Theory

Two:

Three

August

1992

Pages:

187-206

Bette J. Kauffman

Feminist Facts¹:

Interview Strategies and

Political Subjects in

Ethnography

In this essay, I propose that strategies for avoiding, obtaining, and managing research interviews are data and that treating interview strategies as data enables the researcher to see how the researched are active participants in, rather than passive objects of, the ethnographic interview. This analysis is grounded in feminism and used to critique the recent focus on ethnography as literary form. I argue that in valorizing ethnographer-authors as individualized personas and psyches, this formalism both directs attention away from research subjects and what they are trying to say, and fails to account adequately for the political subjectivities of researchers. Ultimately I argue that the kind of political accounting I call for is as necessary for feminism as for other analytic standpoints if we are to come to terms with how theory and methodology preserve and extend social and cultural hierarchies.

An important difference between participants in an ethnographic interview is that one of them ­ the researcher ­ will write about the interview for the purpose of dissemination. Not only does the position of researcher connote authority and, typically, higher social status relative to research subjects, but in writing for dissemination researchers also exercise the power of representation. Ethnographers have thus considered and questioned the distribution of power in the social transaction known as the research interview.

I presently discuss the strategies both I and the women artists in my study used to avoid, obtain, and manage research interviews. The goals of this discussion are, first, to demonstrate how those strategies are related to the construction and communication ­ both mine and theirs ­ of the identity "woman artist," and, second, to argue that negotiations over how the research will proceed are part of the data, not merely contextual variables for which the researcher must account. This methodological move-treating interview strategies as evidence-facilitates seeing how the researched are active participants in, rather than passive objects of, the ethnographic interview, and how the relationship between researcher and researched shapes the analysis. That is, I suggest that the researcher-researched relationship, as it develops and is expressed in negotiations over the research process, is a map for the analysis more than a qualifier of it.²

I further ground this analysis in feminism and count it as another in a series of feminist responses to the power problem in ethnography. In their commitment to challenging status hierarchies of all sorts, feminist scholars have rendered the researcher-researched relationship particularly problematic and produced a variety of strategies for reconstructing relations with research subjects and analyzing interview data (e.g., Devault, 1990; Oakley, 1981; Stacey, 1988), as well as a debate about those strategies and their political implications (e.g., McRobbie, 1982; Ribbens, 1989). But feminist efforts have not produced the desired epistemological and methodological revolutions in sociology (Stacey & Thorne, 1985), in anthropology (Morgen, 1990), or in communications (Press, 1989). Rather, they have been construed as specific to feminist research, strategies for those Rabinow (1986, p. 257) labels "political subjects"³ to pursue and justify unorthodox research approaches and procedures.⁴

Thus my overarching goal is to challenge ethnography, most specifically the recent focus on ethnography as writing, a methodological move that responds to the power problem by emphasizing the constructedness of the ethnographic text and seeking new ways to represent researcher and researched in literary forms that are experimental in the context of ethnography. This innovation, like previous ones in ethnography, is led by prominent anthropologists (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1988) whom ethnographers in other fields have traditionally emulated. Following its practitioners, I locate this formalist move historically as a development in the poststructuralist critique of ethnography.

The essence of my challenge is that all researchers are political subjects. For though the power problem in ethnography has engendered a great deal of self-examination ranging in tone from anguished to ironic to world-weary, a sometimes debilitating reflexivity, a sometimes narcissistic self-reflexivity, little of this self-examination deals with the political subjectivities of researchers in terms of gender and sexuality, race, and social class. These I call the "local politics" of doing ethnography, in order to distinguish them from the sweeping terms of Western hegemony that the poststructuralist critique has long recognized and employed.⁵ Standing on feminism, I argue that the formalist move of the post­structuralist critique valorizes ethnographer-authors as individualized personas and psyches, and in so doing directs attention away from research subjects and overlooks the local politics of researcher-subject interactions.

Ultimately I argue that the kind of political accounting I call for is as necessary for feminism as for other analytical standpoints ­ if we are ever to come to terms with how theory and methodology preserve and extend social and cultural hierarchies. Seeking to elucidate the racial politics of my own research, I suggest that we can never fully account for ourselves and must rely on others to call us to account and teach us an array of places to stand.⁶

Subjects in Ethnography

My concern is thus with subjects in ethnographic research, researcher and researched "subjects" who are both producers of meanings and accounts. In so using "subjects," I call for recognition that the active meaning of the term applies to the researched as well as to researchers and contest the notion that "subject" necessarily connotes subjection and domination when applied to the researched, even as it is assumed to connote subjectivity and agency when applied to researchers (and authors, artists, etc.). Casting the argument as enabling researchers to see how the researched are subjects in the ethnographic interview rhetorically conveys that the subjecthood of the researched exists beyond the beneficence of researchers. That is, there is condescension in the notion that research subjects have power and agency only to the extent that researchers enable or allow it. At the same time, research subjects are constructed as "others" precisely by research and as researchers we exercise the power of representation in disseminating our accounts. In sum, I seek language that avoids, on the one hand, denying research subjects the agency they do have, and on the other disclaiming that research inevitably constructs them as others in a study that is not theirs, even as it also "cannot ever be wholly ours" (McRobbie, 1982, p. 55).

A Challenge to Ethnography

The history and variety of critiques of ethnography need not be reproduced here (see Clifford, 1986). Rather, I would reframe that history as a series of attempts to deal with gaps of two kinds: the social and cultural gap between observer and observed, and the gap in time and distance between moments of observation and moments of theorizing, or between "soaking it up and writing it down" (Geertz, 1988, p. 83; cf. Marcus & Fischer, 1986, p. 18). Malinowski's solution⁷ was to close the first gap by establishing his own everyday, empathic presence "among the natives" (Stocking, 1983, p. 112). His method came to be known as participant-observation and represented by the "central mythic symbol" of the ethnographer's tent on the beach, photographic images of which bracket his account, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922/1984) (Stocking, 1983, p. 109). Having closed the gap between self and others, Malinowski calls for scientific discipline and methodological accountability, thereby bringing into proximity and balance, yet maintaining as discrete, the moments of observation and theorizing. This strategy of balancing subjective experience with objective accounting is further represented in the structure of Argonauts: The methodological primer introduces a "you are there" style narrative, a style Stocking suggests may owe more than a little to the novels Malinowski escaped to in that selfsame tent on the Melanesian beach (Stocking, 1983, pp. 106-107).

