(How) Can A Man Do Feminist

(How) Can a Man DO' Feminist Ethnography of Education?
Bradley A Levinson Indiana University

The author atiempt« to work through ;Iht qJislemol'lg1CJlI, melhodolagiCJlI, and tlhiad questions involved when a man IIltro!pts to contribute 10 feminisllheary .and pmciics with ellmogr;aphiclmawltdgt. He discusses the pTtcursors to such.aproject by r:ecounlilIg .tht histury afmalt oonfribuliollS to'fominisl anlhropolagiad scholarship .and mMwing cunml ,debates about the problrntS of.in1flprdalion and praxis in ftminisl tlhllOgmphy:

Drawing an fieldwork 0111 MaiCQn ~co.ndaryschool,. the author presmts the diltmmas he foad and .insights Ire gamtml in focusing his inquiry on Mexican schoolgirls lind their mothers. He a/so discussestht problematic nature of his inquiry with sexist schoolboys and the ways this inquiry may still contribute 10 feminisl knowledge. Reflecting all these experimCfs, he establishes the cenhulityof feminist educational ethnography in the outlook for frminist social cmmge arul argues for Q pluralistic eonception affeminist educational ethnography tha! might find a wluable place fur male cDntributians.

And what do feminists wanl? If you. will fOrgi.ve me my directness, we do not want YolJ. '1.0 mimic us, 110 become the same as us; we don't want your ,pathos or your .guilt; and we don't even wanl your admiration (even if irs nice to get itonce in a while). What we want, Iwould even sa.y what we need, is your work. We need you '10 g~1 down 10 serious work. And like all serious work, that involves struggle and pain.

-Alice Jardine (lardine & Smith, 1987)

Feminist scholars have engaged in undeniably fruitful discussion about the complex relations between research methods, knowledge, and liberatory

Author's Note: This is a revised version or a paper originally prepared for a roundtable session .atlhe annual meeting of the Ameriean Educational Research Association, in Atlanta, Geol'gia, April 15, 1993. I would like 10 thank R W. Connell, Rachel Cristina, Margaret Eisenhart, Dorothy Holland, [anise HIJI:tig, Catherine lutz, Luise McCarty, Tom Schwandt, Debra Unger,. several anonymous reviewers,and especially Judith Stacey for their thoughtful comments, Thisartide was substantially revised while I held a National Academy of Education Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. [ thank those institutions as well.

Qualitative Inquiry, Volume 4 Number 3,1998 337-368 ~ 1998 Sage Publications, Inc,

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practice O· Acker, Barry, & Esseveld, 1991; Fine, 1994; Fonow & Cook, 1991; Harding, 1992; Lather, 1991; Maynard & Purvis, 1994). A significant part of this discussion hasconsidered the specific contributions and limitations of feminist ethnography for such practice (Abu-Lughod, 1990; Reinharz, 1992; Stacey, 1988). It is rare, however, for this discussion to broach the problems and possibilities of male scholarly contributions to feminist ethnography. Rarer still is the question of male participation subject to the same kind of epistemological and ethical scrutiny as is women's work with other women or ethnic and class relations among feminist researchers themselves (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994; Lugones & Spelman, 1983). This critical oversight renders male work, "struggle and pain" for feminist goals, a confusing, even forbidding endeavor.

In this article, I would like to carry forth the discussion by taking up Alice Jardine's passionate invitation '10 profem:inist male academics. The litle and framing question of my inquiry leaves to the reader the ultimate judgment about how and whether men can usefully contribute to feminist ethnography. Here, I present some of my own struggles as a man attempting to contribute ethnographic knowledge to feminist intellectual projects, and I reflect on some of the practical and theoretical entailments of such struggles. I pose questions to open the discussion further, to make male work for feminist goals not only possible but desirable.

This inquiry began more than 5 years ago as an earnest rejoinder to Judith Stacey's (1988) widely cited doubts about whether there can be a feminist ethnography at all. In that piece and in a later revision (1991), Stacey poses the ethical conundrum of a feminist ethnography that paradoxically exploits its informants to a greater degree than do the hierarchical and objectifying practices of survey and structured interview research. Feminist ethnographers, Stacey says, ought to and often do encourage collaboration, mutuality, and intimacy in their research with women. However, the empathic qualities of ethnographic fieldwork inevitably contradict the need to convert these relational experiences into "grist for 'I he ethnographic mi]!" (Stacey, 1991, P: 113), the "data" informing a final interpretive product. Stacey laments that the divided loyalties and strategic choices required of the ethnographer entail a sometimes necessary betrayal of intimacy in a way that may put the informants at emotional and! or social risk. Yet, even as she wonders whether this apparent violation of feminist research preoepts vitiates feminist ethnographic practice a \together, Stacey opts for a resolutely "partial" ethnography which-"committed and incomplete" (Clifford, 1986, p. 7)-would still surpass in value "less dangerous but more remote research methods" (Stacey, 1991, p. 118; d. Roman & Apple, 1990).

In the course of her discussion, Stacey (1991) reminds us that a good deal offeminist critique has been directed toward the gaps and distortions of social science "research by men, hut about women." Consequently; feminist ethnography is presumed to occur "almost exclusively woman-to-woman" (p. 116).

Yet, by highlighting the rich possibilities of woman-to-woman research, this view deflects the question of how and whether men might still contribute to the variously professed goals of feminist research=-ethnographic or otherwise. Indeed, only a few feminist methodologists suggest that men might have any role in the development of a feminist ethnography except as examples of myopic partiality, foils for the conception of an alternative. I Even the explosive growth of critical ethnographic studies of masculinity by men (e.g., Connell, 1995;. Gutmann, 1996; Herzfeld, 1985; Kimmel&: Messner, 1992) has yet to be fully incorporated into feminist projects?

Ironically, by exploding the myth of female solidarity in the field, Stacey also opens a space for e.xamining male participation. She allows for points of sympathy between a male ethnographer and a female informant that might be identified and drawn upon in the production of an ongoing relationship characterized by collaboration and mutuality. In her own ethnographic work, Stacey (1990) draws on her relationships with the male relatives other female informants to illuminate the power dynamics of family formation from a feminist perspective. Thus, she also establishes the possibility that ethnographic research about men, whether by male or female ethnographers, may contribute to the development of feminist theory and practice.

Ethnographic research on education, broadly defined, examines those social spaces and relations, both in and out of schools, constituted by the transfer and coconstruction of cultural knowledge. Yet just what makes such ethnographic research feminist has recently become a subject of some contention. Feminist researchers within the field of education, as elsewhere, have advocated a more engaged research praxis that mighl overcome some of the inequalities in doing social research (Britzman, 1991; fine, 1994; Lather, 1991; Roman, 1992; Roman & Apple, 1990; Weiler, 1988). For many feminist educationists, including ethnographers, research should not just describe and analyze oppressive social relations, rather, through a form of action research/ wo.men should work to. transform these relations during the research process itself. Yet, this work still Fails to. address the position of men in feminist ethnography, either as researchers or subjects. My own emerging vision of feminist educational ethnography includes work by, with, and about men (Levinson, 1989, 1991).1 define feminist ethnography as intensive qualitative research, aimed toward the descript ion and an a lysis of the gendered construetion and representation of experience, whkh is informed by a polihcal and intellectual commitment to the empowerment of women and the creation of more equitable arrangements between and among specific, culturally defined genders.' This definition leaves aside the question of whether the analysis ought to be developed in deliberately collaborative ways or directed toward transformative praxis at the research site .itself. As I argue elsewhere (Levinson, 1996, 1998b), I. believe that interpretive-analytic approaches to ethnography can productively coexist with collaborative action approachesj I do not believe that we can or should distinguish firmly between a naturalistic or


Levinson / FEMlNIST ETHNOGRAPHY OF EDUCATION 341

realistic interpretive ethnography and. a more explicitly committed political one.Re~exivity is th~ k~~ to success in either case (Shackloek &: Smyth, 1998). According to my definition, moreover, work with men (whether by male or female ethnographers) and about the construction of gender roles and ideologies .~ore ge,":er~ly has .an important role to play: So too does the study of mascuhruty and lts hnks With the major structures of power in contemporary societies (Connell, 1987, 1995; Segal, 1990).

