Researchers and Other Voyeurs
Researchers interested in sexual behavior must consider how to handle their own sexuality in the field; this decision is influenced by the scholar’s discipline, theoretical orientation, and research questions.
Researchers can choose to use methods that do not implicate their own identities or sexual practices in the study. Sociologists Curtis Bergstrand and Jennifer Sinski conducted online survey research and interviews among American swingers, for example, but chose not to participate, claiming that “frankly, swinging is not for everyone and everyone is not ready for swinging.”[1] Researchers in public health or related fields who study gay men’s group sexual behavior often collect data from subjects during visits to medical clinics or after circuit parties or other public events.
Other researchers participate to various degrees, openly or covertly. When sociologist Laud Humphreys wanted to study men who utilized “tearooms,” or public restrooms known for same-sex activity, he found that the layout of each facility and the reactions of participants to his presence affected his ability to only observe. The men worried about being arrested or observed accidentally, so one man often served as a lookout, or “watchqueen,” alerting the others when someone was approaching. “The very fear and suspicion encountered in the restrooms produces a participant role,” Humphreys argued, “the sexuality of which is optional.” He initially pretended to be a straight man entering the restroom or to be “waiting” for a sexual partner, but the role of lookout worked better, as it allowed him to observe without being expected to join in.[2] Richard Tewksbury, also a sociologist, presented himself as a “potential participant” in his covert research on two gay male bathhouses. Spending several hours at each location, he “circulated with and among patrons,” carefully observing “their activities, movements, interactions and the use of the physical features of the environment.” Periodically, he retreated to private areas to write notes.[3] In their research on women’s bathhouse events, self-identified lesbian researchers Catherine Nash and Allison Bain presented themselves as both voyeurs and potential participants, although they avoided sexual activity.[4]
Sometimes a researcher’s participation in a sexual community or practice precedes the researcher’s academic interest. In 1972, anthropologists Charles and Rebecca Palson, a married couple, were involved in swinging before they decided to formally study it. In his research on gay leathermen in the Netherlands during the 1990s, Maurice Van Lieshout used an “opportunistic research strategy,” suggesting that sociologists might take advantage of familiar social situations. As he had already participated in the Dutch gay leather scene, he gained rapid entry into the setting he wished to study and easily developed rapport with participants.[5] English professor Tim Dean admits to participating in unprotected sex in his book on barebacking. Dean does not consider his work to be ethnographic; he is not a social scientist and didn’t conduct formal interviews. Barebacking, he claims, is an “underground sexual subculture” that “by its nature, tends to resist conventional research methods.” But he had sexual experiences, and he listened to other men talk. “After uninhibited, multipartner sex,” he writes, “men tend to speak more freely.” Being in an “overtly sexual space” such as the back room of a gay bar helped “dissolve some of the barriers and pretensions that constrain verbal exchanges elsewhere.”[6] Sociologist Russell Westhaver, who writes on gay male circuit parties, was a participant at events and also worked for a company involved in their production. He situates himself as an insider who has engaged in “sensuous scholarship,” which he explains as ethnography “grounded in a commitment to seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting the body through poetic processes of transcribing, revisiting, and elaborating bodily experiences and memories as fieldnotes.”[7]
Although some social scientists believe that being or becoming too much of a participant in a community one is studying biases data collection or interpretation, many ethnographers argue that there is never an unbiased or objective position from which to conduct research. Each of us is a particular race, class, gender, and sexuality, for example; these social positions impact how we perceive and interact with others—and they with us. No matter how objective a researcher attempts to be, he also brings his own beliefs and experiences to bear on a topic.
Some researchers believe that sexual involvement with subjects should be avoided for ethical reasons, both to maintain confidentiality and ensure that subjects are not coerced into either sexual activity or participation in the project. But while the potential for abuse should always be considered, research carried out in naturalistic settings involves complex social relations. Field sites are not necessarily distinguishable from one’s everyday social world. Researchers may also have more or less privilege than their informants nowadays, especially when studying “at home.” People who are written about can comment on or publicly reject a scholar’s results. Although in 1969 Humphreys could claim that an observer in a tearoom is not yet “suspected as being a social scientist,” this has not necessarily been the case in recent years. BDSM communities, for example, have been extensively studied in the past few decades and now often engage proactively with researchers.