Malinowski's legacy remains, though irrevocably altered by the publication of his diaries (1967/1989). Concern for the ease with which observer exploits observed has, since the diaries, been accompanied by deep suspicion of "any overly confident and consistent ethnographic voice" (Clifford, 1986, p. 14). Attempts to deal with the power problem have led to a reversal in strategies: Malinowski's method is substantially retained, even as the gap between researcher and researched is valorized. Ethnographers cannot "go native" after all; experiences in the field are "an open-ended series of contingent, power-laden encounters" producing incomplete knowledge (Clifford, 1986, p. 8).

In contrast, ethnographers struggle to close the gap between experience and account. The research product should represent the research process, and the formalist move of the poststructuralist critique has, rightly, drawn attention to the literary aspect of negotiating the gap.

However, the formalist move deals with the power problem largely by foregrounding subjectivity ­ the ethnographer's ­ in the ethnographic text. While Geertz (1988) maintains a distinction between self-other and self-text negotiations, Clifford (1986, pp. 11-12) closes the gap by virtually collapsing all knowable culture and all ethnography into "poetics," the former "an interplay of voices, of situated utterances" and the latter an "enactment" of those voices in the ethnographic text. The writer's voice "pervades and situates" the textual enactment of what ethnographer and subjects have created through talk. The experimental forms ­ autobiography, "ironic self-portrait," and especially dialogue and polyphony-represent the self-other relationship in their very form (Clifford, 1986, pp. 14-17).

This is perhaps not so complete a break with the past as it seems. The "you are there" narrative, in which the ethnographer-guide is clearly present if not named, becomes the "I and they are here together" narrative, which differs from the Malinowskian version primarily in its self-reflexivity. As Geertz (1988, pp. 15-16) argues, the authority of the account still rests on establishing that the self-other gap was bridged if not closed, albeit momentarily and imperfectly. Clifford offers textual enactment as the new "ethnographer's magic" (Stocking, 1983, p. 70), replacing the tent on the beach as mythic symbol covering epistemological strain between fieldwork methodology and ethnographic knowledge. In both Clifford's and Geertz's versions, Malinowski's methodological accountability is expanded not only to include but foreground the ethnographer as "a character in a fiction . . . at center stage" (Clifford, 1986, p. 14).

While Clifford (1986) argues that the new literary forms "need not lead to ethnographic self-absorption" (p. 7), they do tend to, as his hopeful tone and his own centering of the ethnographer confirm. The "I-witness" (Geertz, 1988, p. 73) account and the "fetishizing of form," Clifford's own description of what he is up to (1986, p. 21), displace concern about the relationship between the ethnographic text and the others it purports to be about.⁸

Moreover, the ethnographer-subject of these "self-locatings" (Geertz, 1988, p. 15) is less a social, historical, cultural, and political being than a psyche or personality. For example, both Clifford and Geertz refer repeatedly to fieldwork as "personal encounter" and "personal experience," which it is, but more. It is cultural encounter, with all of the tensions intrinsic to differences in status, social identities, and worldviews. Geertz further recommends the "confessional" approach of the diary form as necessary corollary to ethnography as "biographical" presence in the field (1988, p. 84), and makes exemplary one such account in terms that individualize, significantly, only the ethnographer: The monograph in question consists of "a series of . . . set pieces . . . in which [the ethnographer's] reserved, rather introversive temperament is passed, like so many spiritual tests, through various Papuan actualities (p. 87).⁹

What is missing from these discussions of ethnography as literary form is consideration of ethnographer ­ authors as gendered, racial, social-classed beings, and how such aspects of identity might enter into both self-other negotiations and self-text ones. The fetishizing of form, which virtually reduces the power problem to how the ethnographer orchestrates the presentation of self and others in the ultimate text, fetishizes ethnographers as authorial personas. As Firth notes, the trend is toward seeking understanding of the ethnographer's output "by reference in part to his [sic] own personality" (1989, pp. xxvii-xxviii), and as Geertz and Clifford (1986) make clear, the personality is to be found in the text. This approach bears more than a passing resemblance to the essentially circular art-historical project of constructing an artist-subject by analyzing his or her artworks, a subject that then becomes the source of meaning of the artworks, thus the artworks the expression solely of the subject (Pollock, 1980). As with art, foregrounding the authorial ethnographer-subject isolates the text from historical, social, cultural, and political analyses.

To the extent that it fetishizes form and authorial personas, the formalist move thus glosses the power problem in ethnography in asocial, ahistorical, and apolitical ways. How does one argue with a text that resorts continuously to "just my (partial, biased) point of view" but does not account for the local politics of that point of view?

Clifford (1986) describes his own practice as the fetishizing of form in preparing to acknowledge that the anthology he is introducing (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) excludes feminist work because the latter "has not produced either unconventional forms of writing or a developed reflection on ethnographic textuality as such" (p. 21). He wishes to leave "blatant" the exclusion of feminist and "non-Western" standpoints in order to avoid "tokenism and . . . an aspiration to false completeness" (p. 21). Worthy goals, but what Clifford seems not to comprehend fully is that the fetishizing of form and authorial personas is in itself a political as much as a metatextual move, once again privileging by exnominating a white, bourgeois, patriarchal standpoint.¹⁰

In the same volume, Rabinow (1986) argues that Clifford traps himself by privileging the new forms, particularly polyphony, yet knowing he cannot claim it as a "utopia of plural authorship" (p. 246) for even the polyphonic text is authored; a single hand ultimately orchestrates the voices. Nevertheless, Rabinow also fails to see fully the politics of the formalist move. In constructing his own typology of ethnographic standpoints, he categorizes feminists as political subjects while locating himself among "critical, cosmopolitan intellectuals," a standpoint characterized variously as ethical; "attentive to (and respectful of) difference, but wary of . . . essentializ[ing]"; acutely conscious of "particularities of places, characters" but member of no particularity, preferring instead an ethos of "worldwide macrointerdependency" (Rabinow, 1986, p. 258). In other words, Rabinow suggests that he stands nowhere by virtue of standing everywhere, that he and others like him are especially sensitive to social and cultural specificity because they themselves have none. This universalizing of standpoint is precisely how "white" has so long avoided naming itself a racial category (cf. Dyer, 1988).

