Letter/Communication
‘Sexualizing research.’ Reply to Erich Goode, ‘Sexual involvements and social research in a fat civil rights organization’
Qualitative sociology, v 25(4), pp 535-539
Dec 2002
Abstract
Erich Goode has written a spectacularly self-indulgent essay about a research project he began and ended roughly twenty years ago. For three and a half years, beginning in April 1980, when he attended his first meeting of the National Association to Aid (later for the Advancement of) Fat Americans (NAAFA) in Nassau County, Long Island, Goode studied the experiences of fat people. He was a participant observer in the Long Island chapter of NAAFA, and as part of his participation he dated and had sex with the obese women he studied. Towards the end of his study, in March 1983, he was a partner in the conception of a pregnancy with a woman he met at a NAAFA party in a San Diego bar; she gave birth to a daughter nine months later. Until the publication of “Sexual Involvement and Social Research in a Fat Civil Rights Organization” in Qualitative Sociology, Goode’s research was, in his estimation, “a colossal waste of time” because he succeeded in publishing only one article on fat admirers, “a watered-down version of that same piece” in a nonscholarly magazine for health professionals, and a summary of obesity as a stigma in one of his own anthologies. In the present article, Goode writes about sexuality, the erotic experience of fieldwork, and sexual relationships between researchers and subjects. These are provocative topics. I offer the following commentary in the spirit not of rescuing the fundamentally flawed ethical and methodological positions taken by Goode but with the goal of contributing a point of view left out of his article. I enfold the question of sex between researchers and subjects into the topics of embodiment, gender, and power. I conclude with reflections on responsibility and respect. My caveat is that I agree sociologists need to talk and write about these matters, but I don’t think Goode’s research or his essay help us to move in the right direction. [1st paragraph]
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Details
- Title
- ‘Sexualizing research.’ Reply to Erich Goode, ‘Sexual involvements and social research in a fat civil rights organization’
- Creators
- Susan E Bell - Bowdoin College
- Publication Details
- Qualitative sociology, v 25(4), pp 535-539
- Publisher
- Springer
- Number of pages
- 5
- Resource Type
- Letter/Communication
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Sociology
- Other Identifier
- 991020638513104721