be able to come up with exact E=MC2 equations to predict our development with precision. Too much relies on our own perception both of what happens around us and of the meaning and range of our responses. It’s something like predicting the flight behavior of a flock of birds – part basic social rules for the environment, part individual variation and part chaos theory. _

    — bta · May 21, 10:49 AM · #

  23. AHA:

    1. You almost never answer the question. (I’m still waiting for the court cases, and the links.) Perhaps you could signal the coming evasiveness by, in the great tradition of Richard Nixon and Dana Perino, beginning your non-answers with, “You know, I’m glad you asked that question.”

    2. Whatever Ms. McKinnon pioneered in the field of legal theory and criminal motivation, the crime of rape is still physiologically an act of forced or coerced sexual penetration. If Ms. McKinnon ever discussed an act of forcible or coerced “enveloping” of a male victim by a female perp, I’d sure like to hear about it.

    And I did get the suburban/college-town thing right, didn’t I?

    — LuckyJim · May 21, 11:05 AM · #

  24. bta:

    That’s not a chip on my shoulder. It’s a golden epaulet I won in the debating club. Looks neat, huh.

    In comment #16, I was replying to my ol’ pal, Anti-hypocrisy advocate. Although he’s certainly welcome, he’s never been on my sofa.

    — LuckyJim · May 21, 11:15 AM · #

  25. Let me side-step the diatribes that are present in these comments and add one more observation about ethnography in the service of another kind of power—that of commerce.

    I have used some of the tools of ethnographic listening in research for corporate clients, and there is a rich vein of ethnographic research in product development circles— so much so that the Harvard Business Review cautions clients to assess practitioners with an eye to its “fad status.” This is far from Jackson’s observation that “ethnographic analysis seems to have lost some of its authority.”

    In corporate ethnography, there is no pretense that the ethnographer will be in situ long enough to pass as part of the community, and some may therefore question the reliability of what we discover. Such researchers are not roughing it, and the quality of their work , or its integrity , may be called into question. But the value of such ethnography remains a crucial counterpoint to the gathering of quantitative data. When one mother says that she limits her son’s use of electronic devices to ten hours, and another family takes electronics on a trip to Africa to “keep the children occupied,” we know a good deal about the value of electronics in society and can speculate on what our children may be missing.

    If such research neither shocks nor creates “noble savages,” it documents lives lived, in ways quantitative data can not. I am troubled by the need to commoditize findings, but the potential to understand how people actually live with and use their commercial culture has potential for re-inventing our relationship with a disposable society. It is, as many have suggested, a question of how the data is translated for use—whether it is documenting the Trobriand islanders or ourselves.

    — Nora Rubinstein · May 21, 05:29 PM · #

  26. Re: Comments 16, 19, and 23

    cf. Philip N.S. Rumney, “In Defence of Gender Neutrality Within Rape”, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fall/Winter 2007 for a detailed discussion of the issue of gender-neutral rape laws.

    “Jurisdictions that have adopted gender-neutral laws include: Canada, all Australian states, n29 the Republic of Ireland, n30 Finland, n31 England and Wales, n32 and the vast majority of states within the United States. n33 Gender-neutral reforms, however, are not uniform in nature. Some jurisdictions have adopted laws that are fully gender-neutral—these laws recognize male victims of rape and acknowledge that women can physically commit the act of rape. n34 In order to achieve gender neutrality, jurisdictions have adopted an expansive definition of sexual intercourse that includes penetration of the vagina, anus, or mouth with a penis, hand, tongue, or inanimate object. n35 These definitions also cover assaults where a woman coerces a man, woman, or child to penetrate her in one or more of the ways stipulated. n36 Other jurisdictions, such as England and Wales, have extended the definition of rape to include male victims, n37 but do not recognize females as principal offenders (although women can be convicted as accessories). n38 While most reform jurisdictions do recognize same-sex rape, Indiana is unusual in that it has a gender-neutral law that only recognizes rape between heterosexuals. n39”

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 22, 12:07 AM · #

  27. A law is not a CASE. Give me a case that involves a female’s forcible “enveloping” of a male.

    This whole thing started, AHA, with your saying, “Dworkin might have instead viewed the human sexual interaction as ‘enclosure’, ‘envelopment’, etc. – a completely different metaphoric vein, if you will – and thereby re-situated the dialogue between the sexes.” I’ve been chiding—OK, hammering—you ever since as to the wishful-thinking nature of that statement, especially concerning rape. Even if you do come up with the kind of case described at the top, it’ll still be one against, what, a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million?

    — LuckyJim · May 22, 06:40 AM · #

  28. On Comment 27:

    Laws do not generally precede crimes, they follow and then proscribe them. When they do precede them, the crime is usually considered a threat to the common good.