Finally, the formalist move either conflates the moments of experience and account, or implies that writing/theorizing begins at home, after the fieldwork experience, and that fieldwork begins with alighting on some remote beach or the doorstep of some proximate informant. I refer neither to the fact that field notes are taken and interviews recorded in the field, though discussion of these aspects of writing are notably absent from the literary critiques I have been referring to, nor to the fact that planning and preparations for fieldwork must be made. Rather, I call attention to how social, historical, and political standpoints, how the particularities of the ethnographer, shape the very selection of what constitutes a "problem" worthy of study, whose reality or social knowledge will be construed as "answer," and what techniques will be privileged for the selection of "facts" from the flow of things. In short, the issue of standpoint arises long before the ethnographer sets foot on distant shore or near doorstep, much more before he or she takes pen or keyboard in hand to write up results.

The point is illustrated by Clifford's discussion (1986, pp. 18-19) of Lienhardt's work on Dinka religion. Clifford argues, rightly, that the discursive paradigm in ethnography has produced a "specification of discourses" that has worked to reveal gaps in knowledge. We can now see that Lienhardt's treatise fails to specify gender adequately. Clifford finds evidence in the linguistic conventions and formal attributes of the text: Lienhardt's examples are overwhelmingly "male-centered" and the one female point of view he mentions is an affirmation of a male point of view. Yet he refers throughout to "the Dinka" and "men," apparently in their generic senses though we cannot know for sure from the text. While the "partiality of gender" was not an issue when the book was published, Clifford is sure that had it been, Lienhardt would have addressed these problems.

To which I must ask, how? By fixing the text, as Clifford implies? By acknowledging the "fact" that Dinka religion is (regrettably) male centered? How indeed did Lienhardt "decide" to focus his account on (presumably) male-centered Dinka religion? Under what conditions might Dinka religion be perceived as other than male centered? Ultimately, of what value is the specification of discourses, beyond the rhetoric of sensitivity and the justification of exclusion, if it does not require specification of those discourses in which the ethnographer is always already engaged by virtue of race, gender and sexuality, and social class?

In one of his summaries of the ethnographer's difficulty, Geertz suggests: "Finding somewhere to stand in a text that is supposed to be at one and the same time an intimate view and a cool assessment is almost as much of a challenge as gaining the view and making the assessment in the first place" (1988, p. 10). I argue that the task is to examine where one already stands, not only in the text but in gaining the view and making the assessment, for it is only by such examination that wherever we stand, we stand purposefully and with some understanding of the implications.

The following analysis is thus my attempt to account for my construction of "woman artist" as a social identity, not only from the stories and experiences of the women artists who participated in my study, but from our relationships developed and expressed in part through negotiations over how the research would proceed. It is also a story about how those negotiations called me to account for where I stood as a woman and feminist scholar and the consequent gender politics of my research.

Interview Strategies as Evidence

The subjects in my research were members of women's cooperative art galleries, one in New York City and one in Philadelphia. All were white, middle to upper middle class women (aspects of identity I return to), most were or had been married, and most had children. In both groups, my request to observe included notice that I would approach them individually for interviews. I was careful to indicate that permission to observe the group did not constitute permission to interview members, that each could accept or decline though I certainly hoped all would accept.

My interview protocol was as follows: Toward the end of fieldwork, I would interview as many of the members of each group as would consent to be interviewed. I would ask for an hour and a half of the artist's time, the least I could get by with and the most I could ask of busy subjects. It would be in her studio ­ on her turf, so to speak ­ where the balance of power between researcher and subject would be more equitable and where examples of her work would be on hand for us to discuss.

The problem that inspired consideration of interview strategies as evidence was not, however, that many said no to interviews. Indeed, almost all approached said yes, at least provisionally. Rather, "yes" did not necessarily result in an interview,¹¹ and, when it did, my protocol became very much open to negotiation. Moreover, patterns specific to locale emerged. Interview strategies in New York were different from interview strategies in Philadelphia, and the innovations introduced through negotiations over when, where, and how the interview would transpire seemed to be related to accounts of being a woman artist in each city.

First, in Philadelphia, scheduling an interview required one request. All but two came off without a hitch, that is, as scheduled without postponement or cancellation. In New York, there were many hitches: unreturned phone calls, postponements of scheduling, cancellations, and reschedulings. I was asked to call back in a week, in a month, and in several months. All Philadelphia interviews were completed within a 3-month period; New York interviews were spread over 9 months.

At the same time, however, no one actually said no, or, more accurately, no one spoke no.¹²Two New Yorkers spoke neither yes nor no, but effectively said no by not responding to repeated messages left on answering machines or with studio assistants and family members. Two who spoke yes, in both cases more than once, effectively said no by postponing the scheduling of the interview. One series of postponements went like this: "Yes, but right now's not a good time. Call me next month." "Sure. Talk to me at the opening next week; we'll set it up." "Sure, but I don't have my calendar with me tonight.¹³

Second, all Philadelphia interviews were conducted in studios as planned, with the innovation that all except one also included a visit in the home, often involving the serving of food as a an event in itself.¹⁴ In contrast, only one New York interview followed the Philadelphia pattern of home and studio with the serving of food. Five were conducted in the studio alone, and the remaining three in public spaces, specifically restaurants and the gallery.

