[-empyre-] Queer Ethnography, Methods, and Play

Thu Oct 17 04:31:50 AEDT 2019

Hello all, and thank you for having me,

I’m looking forward to riffing along with others. But first, a few thoughts
on ethnography, lightly sparked by the soft injunction to think with
Erica’s skating as play, and how this sits with, skirts, or displaces
ethnographic practice.

I’m trained as an anthropologist, with ethnography as the methodological
center of that disciplinary practice. What people call ethnography might
mean a lot of things. For some people it stands of a qualitative research
practice, opposed to, say, surveys, and oriented toward truth at granular
scales. For others it’s a kind of deep hanging out, a phrase that suggests
both ease and rigor, which gets at something of the weirdness of
ethnographic work. To me, I like to think of ethnography as a work of
encounter. More than a question of data gathering, it’s a matter of the
thought or insight or realignment that could not have happened unless you
were there, somewhere. It’s a work of allowing your world and thinking to
be permutated by someone else’s.

Two quick thoughts. My work involves exploring political, cultural, and
ecological worlds that take shape with strange modern weather. I’m
especially interested in massive dust storms that form in China’s interior
hinterlands, pass over the country, then surge across the Pacific. As they
do, they create unexpected relations, reorganize the conditions of
political and physical life, and have folks turning their attention to the
places where earth and sky become one another.

I realized as I was working that I wasn’t studying, say, scientists or
farmers interested in storms. Instead, I was moving through a weird crew of
folks who were perplexed by dust, but in ways that were different than I
was. Learning about those reorganized mine, offering me weird an unexpected
ways of thinking about materials, or sometimes finding myself deploying
some idea that had come through the attention of some people to their land
to suddenly understand air differently. Ethnography here: a play of
displacements, bound in a delicate parallax toward the same thing.

And to return to Erica’s skating and the matter of courage. I think it’s
interesting because *doing *ethnography has sometimes felt like play, but,
during fieldwork, not often like fun: more like an activation of every kind
of latent social anxiety. Other people describe it as developing deep
friendships, which sometimes happens. But for me it was emotionally complex
and often disassociating, including that it involved me being not-out for
the first time in my adult life. I wonder what courage in such a conundrum
may have looked like.