Erotic entanglements may be inevitable in some situations. Anthropologist Ralph Bolton found that the line between his personal and professional lives blurred while he was studying gay bathhouses in Brussels. “In gay culture,” he writes, “sex is where the action is.”[8] His relationships with friends and lovers provided him with access to social events and experiences that would have been unlikely had he remained distant: “I became a player in the scene, reciprocating by introducing my tricks, friends, and lovers to others in my network. . . . By experiencing them, I came to learn of blow jobs from bartenders when the door was locked at closing time, of jacking off in cruising spots in a park near the Grand Place in partially public view, of sexual encounters in alleyways between someone headed home from the bars and someone on his way to work at dawn, of sexual action in the dunes along the coasts and on the piers in Ostende and in the backrooms of discos and in the bathrooms of ordinary bars.”[9] Participation also informed his research in bathhouses and saunas. Although some sites where sex took place were relatively public, such as the steam room and the orgy room, he found that nonparticipants altered the flow of interaction and that the dim lighting presented difficulties with observation. And while interviewing could have been done in nonsexual areas of the sauna such as the bar area or television lounge, most conversation took the form of “post-coital sharing.”[10] These conversations provided valuable information. He did not ask sexual partners to sign consent forms; some did not know he was conducting research on sex and AIDS. Still, Bolton “never engaged in sex for the purpose of collecting data,” never coerced anyone into having sex with him, and protected people’s confidentiality. He also stresses that his partners did not suffer physical or psychological harm from the encounters (beyond the emotional pain of relationships ending on their own).[11]
Sometimes, abstaining from participation can actually disrupt one’s investigation. During his fieldwork in Mozambique among marginalized young men known as moluwenes, anthropologist Christian Groes-Green found that because of differences in gender, race, and status, his informants perceived him as “morally righteous” and were wary of discussing their sexual practices with him. Groes-Green slowly earned their trust by drinking with them, partying, “being wild,” and “celebrating spontaneity, naughtiness, and excess.”[12] But when he turned down a local woman’s offer to participate in group sex one evening, he suddenly reverted back to being an outsider, even a “traitor,” and realized his access to the community was at stake in such decisions. His awareness of his privileged position in relation to the community he was studying often led him to withdraw from lust-provoking situations and “create social boundaries and physical distance.” Yet the social milieu also required managing his ambivalence. He continued to experience anxiety and guilt when confronted with scenes of unsafe sex, feeling “complicit” in their risky activity because he was unable to intervene without losing his ability to observe. Still, Groes-Green grasped that “delimited involvement”—by which he meant being in close proximity without including “direct sexual or carnal merging”—was critical both to his access to the community and to his aim of understanding why moluwenes made the choices they did with regard to sexual behavior.[13]
Researchers Nash and Bain defended their decision not to participate at the women’s bathhouse events they studied on the grounds that one researcher was monogamous and that their “feminist ethics” prohibited them from doing so. Not surprisingly, though, their decision to wear street clothes and position themselves on the outskirts of the activity meant they felt “awkward” when play began. They worried about being perceived as inappropriately voyeuristic, inhibited, or judgmental by other attendees. Observers, after all, can themselves be observed. The organizers of the events, whom the researchers interviewed prior to attending the bathhouse events, made the researchers feel they were not being “honest” in their research if they did not participate.[14] This was not just because their decision was made ahead of time, but because they also were not “using the space in the ways [the organizers] had envisioned.” When Nash and Bain broke etiquette in such a relatively small and tight-knit community, their fantasy of maintaining a “fly on the wall” researcher position was smashed by the “elephant in the room.”