How many of the unrealized New York interviews were due to the issue of place, I cannot know. But the probability is suggested by one who spoke yes to being interviewed and effectively said no, for when I specified her studio as the place, she said she would have to think about it. Upholding protocol, I agreed to call her back in a few weeks ­ and did, getting the first of two more postponements of scheduling that ultimately resulted in no interview. It was from her I learned finally to modify my request to conduct the interview in the studio, at least in New York. Another resourceful New York subject scheduled the interview in her studio three times, cancelled the first two, called on the day of the third to ask me to meet her at the gallery, and when I arrived explained that her studio was "a mess." We went to a restaurant.

The third difference between New York and Philadelphia interview strategies is that all except one New York interview were completed within or near the allotted hour and a half, while over half of the Philadelphia interviews took fully half a day, with several more taking 2-3 hours. One took 2 half-days about a week apart. In short, the same basic set of questions took two to three or more times as long to cover in Philadelphia as it did in New York.

The issue became, when did an interview begin and end? Were the returned and unreturned phone calls, the schedulings, reschedulings, and postponements of scheduling, the suggestions of alternative places, the interruptions of children or gallery visitors, and the invitations to come for lunch or stay for dinner all part of the interview, or something else entirely? What might it mean that in Philadelphia, the home is the threshold to the studio and the serving of food the prelude to the interview? That in New York City the studio is to be protected? Or is it the home that is being protected, since New York women artists' studios are equally likely to be in or connected to the home? Indeed, where are the boundaries of "home" and "studio," what is their importance to women artists, and what are the strategies for maintaining those boundaries? Are seemingly endless negotiations to secure an hour and a half's time versus one request to secure half a day¹⁵ to be attributed to the relative complexity of life in New York versus life in Philadelphia, or is something being said about being a woman artist in each city? I presently offer some substantive yet provisional answers to these questions.

Feminist Standpoint

It was methodological training at the hands of Ray Birdwhistell that inspired me to record the details of avoiding, getting, and managing interviews. But while Birdwhistell could direct me toward the possibility that interview strategies might be significant,¹⁶ it was a feminist standpoint that enabled me to raise the above questions. Here I draw upon three particularly relevant aspects of Sandra Harding's definition (1987a, b, 1990): First, a feminist standpoint strives to locate researcher and subjects on the same plane. This I was doing in deciding to conduct interviews in subjects' studios. But, having made a good-intentioned if naive choice, was I obligated to stick with it? Do the differences between New York and Philadelphia interviews make them noncomparable, or can one use the differences, make them part of the data for analysis, as I have done? How can I justify having "learned to modify my request, at least in New York," and with what consequences for the validity of my analysis?

These are epistemological questions that point to the second and third aspects of the feminist standpoint underpinning this analysis, namely rejection of the notions that the origins of research problems are uninvested and unmotivated, and that methodology effaces the social identity of the researcher and protects results from consequent social values. In the case at hand, the interview strategies of women artists became visible as question and data within a research context that (a) is already focused on the constructions of a configuration of identities: "woman," "artist," perhaps "woman artist," (b) sees "woman" and "artist" as basically at odds and requiring negotiation, (c) takes "woman" as seriously as "artist," the construction of those categories and the negotiation of boundaries therefore a meaningful activity, and (d) is already committed to women artists' strategies as the source of "answers." To claim Harding's words, my feminist standpoint "generates its problematics from the perspective of women's experiences" (1987a, p. 7) and turns to women's experience as a reality to answer the questions by.

For me, as for many women scholars, the basis for granting women's identities and experiences seriousness and validity is my own life and feminism. It is no coincidence that I conceived this research at a time when "woman" seemed virtually displaced by "scholar-researcher." I shared with the subjects in my research a "bifurcated consciousness" (Smith, 1974/1987, p. 90), an awareness (more or less) of tensions and discontinuities between equally serious and valid aspects of social identity. To locate myself as researcher on the same plane as the women artists in my study was at one and the same time personal, political, and methodological (cf. Ladner, 1972/1987). Among the consequences was "uneasiness at the juncture" (Smith, 1974/1987, p. 93) between scientific commitment to protocol and feminist commitment in a set of relationships. By not ignoring that tension, I learned to understand negotiations over the interview as women artists telling me that my methodology did not fit their experience, indeed, pointing out the presumptuousness of my attempt to set the conditions of our interaction.¹⁷ By modifying protocol, I was recognizing our relationships within the research as "valid contentions" (Smith, 1974/1987, p. 93), that is, as challenges to the location of me outside the research, challenges based in experience I was already committed in taking seriously. To stand on protocol would have been precisely to invalidate myself, them, our relationships, and the entire project.

Interview Strategies and Social Identity

The analytic trail between interview strategies and constructing social identities is neither simple nor direct, and I cannot detail it in the present context. Rather, I will suggest a couple of connections to aspects of the larger analysis.¹⁸ Firstly, women artists are caught between two cultural constructs: On the one hand, there is the myth of the heroic, eccentric, dedicated male artist working feverishly alone in the garret or loft, where he also lives. His muse is a woman, better yet a succession of lovers in temporary liaisons ­ a lifestyle that affirms the greater sensuality and instability of the artistic personality (cf. Pollock, 1980).¹⁹ On the other hand, there is the "lady painter" who dabbles in watercolors on Sunday in the family den, which only she refers to seriously as her studio (Wayne, 1979). Her primary identities are wife and mother, her art a genteel pastime offering the benefits of being unobtrusive, easily set aside when duty calls, and producing decorative objects for the home (Nochlin, 1973).

In light of these cultural images, it is not surprising that home-studio boundaries are indeed important to women artists. Middle to upper middle class women with husbands and/or children, like most of those in my study, do not live in a corner of their studio. Rather, they carve a studio out of a corner of the home ­ the family room, the laundry, the garage, the bedroom vacated by a child off to college ­ a strategy clearly enabled by the features of middle to upper middle class homes and lives. The physical boundaries are not always obvious; the washer and dryer, the ironing board, the family television, or the car might still share the space. And the negotiation with family members for time to spend in the studio as studio is ongoing. A few have succeeded in institutionalizing their artist role sufficiently to have a studio added to the home, again "succeeded" in distinctly suburban upper middle class terms. Others struggle with the conflict between their desire to rent a studio separate from the home, and their fear that the additional drain on family resources would require them to take a job and therefore have no time to spend in the studio.

