(Un)Safe! Fighting the Po-lice in Quasi-educational Spaces of Bathrooms: A Betweener’s Reflection on the Researcher’s Body in Three Intercalated Acts

Abstract

Who gives ethnographers the authority to do research? Whose bodies are in and/or out of researchers’ practices or roles? In this performance autoethnography, I explore the (im)possibilities of these questions, pressing concerns that remain interconnected with discussions of ethnographic reflexivity. I convey how, despite the rise of conscientization resulting from the Crisis of Representation in the 1980s, knowledge production about the Other still tends to reify the very oppression it intends to challenge. Can a janitor become an ethnographer without having to bury experiences under layers of theory and other technologies of justification? Or are marginalized humans still relegated to a subordinate position of “research subject” in this process? I attempt to further promote narrative space about the struggles to move from researched to researcher, from honorable subject to street knowledge producer. Inspired by Dwight Conquergood’s suggestion that we do not write about them—the Others—but with and for them, I perform to better understand and explore issues of reflexivity in terms of privilege and authority, as they still dwell in current ethnographic research.

Keywords

reflexivity performance autoethnography knowledge production decolonizing performances

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