In .what foHows, I move on to a grounded presentation of my own expe.nence, my own struggles and insights, as a profeminist ethnographer in MeXICO. llay out the context of the study as it was originally formulated and eventual:ly executed, and then • present concrete cases of problematic research relationships along with the kinds of knowledge such relationships produced. ~ext, I undertake an analysis of recent ethical and eptstemological debates, to ant~pology and the ~a] science; more generally, to clarify the promises and pe.rils of male contributions to feminist ethnogra.phy. I conclude with further questions for discussion,

cultures carried out primarily in the Euro-American canted, would have 'to' be modified by this new case.

Thus, the initial impulse and theoretical framework. for this study were neither exclusively feminist nor determined by the interests of participants at the fieldwork site itself. My dissertation research proposal primarily sought to' accommodate the interests of faculty members and fundingagendes through a cogent demonstration of the contribution [ might make tothe research literature? There was Little explicit concern with the question of how my research might contribute to' women's liberation. Some feminist scholars might condemn this research out of hand as an example of the colonizing tendencies of masculinist First World social science (see Mohanty, 1984; Ong, ]997). This is a debate I cannotfuJly enter here (see Levinson, 1998b). Rather, I would like to focus my thoughts on the possibility of resituating, perhaps even redeeming, this research within a feminist problematic. Astute and ethica I ethnographic research necessarily entails a reorientation of the original research problema tic. It also entails an accommodation, if not outright service, to local interests and needs. Here, I raise the question of whether this k.ind of reorientation could gOo far eno ugh in meeting the demands of "critical sufficiency" (Stone, 1995) fora feminist ethnography.

A MALE FEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHER OF STUDENT CULTURE?

Ethnographic Inquiry Across the Assumed Gender Divide

lnitia.l Frameworks

Though not my exclusive preoccupation, questions aboutgender formed a significant part of my research proposal: I was curious about how girls and boys differed in their appropriation ofthe space of the school for producing identities and strategies, and I wanted to know how the school-and the student culture that emerged there--encouraged or discouraged the expression of certain kinds of femininities and masculinities (Levinson, 1997, in press). I had been informed by feminist critiques of earlier youth culture studies (McRobbie, 1991), especially Willis's (1981) classic account of working-class lads, Nevertheless, despite my commitment to gender analysis and feminist theory, I downscaled myambi.tions for working with girls {average age: 12-15 years}. Friends, colleagues, and advisors wamed me that in this conservative Mexican town, women would probably keep their distance. Even as 1 attempted to compensate for my "bias" as a male ethnographer, then, I resigned myself to approaching the girls as best and as much as I could, given the constraints of the field, and paying special attention to the girls' experience in the subsequent analysis,

To my surprise, I discovered early on that some girls would become my most eager collaborators. Within the school, girls played a prominent social role as leaders in both formal and informal activities .. Because I made it clear from the outset that. I wanted to' comprehend the school from the students'

This inquiry emerges out of a larger ethnographic study of schooling and p.opular '~Iture: ~ Mexico (leVinson, 1993a, 1993b,. 1!998c). The study was situated ma cnticaJ educational Iiterature concerned with. how schools in capitalist societies p~rticipa,~e. in frodu~g.o.r reproducing gender as wen ~s r~ce, ~[ass, and age 1Oequalities. One slgmficant segment of this !:ireratu.re, drawmg larg,ely on ethnographic resean:h in secondary schools, asks how st~dents, thro~gh an active production of meanings and strategies, may reinforce, modlfy, or challenge such structured inequalities, Yet, most critical e~ograp~c studies of student culture andseeondary schoolilng have been earned ?ut 10 the~dvanced Euro-American capitalist democracies (including Austrah~), ~d virtually all of them emphasize the splintering of school populations mto mDstly divisive and antagonistic status groups or student c~ltures. I set out to examine student culture at a provincial secundaria (junior high sch~l) in ~exico6-a dependent capitalist nation with a socialist-tinged corporatist polittcal structure, Eventuany, [ observed and analyticaUy reoonstruct~ stud.ents' contradictory investments in producing a cultural game of equahty, which acted to forestal.1 or arrest the emergence of distinct and oppositional student groups. The rather different social conditions in Mexico suggested thatexisting theory, informed only by critical. research on student

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point of view, they took it upon themselves to help the anthropologist learn the ropes. Although boys were often indifferent to my presence, many girls sought me out and inv.ited me to spend time with their friendship groups during recess or after school. I cultivatedthe ambiguity so often necessary to successful fieldwork, and gradually the boys and the teachers alike came to accept my unusual association with the girls'groupS.8

Was the ambiguity of my self-presensetion an unethical masking or a producti ve way of entering multiple cultural. worlds? What kind of authority or attraction did I draw on to enter these different worlds? I did not experience this ambiguity as d uplidty or intentional misrepresentation. Rather, it seemed a fair extension of my own complexities as a subject, my own biographical predisposition to make friends with everyone. As [ sought access to the worlds of boys and girls, teachers and students, I tapped into these deeply conditioned sources of adaptability, which had been augmented by my profeseional training as an ethnographer,"

Th.is adaptability, however, could never fully extract me from relations of power. For one thing, a few girls appeared to develop crushes on me. This was one of the most direct-and compromising-ways I partidpatedin students' "grounded aesthetics" (WiUis, 1990). Across a. range of activ.ities, from sports 'events to dancesto student parties, ~ saw and felt the sensuous motions-the sway of a hip, the pass of a ball, the illicit puff of a cigarettethat students often subsumed into the burgeoning universe of romantic interest.jn their idiomatic fashion, students often counterpoised the allure of this kind of sensuous activi.ty to the school's general focus on the mind and suppression of the (romantic, sensual) body (d. Nespor, 1997). The fact that I had become an object of attraction for several girls drew me into the world of romantic gender relations at ESF in a way I had not quite expected. I was 27 years old at the time of my fieldwork, though I was often told I looked much younger; Because I was more than twice the age of most schoolgirls, it had not occurred to me that they might take me as a romantic object Not only had I overlooked the fairly common phenomenon of schoolchild crushes on teachers, I had also failed to recogruze that relationships and marriages across such age differenoesare fairly typic.al in Mexico. This was pressed upon me toward the end of'the school year when, on infonning them I was sad because 1 had broken up with my girlfriend in the United Slates, two girls offered to match me up with one of their classmates. ] chuckled and said] was too old, but one of the girls said her own father was 25 when he started courting her 'then 14-yeaf'-Ol!l mother, and 'the other girl offered her aunt and uncle as a similar example.

A few girls apparently desired me from afar, and one began a correspondence as my secret admirer; It was relatively easy to gently and congenially discourage these affections. More difficult were a couple of cases in which I formed close, confidential relationships with informants, Leticia stands out here: In March, she came and handed me the notebook I had given her to

record her thoughts about school life. We had exchanged the notebook several times already, but on 'this day she took advantage of my involvement in a basketball game to slip the notebookinto my bag and deliver a cryptic "adios." She avoided me for several. days.and then 'through the intervention of her friends l learned that she had developed feelings for me that made mere friendship too painful When she finally let me approach her, I appealed to Leticia's maturity by explaining why a more .intima.!e relationship would not be possible or appropriate given our differences in age, culture, and experience. After another week, she came to me and said our friendship was too valuable, and she would try to work through her feelings. Now that she is 22, we continue to be in dose touch, as I am with many of her former classma tes as well. Yet, in the process of extricating myself from such attachments as delicately as possible, Ileamed a lot about how girls' subjectivities were being formed in and out of school and about just what kinds of expectations were in playlD