What then accounts for the New York-Philadelphia difference in strategies for maintaining home-studio boundaries? For that I turn to the stories women artists tell about becoming and being women artists. In Philadelphia, the burden of narrative continuity in such stories is borne by the interplay between gendered roles (e.g., wife, mother) and the professional role "artist." Philadelphia women reach back into their childhoods for the typical signs of having been born artists, in keeping with the cultural mandate that "artist" is innate, but at the point at which they might have gone to art school, they went to college instead and/or got married and had babies. They returned to art school as mature women with established gendered role identities. In constructing a continuous artist identity, they are obliged to account for the wife-mother interlude, and they seek to incorporate the gendered role identities to which they remain committed. Doing an interview in Philadelphia, with its visit in the home, serving of food, and interruptions to respond to husbands, children, and pets; with its eagerly told, extended stories of balancing home and family with putting together an art education piecemeal, of struggling to shed "just a suburban housewife" self­perceptions, and of fearing that it will indeed come to a painful choice between family and career, is by my analysis a reasonably coherent whole. The strategies for getting and managing the interview express the stories spoken; the transfer of information occurs on multiple levels. As the interview moves between home and studio, is interrupted by domestic responsibilities, and returns to professional goals, the story told is of life-long interplay between gendered and professional roles.

What, then, can be made of extended negotiations over time and place and the notable absence (by comparison) of visits in New York City homes? What kind of stories do New York women tell, such that they can be told in a fraction of the time? Essentially, they tell stories in which the continuity is "working" (i.e., producing art) versus "not working." For example, at precisely the point at which a Philadelphia subject would have launched into an extended story about giving up art, getting married, having babies, and struggling back, one New Yorker covered virtually the same ground with, "And then I didn't work for five years."²⁰ It is also the case that New York women artists went to art school out of high school, and thus got married and had babies after their artist identities were more firmly established and publicly legitimized. Furthermore, many of them experienced overt sexism in art school, which taught them the danger of attempting to integrate professional and gendered roles.²¹

In short, New York women artists compartmentalize their lives precisely where Philadelphia women artists sought to integrate them, that is, along the boundary between gendered and professional roles. Studios and homes were also compartmentalized: Two artists had the much coveted studio away from home; two worked in the same building but on a separate floor from the home; another used a room in a family apartment, accessed via a common space through which I was quickly ushered. And, as the latter suggests, doing the interview was likewise compartmentalized in time and space. If it was to be in the studio, it was in the studio only. If it was to be an hour and a half long, it was an hour and a half long, and some had scheduled other activities immediately following, perhaps to insure that the time agreement was honored.

Were, then, those extended negotiations, changes of venue, and unrealized interviews in New York due to some sort of inadequate compartmentalization, for example, a studio sharing space with a washer and dryer such as I found in Philadelphia? I cannot know for sure since I did not see certain studios, but I suspect it is less tidy than that. Rather, the New York women have, through a variety of social experiences, more fully internalized the social model of the artist. Their tendency to compartmentalize and foreground their professional identity is an aspect of that. Overall, they display confidence and a more socially correct and nuanced version of "artist." Extended negotiations over time and place and unrealized interviews happened when something threatened the display of confidence. In one case, it was explicitly a crisis in "the work." An artist, who had originally invited me to her studio to see work in progress for an upcoming solo exhibition, cancelled when she decided what she was doing was not working and had to be abandoned. She postponed rescheduling for several months and finally agreed to an interview in the gallery ­ when she had mounted a successful show. Two others, who used a variety of reasons to cancel and postpone, eventually revealed in (separate) interviews that though their work had received considerable critical acclaim early in their careers, each now seemed to be on a plateau.

In sum, the Philadelphia interview strategy of home-studio interplay, combined with an eagerness to tell in detail stories of becoming women artists by virtue of interruptions and digressions, expresses an integrative strategy that wards off threats to artistic seriousness and gendered role commitments by presenting professional and gender identities as extensions of each other. The New York interview strategy of studio only or public space, plus extended negotiations over time and terse stories of being women artists in spite of adverse conditions and conflict, like sexist discrimination, expresses a compartmentalizing strategy that foregrounds professional identity, politicizes gender, and wards off threats to confidence with displays of scarcity, a most essential ingredient of the artistic persona.²²

The Interview as Cultural Capital

I began this essay with a purposely narrow distinction: Researchers write about the interview for publication while subjects typically do not. Left out of that distinction are concerns usually included in the objectification litany: The researcher uses personal interactions as data and evidence in the construction of an impersonal (i.e., abstract, categorical) account, the relationship of the latter to the former being always debatable. Further, the researcher's account not only effaces subjects and the particularity of their lives, but becomes a commodity in the publish or perish economy of academe.

The narrowness of my distinction is not to suggest that these are trivial concerns. Rather, it is to suggest that such activities are also engaged in by subjects, that they also are busy constructing accounts of the interaction and using them as currency in their own social milieu. Consider, for example, the Philadelphia woman who, well into the fourth hour of our interview, finally deflected the repeated request of a teenage son for her services as chauffeur: "You'll have to take the bus," she said. "Bette and I are solving the problems of women artists." This was accompanied by a calming hand and, "No, this is more important," as I apologetically scrambled to gather my things and leave. Note that she is not merely granting an interview. Rather, she and I are "solving problems," a construction that simultaneously buys time from motherly duties, appropriates for herself some of the power presumed to be the researcher's, indeed, locates the two of us on the same plane, and affirms the legitimacy of our separate but related endeavors: Yes, women artists have special problems. Yes, their problems are worthy of attention.

