In social scientific projects, methodology and ethics are inextricably linked. In this blog post, I explore how the ethnographic interview contains possibilities for both connection and rupture with interlocutors via reflecting on my own fieldwork.
Do, don’t tell
Whether a complement to participant observation or made more robust via multimodal components, the question-and-answer format of the semi-structured interview has remained generally intact in ethnography. When considering gender-sexuality identities in South Asia, though, several factors made me question the interview(er)’s ability to accord people dignity while being open to the multiple meanings folks may give to ‘queer’. Firstly, the interview, geared to gather information, can produce the aura of surveillance that mimics the aims of colonial anthropologists who had a hand in identifying and criminalizing certain genders and sexualities.
Furthermore, one must consider how LGBTQIA+ issues became sayable thanks to activism in and around NGOs, notably from the 1980s in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As I learned, these rights-based discourses, connected to international development and local public health work, have transformed the interview into a semi-rehearsed form of communication directed towards the media, donors, or Western actors. These circumstances are understandable, given the material needs of many LGBTQIA+ people in India. They also underscore an over-exposure of public attention directed towards them, doubly emphasize narratives of suffering, and may also elide other forms of queerness in the region.
Finally, where an interview enquires about identity, there are doubts as to whether Western notions of gender-sexuality neatly map onto identity in South Asia – where sexual orientation or gender is not necessarily commensurate with personhood but rather simply a practice that one may engage in. As one interlocutor once quipped: “When you see an attractive man on the street, the question is not ‘are they?’ but ‘will they’?”
Many of the interview’s consequences, then, involve its potential for traumatization and reducing folks’ responses to broad, monolithic truths about an internally diverse and fraught category like ‘queer’ or ’LGBTQIA+’.
To try and avoid these pitfalls, on top of structured questions, I sourced an array of videos and photos from Instagram and included drawing (e.g. timeline drawings) and writing exercises (e.g. postcards to friends or future selves). Folks could selectively engage based on their interests and mood – a way of seeing what could emerge around queerness.
Our time together
While interviews could be more personal and sensitive – thus potentially re-triggering – than in my first weeks of meeting people in Chennai, I found that the interview format still provided a sense of familiarity. Apart from attempting to make folks feel safe by asking for consent to record and for my anonymization processes, it was seen as apposite and plausible that I was a student doing a project and that, if I reached out, people could assist me by speaking with me. Importantly, folks were more amenable to this than hanging out in group gatherings or activist meetings, which raised concerns around safety given the queer community’s historically being policed and surveilled.
Despite my greater emphasis on conversation over observing what people do, I did not solely hear responses of pain and being different from a cis-heterosexual norm that would overdetermine a sense of lack in queerness and impoverish the interview. Interviews were enjoyable encounters at public parks, beaches, cafes, and people’s homes that led me to move away from the murkiness of the identity lens and towards thinking of time and temporality. For instance, interviews themselves were ways to pass time – often while on social media. While on Instagram, my interlocutors and I would scroll our respective feeds and react to how the algorithm inevitably reflected our queerness back to us, producing interesting ethnographic insights.
Moreover, I began speaking with queer-affirmative psychologists, whose work in the proverbial therapy room, I found, arrests time and complicates linear notions of queer experiences. In thinking about people’s communication, then, it is worth considering how people can pass, spend, and manipulate ideas of time even if they cannot control time’s passage.
Drawing queerness
In a timeline drawing (pictured below), Tilotama*, a straight woman clinical psychologist, attempted to relate to her gay male client’s differently lived experience. One sees a more-or-less typical (or linear) portrayal of how ‘coming out of the closet’ makes life bearable, richer, and clearer by closing a prior chapter of confusion and distress (shown below by the timeline flipping upside down). By her own admission, this exercise only generally conveyed what Tilotama saw to be a shift in her client’s mood. More saliently, though, she noted that their therapeutic work did not end there. Attending to positive emotions in a client’s experience does not obviate other struggles or make people’s lives linear. Therapeutic work underlies waiting and dealing with present emotions, good and bad, as opposed to jumping ahead to a future despite how much we may yearn for a better one.
Refocusing interviews on temporal notions of queerness unearthed a potential avenue for interviews to move beyond (but still accommodate) narratives of pain that largely re-traumatize or discussions on identity that portray it as static rather than co-constitutive. Language will always be incommensurate with experience, as psychoanalysis and ethnographers like Das and Valentine among others have conveyed. Where interviews persist, then, they may be enriched if we consider time itself like an actor and the effects it has on words and our bodies.
*This is a pseudonym for purposes of protecting anonymity.
**I took the picture on a random walk during my fieldwork and was particularly interested in the second line (on the right-hand side), which read together means something like ‘a sweetness to [my] words is needed/wanted’.
I thought it was fitting, given that I think a lot about attempts to communicate and the intentionality behind words.