1 participated in the girls' burgeoning world of romance not only as an object of desire or romantic prospect but also ,as confidante, counselor, and intermediary In fllis way; I learned about gender and romance from the perspective of an outsider sympathetic ,to the concerns of the girls. Many came to confide in me some of their deepest conflicts and most secret desires. My ambiguous status in the school allowed me to develop a relation .of trust and empathy few girls could expect from other men in their lives. As an educated adult, I was sought cut for advice and comfort. As a U.S. citizen=-a fcreigner-and as an anthropologist, I was deemed to have an expertise in practical questions concerning school, family, and romance. Yet, though [ was perceived as a kind ofadult, I also became incorporated into students' friendship networks to varying degrees. I went to students' parties, sat with them in classrooms, and played with them at recess and after school. I occupied a kind of transitional zone between adolescent and adult, able to draw on the perceived authority of experience and U.S. citizenship while participating nonjudgmentaUy in students' informal activihes.1I

Eventually, m came to know many of the students' mothers as well, and again,contrary to my expectations, they opened up a world I had thought inaccessible. These women provided my most pcignantinterviews as they recounted their lost dreams of childhood and their marital struggles. Undoubtedly; there were certain topics-notably sexuallty-s-that remained largely outside my purview. Nevertheless, I also came to spend a good deal of time in kitchens, church pews, market stalls, and other largely female arenas where] was privy to a dearly :female {ann of alliance and banter. Certainty; the fad that I had a rather different way of conducting myself than other men in the local society contributed to the relative ease with which women opened up to me. Even if I was a man, my inquisitive, empathetic demeanor was not easily understood through local categories of male conduct. And in a culture where women struggled against various forms of male

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dominance, visiting American men were often bestowed a (perhaps undeserved) reputation as being more attentive to the rights and needs of women. There is little doubt that media images of "sensitive" American men, coupled with returning migrants' first-hand reports of women's relative freedom in the United States, fueled this perception. On many occasions, I heard women advance a peculiar combination of statement and query, comparing Americans' presumed progressi.vism. with Mexican male dominance: "Alia '10 trlllllll aslll sus muieres, i.verdlld?" (Over there they don't treat their women like this, right?]. I usually set them straight with some version of" Hay de todo" (There's a little of everything).

The question of my sexuality did not come up for inspection as much as some had led me to expect. My inclination to spend time in the kitchen, wash my own clothes, or chat with female teachers and schoolgirls did not, as far as r could tell, generate significant doubts about my heterosexuality. Perhaps my status as an anthropologist and foreigner allowed me greater leeway than might have been granted a fellow Mexican. Perhaps my invocation of a distant girlfriend, or myadmissions of attraction to some local women, dispelled any doubts. Though I cannot know what was priva.tely surmised, for the most part my habit of crossing gender lines occasioned lighthearted, sometimes nervous commentary rather than earnest gestures of control or admonition.

Why did my relations with girls and women become so central to the ethnographlc research, and how did I try to reciprocate their trust and honesty? Interestingly my fledgling friendships with girls facilitated my relation with the different cohorts (gruposescolares) where students spent most of the school day. This was because girls held fonnal and informal leadership positions in the grupos escclares. Once I became accepted by a critical mass of girls, the gropo as a whole usually welcomed my presence in the classroom and other activities. I tried to reciprocate this by respecting, even promoting, the girls' strategies for empowerment in the school. r helped them with homework, took their side in some arguments, coached their basketball team, and SOOn.

Some girls came to confess that they saw in me the big brother they had never had and sought me out for advice on school or family matters, relating some of the emotional concerns in their lives. In these cases, [ adhered to a key dictum of counseling psychology and gave minimally directive advice, trying to clarify points of view and letting them decide for themselves. Besides, I honestly did not know what else to tell them. A cultural novice myself, how could [advise them properly in social affairs?12 This was likewise for my relations with schoolgirls' mothers and female relatives. Though they asked less expliciUyfor advice, they d:id often ask me to confirm their experience, to acknowledge their wisdom or suffering, and as will be seen, to take their side against the patriarchal authority of their husbands.

I also struggled with traditional. canons of ethnographic validity that stipulate a kind of neutrality, a minimal intervention into the "natural"

fieldwork context. There was a delicate line to tread. If I gave more directive advice about how students should relate to other students or parents, then wouldn't I be radically altering the phenomenon I was trying to understand? And if I allied myself more strongly with certain girls against their teachers, parents, siblings, or schoolmates, wouldn't I be jeopardizing my own precarious status in the field? Moreover, how GOuld I perceive the effects of my presence on 'these girls' aspirations and iden'llties or on their mothers' strategies for empowerment within their marriages and households? How could I incorporate the perspective of the participant-observer and of my (U.S., White, middle-class, Jewish, heterosexual. etc.) male subjectivity. into an intersubjective analysis of social process? Eventually; I settled for a goodenough reflexivity. Eschewing the attempt to interpret a social process that "would have happened had I not been there," 1 set out to document my own interventions as closely as possible. This included retrospective discussions with my research collaborators in an attempt to discern these effects. Moreover; my own actions on the girls' and women's behalf evolved as I became both more culturally proficient and more radicalized by my knowledge of their predicaments in specific contexts of domination.

A brie.f example from my fieldwork may illustrate, Over the course of the school year, I developed a particularly dose relationship with Rosita and her family, At 14 years old, Rosita was the older of two daughters in a family of modest means located in an established working-class and artisanal neighborhood. Her father owned and operated a small cargo truck and also supervised the operations of a small shop for the production of cotton napkins and tablecloths, which he owned in conjunction with his father and brothers. Her mother supervised domestic chores, cut and measured cloth, and subcontracted embroidering and other detail work on the cloth to poorer neighborhood women.

Rosita was one of those schoolgirls who said she came to consider me the big brother she had never had. Still early in the year, Rosita called me over during recess and said she wanted to consult with me. As I had in the past, I reminded her that because I was not Mexican, I might not be able to give her the best advice. She persisted, saying an opinion would suffice. Then she proceeded to tell me about the quarrel her parents had had the night before. She claimed to have successfully blocked out the details of the quarrel, even though they had been arguing close to where she was doing her homework. After a few minutes, she said, her father asked her to bring him his coffee wit h some cookies because he was going upstairs to rest, but her mother blurted out a defense, scolding, "Why don't you do it yourself? Your daughter is not your slave.if you're already down here why can't you just serve yourself?" Rosita said this whole episode caused her to stay up all night with worry:

The conflict between her parents would become a dominant theme in Rosita's final year of secunda ria, and it became dear that Rosita felt somewhat responsible for it. One day shortly after the discussion described above, I

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noticed that Rosita looked distracted and upset. She hardly looked at me, and when I asked her if she was angry, she only managed, "I've got 11 big mess [relajo1 at home." When I finally caught up with her after school, and we walked alone for a stretch, she told me her parents had scolded her fOT her grades, which were much lower than usual during the first ~radi[\g period. Then her parents had argued with one another. As I observed In several other households as well, the father had blamed the mother for insufficient vigilance over their daughter'S studies, and the mother had defended herself. In the manner of a contract, the father felt that his material provision for the family obligated the wife to take care of the home and, by extension, m~nitor the conditions allowing for school success. Rosita thus felt she had occasioned an uncomfortable argument between her parents.

1 became quite dose with Rosita and her family; visiting often. If her father was home, I was invariably obliged to sit and chat with him while Rosita and her mother sat on the margins of our conversation and listened or went about their household chores. Rosita's mother often chipped in comments to the conversation but did not otherwise take a leading role. Because of this, I relished the opportunities to speak with Rosita's mother at length when her husband was outside the home. It was during these chats that I learned why she so adamantly defended her daughter'S right to choose her own friends and leisure activities, even her career. She spoke with a sense of sadness and loss about her own lost opportunities and about her too-early marriage to a man who t umed out much like her own fa ther, Rosita's mother was struggling in a marriage, and a web of affinal kin relations, which she regretted in many ways. Her solution, it seemed to me, was to invest in her own d.aughte~s' happiness and freedom. That is why she enjoined her husba.nd to gIVe ROSita more freedom, and that is why more overt household conflicts had begun to develop as Rosita matured.