Consider also that being interviewed in a restaurant or the gallery puts being interviewed on public display. One woman artist interviewed in the gallery first asked me to wait while continuing her participation in a group discussion, all the while announcing to those present that she really had to go be interviewed. This delay necessitated asking her postinterview appointment to wait while she completed being interviewed. And at one point during the interview, she shushed a pair of gallery visitors with, "Excuse me, I'm being interviewed." In a social milieu in which the making of reputations is a primary activity (Becker, 1982, pp. 351-371), being interviewed is not without value.

Philadelphia women also displayed being interviewed but primarily to their families. The teenage son relegated to the bus is just one example of domestic duties warded off and the interview and its importance drawn to the attention of various family members. This is completely in keeping with their need to demonstrate seriousness to their families and institutionalize their artist identity in family life.²³

Considering interview strategies as evidence and the interview as "cultural capital" (Bourdieu, 1979/1984) does not, in itself, put to rest issues of the distribution of power in researcher-researched interactions, of the gap between ethnographic accounts and lived experience, and of the relative value of each participant's construction of what got said in a research interview. What it does is suggest that an exaggerated sense of the researcher's power has gotten in the way of seeing that research subjects also have and use power, power for which they are not dependent upon our generosity and self-conscious inclusiveness. Certainly the nature and extent of power subjects have and use, the particular ways the interview might be useful to them, are related to their social position apart from the interview. In art worlds, the interview's value is perhaps readily apprehensible, but I would not assume that other subjects in other circumstances could not and do not also make use of scholarly interest in them.²⁴ The post­structuralist question is, are we invested in our own power at the expense of attending to what they are trying to say about who they are, in and apart from the interview, both through the words they speak and through their negotiations with us over when, where, and how they will speak them?

Feminist Facts as Provisional Facts

As Janice Radway (1989) has noted, the analysis I have just completed "makes political claims on us." What is perhaps more difficult to see is that all research makes political claims on us. Much appears not to by virtue of having no political first name and because its justificatory strategies have been naturalized along with the social identities of its historical designers and practitioners.

Ethnographies that fail to account for themselves politically are as much in this category as are more traditional examples of positivist science. And as all research makes political claims, so all researchers are political subjects. Besides being the troubled beneficiaries of Western hegemony, Rabinow's critical, cosmopolitan intellectuals, Geertz's I-witnesses, and Clifford's ethnographer-poets are also gendered, racial, social-classed beings. Besides being the anguished heirs and practitioners of a relatively self-conscious research methodology, ethnographers are also members of social groups and worldviews, some of which have scarcely begun the process of naming and confronting themselves as social, historical, cultural, and political standpoints.

Inasmuch as it fails to recognize the levels of social organization between Western civilization and individual psyche, the formalist move of the poststructuralist critique postpones yet again the day of reckoning. Certainly the ethnographic text is a construction and should call attention to its own constructedness. It is a literary form and like all cultural products, its formal aspects are part of the meanings it proffers, whether or not the author purposefully used them in a metatextual way. It is orchestrated by a single voice and that voice should not hide either behind illusionistic narrative strategies or behind confessional self-psychoanalysis. Nor should it hide behind naturalized social identity. It is, finally, a gendered, racial, social-classed voice interacting with other gendered, racial, social-classed voices. I too would not essentialize or reify these particularities. But is the only alternative pretending they are not real?

That being said, what constitutes accounting for a standpoint, in this case, a feminist standpoint? My personal journey to feminism? Self-consciousness about politics, that is, saying it is feminist? Locating my argument in relation to traditional versus feminist epistemologies and methodologies? Can I examine where I presently stand? Can anyone? Particularly in light of my critique of poststructuralist formalism, can we do so without turning attention once again away from subjects, their lives, what they are trying to get said, and back to the researcher and science of some kind as the way of understanding the world? Is there an end to the hall of mirrors?

I think not. Knowledge is contingent. This is not to say that knowledge is merely relative, for in a world in which certain knowledge and ways of knowing have been and continue to be privileged by virtue of class-race-gender positioning, the knowledge and ways of knowing of historically oppressed groups are sorely needed, the continued absence of them perpetuates incompleteness in our understandings of societies and cultures. I stand on feminism, which makes this knowledge and this way of knowing possible. But I also refuse to stand still. It is a provisional stand, for it is all too clear that feminism is perfectly capable of devaluing some knowledge and some ways of knowing. This narrative is about white women; it excludes women of color and the research from which it is drawn excluded women of color, albeit unwittingly, by virtue of its very design.

Many white feminists have acknowledged that women of color are doubly or triply oppressed-often by social class as well as race and gender-and have expressed deep dismay at racism within the contemporary women's movement. Far fewer have been attempts to confront how white, middle class feminist theory and practice preserves and extends the historic division between white women and women of color. The handy explanation that white leaders regrettably but unintentionally carried racial biases from society at large into the movement is inadequate, for it supposes that by virtue of soul-searching, heightened awareness, and improved intentions, women of color can be drawn into "our" newly inclusive movement.

Rather, the tension between white women and women of color must be understood as outcome of social-structural interdependence between white supremacism and patriarchy. Historically, racial hierarchies encouraged white women to cling to their own second-class status by joining in the objectification of women of color (cf. Cliff, 1988). White women have capitalized upon the margin of privilege so maintained, the attendant economic, educational, and cultural perquisites, in setting the agenda and claiming the benefits of the contemporary women's movement.