On Wed, Oct 16, 2019 at 10:00 AM Erica Rand <erand at bates.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> Thanks for the opportunity to join the conversation on queer ethnography,
> methods, and play. I’m thinking about this a lot lately, as changes in my
> figure skating life and my body—one chased and avidly pursued; the other
> one involuntary/unsought—have caused me to return to (re-up and revisit) an
> autoethnographic project begun in 2005 that turned into “Red Nails, Black
> Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice” (2012).
>
> That project, which involved participant-observation research in  adult
> (ie grown-up vs triple-xxx) figure skating, grew partly from my desire to
> play more. Maybe I could be brave enough to compete if I had a research
> project to help me overcome fear and shyness. Plus, I could justify skating
> as my job. (No I can’t join you in pseudo-collaborative institutional
> planning; I have to work on my loop jump and camel spin.)
>
> Now I generally skate for pleasure only. Pleasure sort-of in that skating
> way: You’ve got to be up for cold, bruises, frustration as well as
> exhilaration, thrill, wind on your skin. I’ve got to wrest queer femme
> pleasures, and they are mighty, from figure-skating’s tweaked version of
> racialized heterofemininity. Boyish figure made girlish ideal through
> athletic necessity. Muscle development thwarting white fragility oops
> balletic grace.
>
> Then this happened: I started skating pairs with a non-binary skating
> partner. Navigating the rules itself will be interesting. Start with gender
> markers that do and don’t match gender identities, and with neither markers
> or identities adding up to the M/F norm for testing and competition. (But
> where, how, what is written in the rulebooks, not totally clear.)
>
> And meanwhile this happened: my body hip-checked my queer gender when
> menopausal hormone changes disrupted a cushy gender/body relationship.
>
> Then, take it all onto the ice. But our 300-word allotment is short! More
> later.
>
> Erica
> --
> Erica Rand
> Professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Gender and Sexuality Studies
> she/her
>
> From: Margaret Rhee <mrheeloy at gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 3:46 PM
> Subject: Queer Ethnography, Methods, and Play
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
>
>
> Many thanks again to Maria, Lynne, Truong, and Kenji for this discussion
> on Poetry and Play, I hope the conversation continues into this week's
> continuation into play through the lens of queer and trans theory, methods,
> and ethnography.
>
> For this week and the month's discussion, we're interested in artists,
> thinkers, and activists with practices that cross over boundaries and
> intervene in dichotomous logics. With attention to justice, we explore how
> multiple forms of art practices prompt us to reimagine different kind of
> worlds, as strategy and survival. We're honored and grateful to our
> participants this week Chase Joynt, Erica Rand, Jerry Zee, and Kale B.
> Fajardo for engaging in this topic.
>
> Through interventions in queer and trans film, archival research,
> performance and writing in Chase's work that intervenes in the historical
> archive, to embodied forms of ethnographic and auto-ethnographic queer
> writing and athletics in Rand's interventions in skating, Kale's research
> and visual ethnographic interests in environmental humanities with
> photography and writing with the ocean, and the crossing social scientific
> methods and borders through questions of the environment and Asia in
> Jerry's scholarship and thinking.
>
> Our participants provide vital interventions in their work. I invite them
> to share further, and if and how play impacts their approaches and creative
> practices?
>
> *On Practice and Play: Gestures Across Genres *
>
> In this month's -empyre- forum, we take up the question of productivity
> and and the politics of play, and how playing across genres, mediums,
> forms, disciplines, and departments, etc. makes for new kinds of innovative
> art, thinking, and community; and in doing so, better intervenes and
> gestures toward transformative futures. The current conspiracy-us versus
> them- culture perhaps exemplifies the problem of singular thinking and the
> need for creative, eclectic, and innovative practices more than ever. We’re
> interested in artists, thinkers, and activists with practices that cross
> over boundaries and intervene in dichotomous logics. With attention to
> justice, we explore how multiple forms of art practices prompt us to
> reimagine different kind of worlds, as strategy and survival. Initially
> inspired by Tony Conrad's work, his practice spans across film, music,
> writing, and sculptures, we playfully ask how play lends itself to more
> libratory ways of creation and practice.
>
> We begin with the first week on media and new media art in conversation.
> with Tony Conrad's playful work across mediums, we then move into a second
> week asking questions on poetry and playing across the visual, cinematic,
> and theoretical, the third week is dedicated to the theme of ethnography
> across forms such as photography, film, and poetry, the forth week focuses
> on the ways artists advocate for decolonial and racial resistance through
> playing across genres and forms. While seemingly diverse, we hope the
> loosely organized topics will lend itself to connections between the weeks,
> and across the genres and themes presented. With attention to questions
> such as capital, creativity, institutional critique, and justice, we’re
> honored to have the following artists and thinkers join us for this
> conversation and reflect on the possibilities of practice, gestures, and
> play.
>
> We also invite our -empyre- subscribers, whose own work broadly resonates
> with the themes of practice and play, to join the conversation. What are
> the ways your practice has played or plays across genres? Have you faced
> institutional challenges in crossing disciplinary divides, and if so, how
> did you overcome them? Is play and practice productive? We explore this
> topic of play through four loose themes. We welcome our guests and all -
> empyre- subscribers to actively participate and post this month and share
> your practices and experiences of playing across genres and any questions