I became enlisted in these two women's struggle against the cultural authority of the husband and father. I was an "educated" person, an a.nthropologtst (Rosita's mother always called me maestro, or teacher, despite my protests),and-perhaps most important-a man, who could perha~s convince their husband and father to loosen the reins on his daughter. ROSita and her mother never specifically requested my intervention. Rather, they attempted to draw on my kind of authority to contest ~e ~uthority of RO~ita's father. They would invite me over frequently, and ROSita s mother sometimes made a reference to the more "liberal" practices of other families, hoping I would confirm her observation. Por instance, when her husband refused to celebrate his daughter's 15th birthday with a traditionally upper-c.lass qllinceafio party. Rosita's mother said, "Everybody is doing~t nowadays, nght teacher?" This "rightleacher?" (.:vudim que sf, maestro?), directed at me, "",as a common intonation on my visits. It attempted to secure my agreement WIth causes and strategies being advanced by Rosita and her mother. It attempted to persuade the husband and father. I usually responded in agreement,

carefully crafting my words to support the mother's contention while acknowledging the father's position as well. After I got to know the father well and had earned his respect and trust, sometimes I even ventured to contradict him more emphatically.

Besides making these oblique requests for intervention, Rosita and her mother both clearly enjoyed speaking with me. Each of them commented on several occasions Ihat it was a relief and a 'benefit to discuss their problems with someone who was outside the family and their immediate circle of friends and kin. I was one of the few people they knew who would probably never reveal their stories to other people in the school. or community. Interviews and chats, it seemed, became an enormously reflexive and cathartic exercise, an opportunity to tackle dragons from the past and chart new courses tor the future. In other words, these interviews, rather than revealing preformed identities, conflicts, or aspirations, became pari of a process of intersubjective identity formation into which I had been drafted. What's more, Rosita and her mother also felt honored by their participation in a "scientific" study (d. Skeggs, 1994, P: 8]).

I! have given this example because it shows one kind of involvement with schoolgirls and their families, one angle on men working with women from a feminist perspective. Some might contend that this research was exploita'live, that its commitment was not genuine. After all, the relationship was never fully symmetrical or reciprocal; neither Rosita nor her mother solicited my research project, and once engaged, neither could easily refuse my requests for interviews despite my initial statement that they could quit at any time. Prom the beginning, I deigned to use their participation as another source of data in an interpretive study, with little pretense of transforrnative praxis in the field. One could even say, most cynically, that I. have eventually parlayed their cooperation into material and career gains. On the other hand, as I have tried to show, mutuality and reciprocity became an emergent quality of the relationship. Rosita and her mother expressed their gratitudeto me on numerous occasions and seemed genuinely pleased when I came to visit. I have continued to maintain my relationship with them by calling, writing, exchanging gifts and favors, and visiting when possible. Though I retain ultimate control over the textual products of our collaborations, they have seen the transcriptions of some interviews and have given me their feedback about my interpretations, which [have then modified accordingly (of course, this is often made more problematic by distance and language differences).

How can we reckon the outcome of Ihis relationship? Must I admit that my own role in these two women's empowerment was minimal, despite my presence and my advocaey vis-a-vis themale figures in their Iives? Quite aside from the local impact of my presence, my "exploitation" of Rcsita and her mother for my own research ends must be balanced against its potential contribution to feminist theory and practice in Mexico and elsewhere. Among other things, my research with Rosita and her mother has allowed me to


Levinson / FEMINI5f ETHNOCRAPHY OF EDUCATION 349

Ethnographic Inquiry Among lithe Boys"

Now I would like to move on to a discussion of the problems I faced in my work with Mexican adolescent boys. For the most part, my relations with hays were constructed on rather different grounds. It was rare for one of them to ask me for advice like the girls did, and I got to know ra.therfew of their fathers or male relatives. Conversations were directed more towa.rd sports, music, or aspects of American popular culture, In fact, in comp~rison ~o the"girl~: conversations were few and far between. Boys simply did not like to talk (plafiCJIr) as much as i9rIs did. Their interactions tended more toward roughhousing, banter, and aklnd of masculine gamesmanship, which involved humor and insults. Indeed, I noted that the boys' masculinity was largely premised on this spurious emotional self-sufficiency, with its deliberate cultiva.tion of b:ivolity Feminist sociolinguists in the United States have found similar differences in male and female speech patterns (Eder; 1995; Tannen, 1994), so the boys' communicative ethos was not too unlike what I had known growing up in suburban Los Angeles. My interactions :-rith boys often turn~d on those transcultural features of our masculinity, which J could summon In spite of our ethnic, class, and age differences.

Oddly enough, even though my relations with boys were constructed on

the grou.nds of this shared subjectivity, I often felt~s though I wer: engaged in another kind of masking with them. My sympathy for the predicament of

girls under patriarchy seemed to outweigh my commitments to the boys, who of course had their own struggles. The intention r masked was to better understand the boys' world in order 110 critique it, to elucidate the underpinnings and reproduction of male power. In its own way. then, my research stance was exploitative toward the boys. If they had known my true sympathies, they might nol have willingly participated. Ironically, the girls did not corne to know my motives much more than the boys did. Had I told them I was studying the constraints on their freedom as women, they would hardly have understood why. In this sense, I waS no more transparent with the girls, and this suggests that I drew on my power as male and as researcher to entice their participation more than I did with the boys.

Still, r often felt less comfortable with the boys than with the girls. To engage with the boys on the grounds of a common subjectivity seemed to require tapping into something more distant, perhaps deeper, but alien to the kind of "remade" masculine subjectivity (Connell, 1990; Jardine &: Smith, 1987; Segal, 1990) that] had more recently formed in my experience with feminist activism and academics. It was akin to the feeling I often have when I now visit my own family and we host a family gathering. On these occasions, it is customary to stay with the men in the family room, watching television and participating in desultory discussions of finance or sports, which I can find both dreadfully boring and strangely compelling. Though I may share these masculine pleasures, I would often rather be in the kitchen, yard, or living room, garnering snippets of family history, sharing photos, or playing with the children-aU in the company of women who've come to accept my idiosyncratic tastes.

An example from the field illustrates these personal dilemmas. One of the friendship groups r worked most closely with consisted of four boys from middle- to upper-class families in town, who playfully called themselves the Juanitos. These boys befriended me early in the school year, and I began to spend time with them in and out of school. It was dear to me born the outset that these boys spent time together because of a particular shared configuration of class, ethnic, and gender identities. This could be seen most dearIy in their manner of keeping certain students at a. distance while constructing a dominant ethnic and gender identity. For instance, through the first three months of the school year, I noticed a boy named Antonio tagging along with the Juanitos, following them around during recess and sometimes .after school. The [uanitos seemed to accept his presence, though Antonio rarely initiated interaction.

Antonio was obviously from a different background than any of the ol:her four juanitos, In contrast 10 them, he was short and dark-skinned and he lacked the kind of savvy and social acuity that, in the [uanitos' view ~nyway, marked the cultural capital of the professional and merchant classes. Yet he was clearly making a bid for acceptance in the friendship group, and what made that bid desirable, or even possible, was the fact that his family had

understand how some girls drew on school-based notions of student rights to contest their fathers'authority in the household and how some mothers suppo.rted them in this struggle, investing in 'the.ir daughters' futures as a substitute for their own. It has also helped me to fill in a larger argument about the way gender struggles in the family and the school dynamic~lly and reciprocally influence students' construction of aspirations and id~ntJties (see Levinson, 1997). Do these research findings ring hollow in the lives of ESF students and families? Perhaps. The research may not have a major effect on Rosita's own struggle for emancipation, at least not in any immediate sense. Rather, it win become part of a. body of critical research, hopefully drawn on by feminists and proferninists to transform gender relatio~ of power. ln~he context of Mex.ico and Latin America, this hope can be reahzed by translating the work, presenting it in public forums, and making it accessible to Mex.i~n feminists working on similar issues-an effort I have already begun (Levinson, 1998a). Perhaps the research might thus contribute to critically informed changes in schooling, law, social service provision, and other everyday sites of gender oppression in Mexico, There are no guarante~ onc~ the textual product begins to circulate, but I retain a not wholly naive faith that s~ch changes will eventually have some positive impact in the lives of ROSita, Rosita's mother, and Rosita's future daughters.