Moreover, the women's movement has preserved and extended the objectification of women of color in its very structure and strategies. Of particular relevance to my research is the practice of women-only organizing. The women's art movement, for example, marks its beginning with the 1969 founding of Women Artists in Revolution (Chiarmonte, 1982) and has produced an array of women's art organizations, ranging from the national Women's Caucus for Art with its network of regional and city chapters to scattered women's cooperatives. In addition, women artists and scholars have produced all the features of a women's art world: feminist art criticism, theory, histories, and monographs; national and regional conferences; dedicated exhibition spaces and hundreds of exhibits of women's art. For women of color, separatism based on gender objectifies by denying a critical aspect of their experience as women of color: the specificity of their relationships with men of color. For though white women can turn racism to their advantage, men of color can turn sexism to their advantage only in limited, short-term ways (Burman, 1988). As Joseph concludes: "Black women cannot operate with a philosophy whose dynamics include separation, rejection, or exclusion of men" (1981, p. 29).²⁵

The women's art world thus poses a dual threat, firstly, to the social identities ofwomen of color by virtue of its white, middle class feminist domination and orientation, and, secondly, to their solidarity with men of color by virtue of its separatist tendency. My selection of women's cooperative art galleries as sites for research was thus political in terms of race as well as gender.²⁶ Moreover, the home-studio boundary is a particular kind of problem for women for whom the social identity "woman" has been defined in terms of domesticity. African­American women, for example, have not been so defined (Joseph, 1981), despite such stereotypes as the "mammy," who was, after all, a laborer in someone else's home. Yet it is clear that African-American women artists face extraordinary race-gender obstacles (Burman, 1988; Cliff, 1988). Thus my attempt to do a gender (only) analysis is also political in terms of race as well as gender.²⁷

Finally, however, the political accounting this analysis attempts is inevitably incomplete.²⁸The specification of political subjectivities I call for is not merely an exercise in inclusivity. Rather, it is to construct places to stand from which critically to examine our own already-standings, places informed by others who call us to account. But each construction of a standpoint excludes another, conceals even as it reveals, and remains dependent on a partial, imperfect hearing of others. Why, then, call for a possibly paralyzing task? Because some standpoints have scarcely begun to know themselves as either subjectivities or political, and in that privileged lack of critical self-awareness, social and cultural hierarchies are preserved and extended.

Author

Bette J. Kauffman is the head of the department of Mass Communications at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, Monroe, LA 71209. The article was written when Dr. Kauffman was an assistant professor in the School of Communications at The Pennsylvania State University. This analysis draws upon dissertation research supported by a fellowship from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Portions were presented at the 39th and 41st Annual Conferences of the International Communication Association, sessions of Philosophy of Communication Division (New Orleans, 1989) and Feminist Scholarship Interest Group (Chicago, 1991), respectively. Janice Radway's insights as discussant of the 1989 presentation have been invaluable. Lisa Henderson has reviewed the manuscript several times, to its substantial improvement. Others whose comments are much appreciated: Nina Gregg, Larry Gross, Leola Johnson, Janet Keefer, Pamela Sankar, Angharad Valdivia, and anonymous reviewers.

Notes

¹ I am indebted to Janice Radway (1989) for this term.

²Here I draw upon Carey's (1989) notion of communications as symbolic maps for constructing a universe in which to take up residence, rather than maps of one that exists independent of human interaction.

³ Rabinow is constructing a typology and defines this category of ethnographers as those whose "guiding value is the constitution of a community-based political subjectivity" (1986, pp. 257-258). The only example he discusses is "anthropological feminists," but presumably ethnographers who base their politics in racial, sexual, and/or class identity would also qualify.

⁴Graham cautions against "building a methodological ghetto for women" (1983, p. 136) by way of feminist preference for qualitative research methods. I suggest that to the extent feminist research comprises a "ghetto," it is less of our own making than of ghettoizing classifications like Rabinow's and the general aloofness of disciplinary "mainstreams" toward feminist challenges. It is to seek once again to engage those "mainstreams" that I direct my critique largely toward ethnography, leaving an explicit entry into the feminist methodological debate for another essay.

⁵ By focusing on local politics, I do not intend that social identity and situational power displace concern with global politics and the more general levels of cultural difference. Rather, I essentially agree with Peshkin (1985) that aspects of social identity engaged by different research projects will vary and that part of the analytic task is determining which aspects and how, not whether, social identity enters the research. Though Peshkin's discussion draws upon fieldwork in two U.S. communities, I would enlarge the point. Specification of local politics at work in given research situations, both intra- and intercultural, must necessarily include consideration of larger social constructions of gender and sexuality, race, and social class also shaping those situations. In other words, the local gender politics of a man ethnographer studying an African culture will most likely differ from those of the same ethnographer studying American culture, but there will be a local gender politics at work in both contexts.

⁶ My thanks to the anonymous reviewer whose comments helped clarify this point.

⁷ I begin with Malinowski's solution because of its familiarity and status as an historical marker. For antidotes to the view of Malinowski as Great Innovator such use might engender, see Stocking's (1983) location of him within the history of British anthropology and Marcus and Fischer's location of ethnography as method within the "professionalization of the social sciences and the humanities into specialized disciplines of the university" (1986, p. 17).

⁸ Rabinow argues that Clifford's meta-anthropology is ultimately non-self-reflexive, for in displacing concern about the relationship between the text and an "external referent," the text becomes free-floating, "its referents become other texts, other images" (Rabinow, 1986 p. 250).

⁹Geertz (1988, p. 86) is characterizing Read (1965), but by my assessment, Read himself takes pains to preserve individual Papuans as well as their "actualities" in his account. 

¹⁰Consider, for example, that an equally valid strategy that would have named politically the "strong, partial light" shed by "modernist ëtextualism"' (Clifford, 1986, p. 21) would have been to construct a dialogue between textualism and feminist critiques of it, not a token butÝ several feminist perspectives variously incorporating race, sexual orientation, and social class analyses, thereby producing a polyphonic work, a metatext in the new literary form in ethnography that Clifford idealizes. I am not suggesting that every anthology must do everything, only that Clifford's defense of the focus of this anthology (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) is symptomatic of how the formalist move fails to account for itself politically and that the exclusion of feminist voices in order to avoid tokenism and maintain the desired focus is not the inevitability he implies. Certainly, as the references for this article indicate, feminists willing and able to address methodological and epistemological issues in ethnography are available.

¹¹ Under this plan, I approached 13 members of the New York cooperative and 15 of the Philadelphia cooperative. Of the 13 New York women approached, nine (69%) were actually interviewed, while of the 15 Philadelphia women approached, 14 (93%) were interviewed.

¹² Here I use Geertz's argument (1973) that only part of what gets said is conveyed in the words spoken.