If anthropological and feminist ethics suggest attention to power differentials, what are the ethics of academic voyeurism, especially if it causes discomfort or confusion for others? When researchers decide ahead of time what they are willing to “see” and experience, might they become like tourists, disrespectful of local customs and oblivious to their own social impact? Do prior intentions not to engage sexually—or even erotically—in particular settings protect researchers against the vulnerability that participants expect and experience, and thus inhibit a researcher’s ability to understand a field site? The researcher role, Nash and Bain admit, served as a “cover,” providing psychological safety by offering little opportunity to “dwell on, or even discuss” insecurities about their attractiveness to other women.[15] Groes-Green acknowledges that his understanding of his informants grew when he personally experienced the “bodily momentary intensities that drive youngsters to play with death and danger, ecstasy and annihilation, orgies and frenzy.”[16]
To their credit, these researchers raise these questions themselves in their published work. Researchers should never be required to participate in activities that violate their personal ethical or emotional commitments in the name of science. Well-trained researchers can conduct careful, thorough studies regardless of which methods they choose. In 2010, anthropologist Margot Weiss and sociologist Stacey Newmahr each published books on BDSM in the United States, based on research conducted during roughly the same time period. Weiss observed in a BDSM community without participating, while Newmahr became a BDSM player during her fieldwork. Their resulting ethnographies take different theoretical approaches: Weiss focuses more intently on BDSM as part of capitalist consumer culture while Newmahr spends more time exploring the creation of authentic “scenes.” What each researcher observed, experienced, and concluded about BDSM was related to who she was and how she interacted with others at her field sites. Still, their descriptions of BDSM are factually similar, and both discerned the importance of authenticity for many contemporary BDSM practitioners. Weiss doesn’t seem to have “missed” significant aspects of BDSM because of her nonparticipant status, although she contextualizes the scene more broadly in US culture than Newmahr does. Newmahr doesn’t appear to have become too “close” to the community to analyze it effectively, although she homes in on the nuances of interaction and the phenomenology of BDSM play more than Weiss.
The point is that neither participation nor abstention from sexual activity is inherently unethical or problematic. Rather, such decisions are made by particular individuals in specific contexts and should be evaluated as such. Every research method has strengths and limitations and must be considered in relation to the questions being asked. Survey research may suffer from low response rates or from a community’s dislike of being studied by outsiders. When limiting themselves to observation, researchers may not have access to back rooms, semiprivate exchanges, or less visible individuals. Participant-observers enjoy greater access but may feel conflicted over disseminating findings that portray a community negatively or find themselves stigmatized in the academic community. All researchers should reflect on the appropriateness of their methods to their questions and on power dynamics in the field, not just when contemplating sexual involvement with informants but at every stage of the process, from the choice of where to study to deciding what questions should be asked and of whom.
1. Curtis Bergstrand and Jennifer Blevins Sinski, Swinging in America: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the 21st Century (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010), ix.
2. Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (Chicago: Aldine, 1975), 28. While some critique Humphreys for his research overall, most social scientists recognize that his covert observations in tearooms did not have the potential to harm the men involved. The second part of his study, where he interviewed the men under false pretenses as part of another study, was far more controversial.
3. Richard Tewksbury, “Bathhouse Intercourse: Structural and Behavoral Aspects of an Erotic Oasis,” Deviant Behavior 23 (2002): 75–112.
4. Alison L. Bain and Catherine J. Nash, “Undressing the Researcher: Feminism, Embodiment and Sexuality at a Queer Bathhouse Event,” Area 38, no. 1 (2006): 99–106.
5. Maurice van Lieshout, “Leather Nights in the Woods: Locating Male Homosexuality and Sadomasochism in a Dutch Highway Rest Area,” in Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Sites of Resistance, ed. Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997), 345.
6. Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 29–34.
7. Russell Westhaver, “Party Boys: Identity, Community, and the Circuit” (PhD diss., Simon Fraser University, 2003), 21.
8. Ralph Bolton, “Tricks, Friends, and Lovers: Erotic Encounters in the Field,” in Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork, ed. Don Kulick and Margaret Wilson (London: Routledge, 1995), 142.
9. Ibid., 148.
10. Ibid., 150.
11. Ibid., 151.
12. Christian Groes-Green, “Ambivalent Participation: Sex, Power, and the Anthropologist in Mozambique,” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 31, no. 1 (2012): 49.
13. Ibid., 57.
14. Bain and Nash, “Undressing the Researcher,” 104.
15. Ibid., 103.
16. Groes-Green, “Ambivalent Participation,” 56.