Levinson I FEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHY Of EDUCATION 351

recently come into a. good deal of money: Just 2. years earlier, his father had been struggling as a truck driver based out ofa small, distant vmage. Antonio had lived his entire me in the countryside. Then, through astute investment, Antonio's father had managed to first buy his own rig, then several others. By the time I got to know Antonio, his father owned and operated some seven transport trailers and had ceased driving one himself.

Antonio had thus moved into town and acquired some of the trappings of his new social position: a brand-new racing bike, snappy imported clothing, the latest high-top shoes. Yet the marks of his rural past were still indelible, and the J uanitos were never remiss, in pointing these out. On occasions when I asked if Antonio was really a Juanito, the boys' responses were GOy and evasive; Alberto said, for instance, that Antonio could be considered "de reserua;" a benchwarmer, a substitute,

Perhaps most important for the questions I address here, the [uanites dosed their group off from Antonio in several ways, two of which involved components of a hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995): first, by engaging in flirting and petting with girls, which Antonio was not ready or disposed to do, and second, through a. kind of inflammatory, sexist male banter; which Antonio either could not, or would not, master. Talk about girls, like talik about tiindios" and "mllchfl1es" (pejorative racial. and class categories), was one .important way the Juanitos demarcated their friendship group from other students. Maintaining a sharp gender distinction was therefore also one of the' conditions of acceptance intothe [uanitos, U was one more way in which they GOuld keep Antonio, never quite ready for flirtation or sexist banter, at a comfortable arm's length.

Despite the relative discomfort of it, I did participate in the normal masculine banter ofboys like the Juanitos. I did not participate by offering up my own sexist remarks but simply by carrying the talk along with questions, knowing nods, .or smiles. In fact, 1 surprised and disturbed myself at how proficient I could become in this style of interaction. AHhough I refrained from encouraging or endorsing their more sexist remarks and actions, I did laugh along feebly when the occasion called for it. further, I felt pressured to constantly reaffirm my masculine, heterosexual credentials. This meant proffering, upon their request, my assessment of the beauty or desirability of various girls in the school; italso meant enduring endless attempts by the boys to match me up, actually or specl:Jllafively, with female teachers in 'the school. All of this put me in a difficult position. My feminist instincts urged me to admonish or correct the boys in these instances, but 1 worried that to do this mightjeopardtae the broader goal of understanding how male power was reproduced among these g:roups of boys. Perhaps if [ had expressed disdain for the boys' sexism, if I had chal.lengedthem in the terms of their own cultural logic after gaining. their trust, they might have paused to consider their actions. They might even have come to change in some si.gnificant ways. And through this challenge, I probably would have learned

something important about the construction of masculinity. Yet in the field, I was still too wedded to a specious neutrality,. an a'lfempt to understand how gender relations of power were constituted in the absence of an intruding anthropologist I also' worried, perhaps exaggeratedly, that boys like the Juanitos might reject me altogether. This would have nullified some of the positive benefits of the research ..

At a softball game in my local park, I was reoentlyreminded of the tenuousness of male camaraderie and the constraints around antisexist action .. [arrived on a Sunday morning to. play for the first time with a gro.up of guys who had been playingreg:ula:rIy tor some time .. There was alot of razzing and banter about softball skills and appearance. At one point,. an easy ground ball was missed by the shortstop, and the guys on the bench called out, "My grandmother could have got that one!" "Come on, lift up your skirt!" lust then, a slightly older fellow behind them raised his voice a little, "Come on guys, no sexist remarks out here." He then paused for effect and continued in a chuckling tone, "YOI.I can be stupid and rude, but not sexist." This eased the slight tension that had been raised by his first remark, and several of the men laughed. Meanwhile, I had been sitting by myself, off to the side, practically grumbling about the sexism of the men. I was heartened to hear the older man's disciplining remark, but I also wondered why I hadn't had the nerve to make it myself. I realized then that an attempt on my part to discipline the men mighthaveeasilybackfired, Asa newcomer, I did not have much legiHma.cy in their eyes. Moreover.I probably would have sounded far more condemning in my remark. The other fellow~ by contrast, had managed to soften the scolding with a corollary joke, and he clearly commanded their respect. Here I was reminded that the success of any intervention designed to challenge a cultural practice has much 'to do. with 'the degree of legitimacy and respect given to theperson who intervenes.

I was never sure I had achieved that kind of legitimacy with the [uanitos, As males and as members of a prominent social class, the ]uanitos already had access to much of the cultural. knowledge I might provide. Ourrelationship turned more on my ability to tum a good joke or provide them with a source of amusement. Perhaps I also served them as a modest status symbol in the school, In short, they could take me or leave me,and I had to stay in their good graces. Why Ithus failed to 'exercise much (male) power and authority with the Juanitos may speak volumes about my ongoing contradictory investments in male dominance.

My worries about doing research with sexist boys raises a series of questions in relation 10 the ethical conundrum articulated by Judith Stacey Can the precepts of a. feminist ethnography, however those are defined, condone research that undermines the power of men in the process of "studying up" (Nader, 1974)? Are there conditions under which a kind of masking, even deception, can be justified by the intellectual and political goals of feminist liberation, t3 or do the broader ethical dictates of feminist methodology, if not

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all human subjects protocol, override such possible benefits? Also, are there instances in which immediate feminist pedagogical imperatives should outweigh the broader .ntellectual conoems of crirical researcb? In other words, should I have ca~led out the boys' sexism when it cropped up? By ignoring this sexism, was (condoning it and thereby participating in the reproduction of oppressive conditions for women? Would it have been possible for me to teach the boys about gender oppression through challenge, dialogue, or e:xampl.e wrul.e stiU seeking to understand the means by which oppression was produced and reproduced?

Such questiens, as I have tried to show, do notad mit easy answers. Perhaps in their very fonnulation they posit false dichotomies between research and action, between knowledge and practice. They also presume the possibility of complete' and noncontradictory selves. In the spirit oHeminist resea rch, I have attempted to consider the many ways I have floundered on th.e shoals of these presumptions, even as r have tried to push beyond them. What can we learn, then, from my contradictory expressions of masculinity and solidarity in the field, my differing senses of masculinity as resource and constraint? (How) can any male ethnographic experience be converted intosomethirrg of value to feminist projects? To begin answering these questions, (move to a discussion of some epistemological traditions and debates surrounding male researchers and feminist ethnography.

In societies where the sexes are polarizedand women are placed under jural control of men, consignedto hearth and home, they have often been relatively mule, ~able or unwilling toarticulate "global" views, 10 'talk insightfully about themselves, their life [sic], their societies. (p. 27)

TRADITIONS AND DEBATES IN FEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHY

Keesing makes a case that the female "muting" so many ethnographers have described is a fictitious construct resulting from inattention 10 the political and ethnographic contexts in which women's social commentaries may be elicited and described.P

In the 19805, mosUy male anthropologists began to valorize experimental modes of conducbng and w.riting et:hnography to problematize the relation between authority and representation in this kind of research (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Marcus & Fischer. 1986). Yet feminists soon critiqued this poststrucluralist-inspi:red development of experimental ethnography tor ignoring or downplaying the role of feminist contributions to such development and for resurrecting subtly masculinist modes of analysis.16 Indeed, many have recognized that male bias in the construction of knowledge was never a mere function of too many male ethnographers in the field, though that certainly did not help. Rather, the problem arises from a masculine theoretical. gaze,. privileging male voice and activily,that colonizes all available means of representation, even where social access to women's worlds is frrequenUy possible."

In the past, feminists had assumed that masculine cultural. description was determined by the rather strict separation of men's and women's social worlds in the types of peasant and tribal societies anthropologists have tradi'honal1y studied .. James Gregory (1984) argues that such a. separation lypicaUy has been e.xaggerated, coming to serve as an alibi for male ethnographic indifferenc,e to women's activities, Still, the anthropological llteratura abounds with stories of male ethnographers barred from meaningful contact with women, and vice versa for female ethnographers. In the once-archetypal image of fieldwork among "primltives," male ethnographers who wander from 'the longhouse to 'the women's cooking huts face severe social sanctions, even accusations of sexual. aggression: meanwhile, female ethnographers who pursue the opposite course invite charges of moral opprobrium, or worse. Of course, nowadays anthropologists are perhaps just as likely to study modern, Industrial, highly differentiated societies. Although the social worlds of the genders may not be quite so distinct in these societies, many problems of access and rapport persist. Metaphoricany speaking. the cooking huts have been. transfonnedinto a private domestic space, Ihelonghousein'lo politicaland corporate office, each in many ways equally inaccessible to the gendered ethnographer.