¹³ In doing this analysis, I discovered that three attempts exhausted my persistence-in effect, a predictable but unwritten dimension of the protocol.

¹⁴ In other words, most informants offered tea or coffee as an accoutrement of the question­answer period of talk. Food "as an event in itself" means the serving of lunch, dinner, or substantial refreshments before or after the question-answer period. In fact, the events were not entirely discrete, but at some point as lunch talk moved toward interview talk, it seemed necessary to mark the transition. For example, if we were still eating, I might preface a request to start the tape recorder with an apology for "getting down to business so soon."

¹⁵ Philadelphia subjects thus negotiated substantially more of my time and attention than I had expected to devote to this aspect of the research.

¹⁶Birdwhistell (1981) defines the ethnographic interview as a moment in the researcher­researched relationship achieved by negotiation of "a set of conditions whereby information can be passed." From this I take that the relationship, the negotiations, and the conditions are contextual dimensions of the relatively brief period of actual question-answer talk and are likely to include instructions for interpretation of the talk. Further, some part of the interaction will be devoted to continuous negotiation and maintenance of both the relationship and the conditions for that particular moment and kind of information transfer. Consequently, the ethnographer who begins and ends his or her analysis with the words spoken stands to miss a great deal of what got said. Moreover, the tape recording, its transcription, or other written record of the words spoken is not the interview, but a seductive reification of a partial. A record of telephone calls, face-to-face contacts, and all other negotiations, plus a postinterview write-up of what happens before, during, and after the question-answer period are necessary to the analysis I have done.

¹⁷Briggs (1986) learned a similar lesson from Mexicano elders, though the methodological concerns and solutions he derives are quite different from mine. Subjects' inability or unwillingness to "adhere to [the] rules" of research interviewing (p. 3), perhaps due to not sharing the ethnographer's cultural understanding of interviewing, are problems to be overcome by prescriptions that seem largely designed to give researchers more control over the interaction and get subjects to perform more efficiently as suppliers of data. Briggs also assumes a fit between the transcript and the interview that I question (see Note 16).

¹⁸ This analysis is drawn from my doctoral thesis (Kauffman, 1992).

¹⁹For a comprehensive popular version of this mythology, see Edward Quinn's 1986 television production, Picasso: The Man and His Work (Parts I & Il), and Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Mystery of Picasso, 1982, both available at many video stores.

²⁰I know what she was covering with this remark by putting together several clues, including her own off-hand remark at another point in the interview about getting married at that time, the age of her daughter whom I met, and a comment by another member of the New York group.

²¹ Among the comments reported: "If you love art, marry an artist. That way you'll always be close to art." Upon flunking a critique: "Why do you care? You're just going to get married and have babies."

²² Having thus made sense of these negotiated interviews, what insights into women artists' lives might I be missing by virtue of not having secured all interviews? Those interviews are "missing data," not only in terms of the stories the women would actually have told, but in terms of the conditions (if any) under which they would have been willing to tell them.

²³In contrast, New York City husbands and children acquired wives and mothers who were already serious artists with academic and professional credentials in hand, thus New York women were less occupied with recruiting family members as artist-role others.

²⁴McRobbie (1982) challenges feminist researchers in particular to analyze the extraordinary cooperation many have received from women subjects in terms of power relations and suggests that the very willingness of women subjects to talk "is in itself an index of their powerlessness" (p. 56). She exemplifies the issue with the pregnant women of Ann Oakley's study (1981), women described as "in hospital, often cut-off from family and relatives" and "surrounded by distant and aloof doctors and over-worked nurses" (McRobbie, 1982, p. 57). These women were thus delighted at Oakley's attention, became deeply involved in her research, asked her many questions, and in some cases became lasting friends. I would not quarrel with McRobbie's point or challenge to feminist researchers, but I do argue that the women subjects in Oakley's study were not powerless and that the research was useful to them. Beyond the information Oakley provided in response to their questions, it is not difficult to imagine that being interviewed by a researcher in front of those aloof doctors and busy nurses was a source of satisfaction to the women and perhaps empowered them in those relationships.

²⁵Here it is worth noting that many white women artists do not view the movement as necessarily separatist even though it is gender defined, which suggests that what constitutes "separatist" differs according to other aspects of social experience and identity.

²⁶At the same time, women artists of color do participate in the women's art world in significant ways, and do band together on the basis of race and gender to various ends. One of my tasks in continuing this research is thus to explore the conditions under which coalitions can and have been built, even as other conditions and practices have promoted homogeneity in movements of social change.

²⁷ An anonymous reviewer of this article resisted what he or she saw as a tendency to reduce cultural difference to situational power by noting that "your comments about minority women suggest a more complex picture where the cultural/ethnic dimension plays a more central role." The comment startled me into realizing that even as I challenged masculinist research for failing to confront gender as a political subjectivity, not only in its exclusion of women's standpoints but in its failure to name itself and examine its privileged status,^% I was seeing the whiteness of my research only as a barrier to talking with women artists of color rather than as shaping my interactions with white women artists. In other words, the culture/ethnic dimension is as central and complex in conditions of sameness as in those of difference, as the analysis of the gender politics of my research demonstrates. Why, then, did the comment startle me? The central role of sameness is most difficult to see for historically hegemonic subjectivities: whiteness, maleness, middle-classness, heterosexuality.

²⁸I have said little about social class and virtually nothing about sexual orientation. While social class is increasingly appearing (or reappearing) in feminist and other analyses, and plays a larger role in the more comprehensive versions of my research, it seems to me that the interactions between sexual orientation and gender, race, and class are the least well understood, and the most glaringly absent from scholarship and considerations of the politics of research. Certainly gay and lesbian scholars have been making their presence known. But, even more than gender has been viewed as the province of women and race that of scholars of color, sexual orientation has been construed as a problem only for lesbian and gay scholars.

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^% What are the gender politics of problem selection and access at work in, for example, Price's (1983) access to apparently masculinist Saramaccan historiography? Lienhardt's toÝ male-centered Dinka religion (Clifford, 1986)?