    The quote from the Rumney article in Comment 25 was selected precisely to show the linguistic machinations necessary to avoid “active” verbs like “enclose” although the power-laden term “coerce” is retained.

    As a crime of power, the generally perceived/assumed (even among women whose physical stature is greater than many men’s) powerlessness of the female may in part account for imbalance in the number of non-statutory rape perpetrators by gender. However, the article is quick to point out the public’s lack of awareness of male sexual victimization which has, indeed been documented.

    The Rumney article (which “envelopes” this sub-thread debate, so to speak) is a rich resource with 176 footnotes, many of them with case citations and references to other works which contain case citations, concerning both the phenomena and the debate. The availability of the article to those interested should bring closure to this sub-thread which more than one reader has found distracting.

    However, it is interesting to note that such a debate as this underscores the difficulties encountered in law and ethnography as the cultural presumptions of the researcher may induce him and, perhaps especially, her (the “usual” rape victim) to miss/downplay the reverse phenomenon – which is precisely a premise of the article.

    As a post-script, the photo on the homepage of the law journal article’s author, Phil Rumney, confronts the reader with further cultural/linguistic assumptions: link text

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 22, 08:15 AM · #

  29. A case, please.

    — LuckyJim · May 22, 09:30 AM · #

  30. On Comment 29:

    Here are just two of the footnotes from Rumney’s article containing research based on multiple case data:

    n157 For discussion, see Sarrel & Masters, supra note 49; William H. Masters, Sexual Dysfunction as an Aftermath of Sexual Assault of Men by Women, 12 J. SEX & MARITAL THERAPY 35 (1986); Linda Murray, When Men Are Raped by Women, SEXUAL MED. TODAY July 1982, at 14.

    n158 E. Sandra Byers & Lucia F. O’Sullivan, Similar but Different: Men’s and Women’s Experiences of Sexual Coercion, in SEXUALLY AGGRESSIVE WOMEN 144 (Peter B. Anderson & Cindy Struckman-Johnson eds., 1998). For an explanation of various reasons as to why men may report less trauma, see Philip N.S. Rumney & Martin Morgan-Taylor, Recognizing the Male Victim: Gender Neutrality and the Law of Rape: Part Two, 26 ANGLO-AM. L. REV. 330, 338-40 (1997).

    Pace.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 22, 10:36 AM · #

  31. Not bloviating, not blowing smoke, not citations of articles that (apparently) even you don’t want to plow through…just a simple thing: an example of a woman successfully prosectured for forcibly sexual “enveloping” or “enclosing” (your terms) a man.* Given that all Ms. Dworkin would have had to do, according to you, to set us all on a different kind of metaphorical thinking about human sex, was to replace her penetration=colonization metaphor with an envelope/enclose one, it shouldn’t be so difficult.

    At any rate, I’m done. You’re either going to find a case and shut me up, or you’re going to continue your little dodge-the-question fandango, to which, I have found out, it’s useless to reply. Prof. Jackson and other readers will probably be glad to see me—and us—exit.

    * Women raping men by sexually pentrating them with an object doesn’t count, because then the colonization metaphor still holds, with merely the sexes switched.

    — LuckyJim · May 22, 12:04 PM · #

  32. Weren’t we talking about ethnography?

    — Bible Spice · May 22, 02:42 PM · #

  33. On Comment 31:

    For those who have neither the time nor the inclination to read the Rumney article but who nonetheless are “curious” about this disputed bit of gender “ethnography”, a Lexis-Nexis Academic search of the words “man raped by woman” (in quotation marks) yielded:

    “MAN RAPED BY WOMAN”, Scottish Daily Record, News; p. 30, November 11, 2005. (A 24-yr. old woman in Oslo, Norway was sentenced to eight months in prison for raping a 31-yr. old man “as he slept on her couch”.)

    “Man raped by woman, court told”, The Weekend Australian, Local; pg. 9, March 18, 2000. (“Mr Weston said the penis became erect and Ms Dawes placed it, against his will, in her vagina.”)

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 22, 08:44 PM · #

  34. Point of clarification:

    The use of the terms “enclose” and “envelop” in Comment 15 were not being suggested to describe rape but rather human sexual intercourse from the female point of view, thereby drawing a distinction between the two which the theories of Andrea Dworkin (and, apparently, others) do not make.

    In closing, to quote/paraphrase the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, “ le point de vue cree l’objet” (“the point of view creates the object”) – lesson one of Ethnography 101.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 22, 09:16 PM · #

  35. Bible Spice, I agree the discussion seems to have drifted. I was enjoying ethnography….

    — kgotthardt · May 27, 10:24 AM · #

  36. On Comment 35:

    Perhaps the enjoyment mentioned was of the meta-discussion of ethnography. The “drift” on the blog was actually into the ethnography of gender in our culture.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 30, 09:43 PM · #

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