For most feminists, it would have seemed the necessary corrective was obvious: more female ethnographers in the field, focused on female a.ctivi.ty. Indeed, as women have entered the discipline in increasing numbers and turned their attention toward the concerns of a feminist ethnography; we have

Anthropology and Feminist Ethnography

I write from my own disciplinary comer ofthe world, anthropology, which has played a key role in the development of ethnogr-aphy as a method of u.nderstanding situated social action. The rise of feminist analysis in anthropology brought with it a critique of the gendered construction and constriction of knowledge in ethnographic research. It Feminists pointed out that most of the' discipline's "classic" ethnographies had been written mostly by men and were mostly about men, but nevertheless pretended to describe 'Ihe general structure and worldview of a. society; community, orinsrirution (di. Leonardo, 1991 b; Morgen, 1989). Such ethnographies, in other words, described societ ies in which male activity had become identified, historically, with the public arena of decision making, transaction, and ritual-indeed with all of "culture" itself. Male activity was more visible and more easily documented by male ethnographers; hence, etl:mographic description and analysis made this activ'ity seem more representative of a group than did its corresponding female activity. Noted Australian anthropologist Roger Keesing (1985) characterizes the predominant view:


Levinson / FEMlNIST E1HNOGRAPHY OF EDUCATION 355

witnessed a. boom in writing by and about women. IS On the other hand, few men have been able to write sensitively and accurately about women's worlds. How have male scholars who have attempted to situate their ethnographic work within a fernlnist problematic fared? It depend's on who you ask. Feminists have generally kept men honest about their gendered position in the analysis.l" And despite the many male contributions now available, Whitehead and Conaway (1986) note that female ethnographers have more frequently and consistently pmblematized the role of gender in fieldwork. Sttl], di Leonardo (1991a) remindsus that, ironically; even femaleethnographers sometimes depict other women as the only human beings "with gender."

ing (Calhoun, ] 995; Luttl"eIl., 1996; Scott, 1992). Once we accept 'Ihat much of women's knowledge is mediated by social discourses, some of which originate in hegemonic formations.i" then we open a space for conscientious male collaboration in feminist ethnographic projects. The inherently fluid and contradictory nature of gender identity forces us to abandon the essentialist implications of some versions of standpoint theory and entertain the proposition that men can understand women's lives through ethnographic research (Jayaratne & Stewart., 199], p. 94).

But can they do so without reproducing patTiarchalrelations of power, as Modleski suggests? To be sure, there is no space men can occupy that fully escapes these relations of power, but there isa possibility for a commitment to reflexiv.ity and women's empowerment 'thatmight mitigate, or even transform, these relations. This is true even in cases in which men's research methods would seem fa ultimately distance them from the women they purport to be reseerrhtng. The problem, as Stacey (]991) fully recognizes, is that most ethnographic research contains an objectifying moment, at stage of analysis andinterpretation thai requires a kind of distancing from the emo-tional and political commitments one had to make in the field. Joan ACker et al, (1991) state the problem nicely:

The Riske of Objecti.fication:

Male Participadon and Feminist Epistemology

Feminist scholars in and out of anthropology have been generally more receptive to male scholars' work with men, especially on the construction of masculinities. Men working with women, on the other hand, are sometimes seen to reproduce in their researchthe same sexist conditions women encounterelsewhere, For instance, cultural studies scholar Tania Modleski (1991) has discussed' the dangers of men conducting "feminist" ethnographic studies of women consuming popular cultural commodities such as movies and magazines. For instance, she takes John Fiske to task for "employing the techniques of patriarchal panopticism" in his study of young women who appropriate the work of Madonna to contest or disrupt the male gaze. According to Mod,leski, Fiske reinstatesthe v,ery power of that ga.z,e in the "neutral" and in'lrusive methods he uses to study the women. By :fail:ing to develop a more self-reflexive' attitude about the relations of power inherent in male "scientists" studying women, Fiske runs the rlskof reinstating a certain kind of male power through his ethnog.raphic practice (pp. 36-41). Modleski argues that!t is crucial. for a man engaged in critical research with women to acknowledge "his personal investment in his subject(s) and develop more interactive, mutually implicating methods of cultural inquiry" (p.41).

Modleski's critique thus holds Fiske up 10 the kind of ethical and epistemological scrutiny I agree is necessary to evaluate male contributions 10 feminist ethnographic research. Still, many of those who subscribe to standpoint theories find the very idea of male work with female research participants deeply problematic. In their stronger versions, standpoint theories, which in .my vi.ew implicitly or expti.citly inform most action research ap_ proaches In femmlstethnography, highlight the importance of recovering and valuing women's unique perspective on social relations. Because men do not share 'Ihis standpoint, their work with women is seen to be compromised in various ways (Mies, 1983). Yet, standpoint theory often presupposes a facile connection between women's concrete experience and the practice of know-

Ullimately the researcher must objectify the experience of the researched, must translate that experience into more abstract and general terms if an analysis that links the individual to processes outside her Immediate social world is 10 be achieved. Objectification would be minimized and Lhe emandpatory goal furthered if both researcher andresearched could partidpate in 'the proc,i!SS of analysis. But this is not always possible, because the preconditions of such participation, some similarity of interest, ideology, and language between researcher andresearched, are sometimes absent. ...

We tound that we had to assume the role of t'l1e people with the power to define. The act of looking at interviews, summarizing. another's life, and placing it within iI context is an act of objectification, Indeed, we the researchers took the positionthat some process of objectification of Ihe self is a neoessary part or corning to an awareness 0.£ one's own existence: it is not less a part of coming '10, an understanding of others. (pp, 136, ]42}

The question then becomes whether this stage of objectification can be justified insofar as the resultant analysis illuminates the dynamics of gendered relations of power and advances Iemmist knowl.edge toward the transformation of such relations in practice (Hurtig, n.d.). Adopting the modified standpoint theory of Sandra Harding (]992) and Donna Haraway (1991), we can hope to achieve "strong objectivity" through the "situated knowledge" of women's experience. And there is no reason to. assume that male ethnographers are always less capable than female ethnographers of rendering an "objective" account that remains true 10. the experience of 'the researched (Harding, 1992,. p. 584).

For some feminists, of course, the transformation thai counts most isthe one that occurs through the process of research itself; no amount oJenlight-

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ened reseaw;;chreports, policy-making influence, and the like can justify an obj.echfying rese~rch practice that fails to grant equal collaborative authority andepistemoIo.gtcaJI status to the knowledge and values of Ihe researched. For such fem~n~t researchers, the defense of objectification spuriously sanenons [I1~scuhn1St prerogatives in a realist mode of interpretive knowledge pmduction.

subjectivities are complexly articulated by .ag.e, race, class, and gender-to produce mutually empowering knowledge? Doesn't the ethnographer eventually have to "take sides" (Levinson, 199301), a.t least in the moment of analysis? Second, Lather's approach to interpretation and analysis is too closely and irrevocably linked to the goals of a prescriptive critical pedagogy. Although this ma.y work for action-orlented research in which teachers, like Lather, wish to investigate the condinons of knowledge production in their own classrooms (Britzrnan, 1991; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993), for broader critical research it too quickly collapses the moment of objectification, of the search for theoretical and interpretive referents that might make the social processes observed more comprehensible in Itheir totality. In other words,. it closes off the possibility of seeking broader theoretical understanding and building social movements around processes not easily amenable to immediate pedagogical itntervention (such as the political-economic structure of school finance and administration, the production of media images and discourses, and the like). To her credit, Lather (1991) acknowledges the need to "avoid reducing explanation to the intentions of social. actors" (p. 55), but this is where her methodology tends to lead us. Even if we reciprocally "involve research participants in a collaborative 'effort to buildempirical:ly rooted theory" (p. 61), there is still no gua ran tee, as Lather herself recognizes, that the research process will always overcome the "psychologlcal hold of illusion" (p. 61).21

