Discomforting Methodologies

In certain cultural contexts, many minority groups have historically found a space for resistant survival against the acculturation pressure from mainstream societies in the ossification and reaffirmation of gender roles and compulsory heterosexuality. In this context, out-of-the-norm masculinities can be complex and a source of suffering. The ‘emotional discomfort’ accompanies many researchers throughout their fieldwork. This work aims to set a dialogue between my ethnographic experience and the different approaches to the role of emotions from anthropology and situated feminist knowledges. In this article I take my emotional discomfort as a non-heterosexual ethnographer, experienced in fieldwork with Spanish Gypsy men where ‘authentic’ ethnic and gender identities were inextricably linked, as a space for analysis. This position of relative subalternity may be experienced as an impediment or incorporated as a privileged space of research. Here I defend that the discomfort can be incorporated at the ethnographic level, both in terms of content and methodology. Therefore my proposal involves a systematic analysis of how this experience is produced in the different stages of the field work and can be methodologically incorporated in a fruitful way.