When Crime Is a “Young Man’s Game” and the Ethnographer Is a Woman: Gendered Researcher Experiences in Two Different Contexts

Abstract

Ethnographers have long explored the challenges of gender dynamics in researcher–participant relationships, particularly in relation to attempts by female researchers to gain and maintain access to male research populations. However, little is known about these relationships in urban research settings characterized by crime and violence, where gender relations between young men and women are shaped by often extreme forms of social marginalization. Drawing on the field experiences of two female ethnographers who studied disadvantaged and criminalized groups of men in Germany and Canada, our article sheds light on how our experiences in our respective research sites were molded by the local contexts where our ethnographies took place. In particular, we analyze how the respective cultural meanings that the men subscribed to affected their perceptions of women, and how these perceptions ultimately shaped our interactions with our research groups, structured our gendered experiences, and presented quite different challenges for us as female “crime” ethnographers.