Although I admire the move towardgreater theoretical coHabora,Uon., I do not endorse it as a, model for all feminist ethnographic work. Terms such as sin, violen.ce, and exploitation have been used frequently by Lather and others to characterize the modus of interpretive feminist ethnagraphy. Yet radically democratic research collaboration is nat the only possible ethical or epistemological stance, and i'l. may work better in some contexts than mothers. Because there will always be ethnographic contexts worthy of feminist study that might not lend themselves to collaborative action research, we should maintain a. vision of diverse feminist ethnographies, each one responsive to the political and intellectual demands of both the fieldwork site and the broader field of intellectual production (S,. Acker, 1994; Williams, 1993). Among feminist educational ethnographers, my work until now most closely aligns with the materialist position Roman (1992) has articulated (d. Skeggs, 1994). Roman (1992) criticizes the objecttvist referents of most natural.istethnographyand argues for a thoroughgoing reflexivity in fieldwork and writing. However, and :in contrast to much recent writing, Roman still wishes to preserve a materialist interpretive approach that seeks to understand observable social relations through an analysis of underlying soda I and economic structures (d. Carspecken, 1995). This require> the risk of committing the sin of "theoretical imposition." but it is a risk worth taking to explicate the "deep structures" of personal and social behavior (Roman, ]992, pp. 582-583). The oral historian Katherine Borland (1991) has taken this risk and helps us raise

Varieties of Feminist Bducatlonal Ethnography

One suchresearcher would appear to be Patti lather (1991), who sets out a p.owerful theory ~f "research as praxis." In effect, Lather proposes a collaborativernodel of action research that effectively dispenses with the moment of objectification, OF a~ :I~astl'enders it rather differently. In Lather's pastmodernist account, feminiss ~archers collabosate with the researched to produce mu~ually empowe:1ng knowledge for reflection and emancipation, The averarc~mg .goal of th:1S model is to use dialogue and a thoroughgoing reciprocJty tode.~ocratize knowledge and empower the reseerched to speak their understand 109 of their own condition. Above all, it seems, Lather wants to avoid t~e"sin o~ theoretical imposition" (p. 55) often committed by the privileged interpretive ethnographer.

In this earlier work •. Lather (1991) demonstrates her approach through an analysiS of students' reactions. to a "liberatory" feminist curriculum at 'the university Her sludy of her own and other instructors' students in a women's studies class ~nables important points of mutual empowerment and comprehension. eu.nously; lather rarely mentions the term el1mography, andit does not .appear m the book's index. Her research .. into students' responses relies heavily on surveys, jo~mals, .and interviews and less on the mainstay of ethnography-observatlon. Still, the research she describes is closer to what much current ~U~ati?nal.sch.olars~pcharacterizes as ethnography, that is, long-term quelitarive mquuy mlo 'the cultural worlds in which peopla make meaning. In her latest project, a study of women living with HIV/AIDS, Lather (1997) describes herself as "working the ruins of feminist ethnography" (see also Lather & Smithies, 1997). To avoid the "violence of objectification" that permeates mast ethnographic studies (lather,. 1995,. pp. 50-51), she lets the women tell their stories through an open, dialogic text

How do Lather's provocative arguments seem less compelling for the circumstances of my own research? First, Lather's informants are far more hom.ogeneous, if not in. terms of race, gender, and class, then in terms of institutional posit.ia~s and ~terests, than most educational ethnographers are likely to encounter l;n the field, Even her latest work highlights a singular group of women defined by their experience of living with HIV/AIDS. Yet in the typical school or community site that ethnographers study, how is one to collaborate w.ilh teachers, parents, administrators, and students-c-whnso own


Levinson I fEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHY OF EDUCATION 359

When I consider my relationship with RDsita and her mother, I wonder if I am reinscribing patriarchal relations by mediating their words andexperienees with a male discourse of ethnographic authority. Is my objectifying interpretation only an alibi for denying my female informants their expressive

voices? As I recontextualize the women's gestures and statements 'through interpretatiorr.I am, 1.0 be sure, doing 'them a kind of symbolic violence. But their voicesare no less "authentic" for 'this mediation. After ,all, I amalso inserting these voices into a. largersense-maklng scheme, a parallel narrative of feminist COncern. What becomes even marie important are the eonling,ent questions: To what ends do I reportthis research? In what circuits of power do J insert these women's voices and experiences? If I have not designed Ihe research to respond tD the immediate needs of the women WhD participated themselves, should .it not be done at all? Is my mediation and interpretation of women's voices politically and theoretically justified if my analyses will, for instance, further Mexican feminists' projects for women's emancipation?

And what about my work with men and boys? Are their voices any less important for feminists to understand? Can we take more heart in the practice of theoretical imposition with them? If educational relations form the backbone of identity formation in youth, then mustn't we take the risks of recontextuelizing young male voice andexperience in a narrative of feminist liberation (We is, 1989),? Don't we gain critical feminist purchase by studying up the gender hierarchy and identifyin,g the sources of sexism among YDung, disaffected men in modem urban and educational settings (Connell 1990, 1993; Foley, 1990; Mac an Cham, 1991; Macleod, 1987; Walker;, 1988; Weis, 1990; Willis, 1981) or in attempting a frankly interventionist program to transform male consciousness (Katz, 1995)?

Answers to these questions no doubt vary, but surely ethnographic research both by andabout men and by and about women in educational sites can play an important role in further developing feminist theory and practice, The answers we give to these questions are important for theyallow us to bring into the open a discussion about the relationship belween men and the political-intellectual projects offeminis! ethnography. In the spirit of Iardine's opening invitation, 1 have attempted to initiate this discussion here through an account of my own struggles and insights as a proferninist male ethnographer conducting research in a Mexican secondary school and its surrounding community. I have held my own work up 1.0 the interrogation of difficult questions that must be asked of any man doing research conceived in a feminist vein. The central. 'issue, il seems to me, is how a man can do feminist ethnography establishing credibililty and value without having to draw on male cultural capital, or assert male privilege, to do SD (Newton&: Stacey; ] 995). In an imporla,nt sense, patriarchy continues to work in and through me despite my feminist convictions. Perhaps such apparent convictions provide an aUbi for the assertion of my maleprivilege in even more subtle ways. Surely, any male contribution to fem.inisl research must engageina more or less continuous reflexivity, a struggle to undermine and contradict the everemerging signs of gender privilege in 'the movement from field to text. Ultimately; my questions and observations point toward an inclusive sense of the feminist ethnugraphic enterprise, a recognition .of diverse modes of

Ihe question even more poinledl.y. For Borland, the life story her grandmother tells her is "an example to .feminists of one woman's strategy for combating a limiting patriarchal. ideology" (p. 7.0), even though the storyteller finds this feminist interpretation rather wronghea.ded:. Under what conditions can feminist inrerpretadoa legitimate its critical. purchase, even as it gainsays the experience and self-understanding of social actors? Roman (1992) suggests 'Ihat giving a "dialogtcalright-of-vero" 10 informants may free their "voices" but may not get at the structural dimensions of social action. In my view; the risk Roman describes involves the interpretive moment of objectlfication that I have claimed is SD necessaryll It is a risk that grants the judgment of interpretive validity, of "truth" (Rorty, 1979), as much to a community of scholars as to the researched themselves.