> that arise. We look forward to the conversation.
>
> *Queer Ethnography, Methods, and Play *
>
> *Biographies *
>
> *Chase Joynt*
>
> Chase Joynt is a moving-image artist and writer whose films have won jury
> and audience awards internationally.  His latest short film, *Framing
> Agnes*, premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, won the Audience
> Award at Outfest in Los Angeles, and is being developed into a feature film
> with support from Telefilm Canada’s Talent to Watch program. Concurrently,
> Chase is in production on a feature-length hybrid documentary about jazz
> musician Billy Tipton, co-directed with Aisling Chin-Yee. Joynt’s first
> book *You Only Live Twice* (co-authored with Mike Hoolboom) was a 2017
> Lambda Literary Award Finalist and named one of the best books of the year
> by *The Globe and Mail *and CBC. His second book, *Conceptualizing Agnes* (co-authored
> with Kristen Schilt), is under contract with Duke University Press.
>
> With projects supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Andrew
> W. Mellon Foundation, Chase’s work is distributed by the Canadian
> Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre
> and VTape.
>
> *Erica Rand *
>
> Erica Rand is a professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Gender and
> Sexuality Studies at Bates College. Her writing includes Barbie’s Queer
> Accessories (1995), a study of the doll’s history and manufacture in
> relation to corporate and consumer meaning-making; The Ellis Island Snow
> Globe (2005), a queer, anti-racist alternative tour of Ellis Island and
> the Statue of Liberty; and Red Nails Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and
> Pleasure On and Off the Ice (2012), a collection of short essays grounded
> in participant-observation research in adult figure skating. She serves on
> the editorial board of Radical Teacher and is currently working on The
> Small Book of Hip Checks on Queer Gender, Race, and Writing, in which
> autoethographic fragments bump up against other engagements, working to
> make muscle memory of experimentation against traditional ideas of heft and
> fluff.
>
> *Jerry Zee *
>
> I am an anthropologist of environment and politics. I explore embroilments
> of land and air as openings into political experiment. My research tracks
> the substantial dynamics of sand, dust, and wind as a way of gaining
> insight to contemporary environmental politics in China and downwind.
>
> I work, in my research, with scientists, engineers, foresters, farmers,
> artists, and breathers of all kinds. Overall, I wonder over how an avowedly
> post-natural contemporary meteorology displaces analytic habits and ways of
> asking inherited from a more confident social science, and, through this, I
> ask what anthropology has already been becoming in this strange weather.
>
> *Kale Fajardo *
>
> I'm an Associate Professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies
> at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. (Pronouns: He/Him/His.) I
> received my PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of California,
> Santa Cruz. In graduate school, I focused on visual anthropology,
> postcolonial studies, gender/sexuality studies, and Asian American Studies.
> I have a Bachelors of Science degree in Human Development Studies from
> Cornell University, with concentrations in Southeast Asian Studies and
> feminist studies. I'm currently working on my second book entitled, _Fish
> Stories: Photos/Essays from St. Malo to Manila Bay_. In this transnational
> research project, I engage with the “environmental humanities” and I'm also
> returning to my past training and passions in visual anthropology. In _Fish
> Stories_, I photograph, write about and theorize the intimacies and
> interconnections between “Filipinx, fish, and marine ecologies” (historical
> and contemporary), while also engaging with anthropological debates about
> the “border zones between art and anthropology practices” (Schneider and
> Wright, 2010). My methodological (re-)orientation (that is, moving towards
> art/photography-as-anthropology) is also informed by Tim Ingold’s notion
> that “artists and anthropologists come to know…through an art of inquiry
> that emphasizes thinking through making” (2013) and Nikolai
> Ssorin-Chaikov’s concept of "ethnographic conceptualism," which he defines
> as “ethnography conducted as conceptual art.” _Fish Stories_ is also a
> homage to Allan Sekula and his book Fish Story (1995). In _Fish Stories_, I
> include original photographs and written essays on “siyokoys” (mermen) in
> Philippine visual media and folklore to theorize human-fish-sea intimacies
> and queer/trans masculinities. I also analyze and engage with
> ethno-historical images and photos of "Manila-Men” sailors and fishermen
> and their descendants in the bayous and coastal areas of Louisiana. These
> fishing grounds are adjacent to the contemporary “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of
> Mexico (which cannot sustain marine life.) I also analyze and engage with
> old snapshot photographs of Filipino migrant workers who worked in salmon
> canneries in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Currently, these are sites
> where salmon populations have significantly decreased. Lastly, in _Fish
> Stories_, I return to the Philippines to photograph and write about
> contemporary fisherfolk in coastal Bulacan Province and the broader Manila
> Bay Area. Fisherfolk in Manila Bay are stressed by global warming, rising
> seas, depleted fisheries, urbanization and mega-regionalization, and marine
> pollution. On campus, I'm active in Asian Studies + Environmental
> Humanities (ASEH) programming at the Environmental Humanities Initiative.
>
> --
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

-- 
*Jerry Zee*
UC Santa Cruz Anthropology Department
331 Social Sciences 1
702 College Nine Road
Santa Cruz, CA 95064

--
*How we live like water: touching*
a new tongue with no telling
what we’ve been through. They say the is sky is blue

*but I know it’s black seen through too much air*
*.*

*From "Untitled (Blue, Green, & Brown): oil on canvas:Mark Rothko: 1952" by
Ocean Vuong*

The Landscape Lab <https://landscapelaboratory.sites.ucsc.edu/>
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