‘Doing intimacy’ in a public market: how the gendered experience of ethnography reveals situated social dynamics

Abstract

This article considers the way in which gender gains significance during ethnographic research to reveal situated social dynamics. As a female ethnographer in a male-dominated setting, I map my own movement and interaction through the field setting over time to show how my ‘practice of ethnography’ becomes, as it also reveals, a ‘practice of intimacy’. I pay critical attention to the physical realities of the field setting as they structure patterns of interaction, such that three seemingly simple actions, ‘hollering’, ‘kicking it’, and ‘walking’, emerge as highly consequential practices through which people construct, experience, and protect intimacy in public space. Following the ‘ethnography’ into the ‘discovery’, this article pushes the potential of reflexivity to illuminate the way in which multiple gendering processes unfold and become interrelated.