Finally, one of the challenges of delimiting male participation in educational ethnography involves identifying specifically educational contexts of social action (largely, but not exclusively, characterized as schooling) thai requirespecialattention, or acquire special importance, within a feminist problematic. feminist educational ethnographers, of course, have already moved us quite far along in examining the relattons of gender and pow,er in processes of teaching, learning. and i.denlity ronnahon in classrooms and student cultures.2.1 Along with Roman (~988),1 would like to extend this examination toward other instltutional sites of identity formation-in the farnily.. the church, the workplace, the street (Corm.eU, 19.87),andlhe leisure/ commodity culture-that in'lersect with the intentional transmission of school knowledge in complex, and often contradictory; ways (Finders, 199'7; Nespor, 1997). I would remind us that Iherelations between these extrascholastic sites and the school are still educational relations, for they constitute important discoursesthrough which students come to appropriate knowledge, form identities and aspirations, and negotiate their place in the world. These educational relations themselves are shot through with gender and power: A feminist ethnography o.f education thus has much to offer the broader discipline-based practices of feminist ethnography. As we argue for the case of educational an'lhropDlogy (Levinson & Holland 1996), the study of educational processes, within, around, and against modern schooling, should be central to the development of theories and practices of cultural and social change. Education, thus broadly conceived, will always be at the heart of the reproduction or transformarton of the societal gender order.

MORE QUESTIONS AND A KIND OF CONCLUSION

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Levinson / FEMINlST ETHNOGRAPHY OF EDUCATION 361

NOTES

9. lam aware that some psychoanalytically oriented writers might interp.ret this whole eshnographic endeavor as iii manifestation of my unconscious desire to be accepted, to control my emotional 'environment, and the like (Clough,]992; cl.Probyn, 1993). Although I do gr.ant that such desire inevitably enters into the relationships and represeruattons constituting ethnographic research, I do not think ethnogr.aphy can be reduced in this way. ] attempt to use this article to indicate my awareness of how desire and its cousin~power-afrected the research without requiring me to "give up on data collection" allogethef (Clough, 1992, p.137).

10. See Levinson (199'3b) for a. more lhorough account of my relationships with different Individual girls and their friendship groups (pp. 376-395).

n. There were mllny girls, to be sure, wit!! whom I spent little time at aU. Most of these came from. so-called conservative families that discouraged much interaction across gender lines, Such families tended to live in rural or poor urban areas, some of them indigenous. As much as I tried to cempensatefor it, 'there is no question that my lie'ldwork w,as .S"ubject to the class and ethnlc sbucturing of relations w.l!:h participants (Roman ok Apple, 1990, p. 60').

12. [nlight of'jhts, it is especially ironic that by the end ofthe year I hadapparenlly earned a reputation as "gi.vmg good advice."

13. See 'the recent review of debates in the field of sociology around the use of deception in fieldwork (Alle.n, 1997).

14 .. A1lhough the :impact of second-wave feminism produced the first explicitly feminist attempts at theorization in the discipline in the 1970's (Reiter, 1975; Rosaldo ok Lamphere, 1974), important precursors, such as Ruth Benedict and Zora Neale Hurston, have been newly valorized (see Behar &: Gordon, 1995).

15. Feminists have also increasingly called our attention 10 Ihe idiomatic, genderspecific modes of political expression women have developed across lime an.d space. See the edited volume by Butler and &Jott (1992), especially the essay by Alonso (1992), 16. See Gordon (1988), Morgen (1989), di Leonardo (1991b), Lutz (1991,. 1995), Abu-Lughod (t990, 1991), Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, & Ballerino-Cohen (1989), Strathern (1987), Visweswaran (1988, 1994).

17. Also, di Leonardo (l991 a) discusses an exemplary case of thts phenomenon: Janet Siskind's (1973) accounl of the Sharanahua, a tropical. forest group in Peru. According 10 di Leonardo, Siskind's ethnography still privileges the action and agency of men, even though the women were clearly her closest and mostbeloved companions (p. 143).

lB. Of course, the landmark volumes by Rosaldo and Lamphere (1974) and Reiter (1975) were the first 10 systematically bring together feminist theory ami ethnography in anthropology. Feminist ethnographic monographs of this early period would 'have toinclude Stack (1974), Siskind (1973), Strathern (1972), Weiner (1976), and Wolf (1968).

19. Indeed, some of the most interesting feminist work has emerged as a corrective 10 the blunderings and blindnesses of men. The best example here is Weiner's (1976) brilliant analysis and reinterpretation of patterns of exchange in the Trobriand Islands, where Malinowski did most of his original fieldwork Among male ethnographers atlempling to write cogeruly about women's social worlds, Keesing (1985), whose oral history work with Kwaio women I have already cited, is one notable example. Also, di Leonardo (l99h, p. 155) cites the work of Robert Netting (1969') and Walter Sangr.ee (1969), as two early attempts. The recent volumesby Whitehead and Conaway (1986) and by Bell et al. (1993) contain several essays by male ethnographers discussing their research with women or the sex/gender commdrumslhey encounter in the field. The

producing and distributing ethnographic knowledge. As a man,. 1 cannot judge whether men's contributions 10 this enterprise are crucial, but I am suggesting that, properly conceptualized and reflexively executed, they could be useful.

L Recenlly, Reinharz (l992) has reminded us thai the nchness of feminist research comes .inlarge part from its helerogeneity; its refusal to canonize staid methodologies in the pursuit of objec,tive "truth" (1" 74). Abu-Lughod (1990)" in. an article that ilslcs, like Stacey (1988, 1991), whether there can be a feministel'hnography, answers unequivocally in theaffirmative. For Abu-Lughod, feminist ethnography, in all its damming complexity, promises to break up the hegemony of self-assured "mascultnist" ethnography; even mils "experimental" forms (pp, 10-1.06; see also Abu-Lughod, 1991). I concur with Abu-Lughod's assessment, but she still provides no means to endorse ma.le participation free of a rather problematic will 10 power;

2. The British sociologist David Morgan (1983) was aile of the first maleresearchers to suggest foregroundtng male gender identity ineveryday life within a. feminist problematicfp, 95).l..ike Dorothy Smith (1987, 1990), Morgan (1983) also called attention to the masculine nature of "normalsociological enquiry" [p, 108).

3. Action research, of course, spans several disciplines and structural dimensions and has a diverse genealogy that might include Paolo Freire, W.E.B. DuBois, and various pioneers of feminist consciousness-raising. For theIatter, see Reinhan. (1992,. 1'1'. 175-196).

4. I am also using Joan Scott's (1988) understanding of gender as culturally cons tructed "knowledge about sexual d ifferences" (p, 2). 1t should be dear to the reader that my definition here is not unique and. shares much with more postmodern formulations such as that of Lather (1991,pp. 7[·72).

5. See Holland and Eisenhart (1990, pp. 25-42), Levinson and. Holland (1996)0, and Levinson (1992) for useful overviews of thisliterature,

6. To protect Ihe identities of people in the field, I use pseudonyms and call the school Escuela Secundaria Federal, or simply, ESF.

7. Both Francis (1996) and Skeggs (1994, P: 86) call attention tothe strictures typically placed on doctoral research by the conventions of academic socialization, The requirements for sophisricated theoretical production often compromise OUT ability to write for our research participants and to be otherwise accountable to them.

8. Reinharz (1992) summarizes work by anthropologtsts Stich as Lama Bohannan, HortensePowdermaker, and Laura Nader that suggests thai women have an easier lime crossing gender boundaries in the field than do men (p. 57). The authors of more recent volumes suggest that such a generali.za'tion may be difficult 10 make (Belli, Caplan, &: [ahan Karim, 1993, P: 10; Whitehead ok Conaway,19B6,pp. 4,301.). Gregory (19M) argues t.'hal male ethnographers may indeed have easier access to a. woman's world in most societies Ihan a female elhnographer would have to a man's world. However, the myth that men can 'never really gam such access has served as an excuse £or not trying. Indeed, my own experience confirms 'that me.n may cross such boundaries even more easily 'than women can.

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Bradley A. Levinson is assistant professor of anthropology of edllcation in th« Department of Educational Leadership ,HId Policy Studies al Indiana University. Prior ,10 thatappoiniment, he lauglrt cll/tliral antllrop%gy at Augllslana College in Rock Island" Illinois. He is finishing II book 01'1 sluden" culture and identity ,at a Mexican secondary .school a~ld irlitiating anot'her study of rlew ,jmmigr:ants .in Indiana secondary schools. His thematic interests include nationalism and transl'lationalism, poplilar Cllilure, crilical social theory, ethnographic practice, and the gendered construction of experience.

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