Lanita Jacobs-Huey Examining the Politics of Representation in Language and Gender Research

University of Southern California
Anthropology Department
3601 Watt Way, GFS 120
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0129
jacobshu@usc.edu
www-rcf.usc.edu/~jacobshu/

About Lanita Jacobs-Huey

Jacobs-Huey will offer a workshop on ethnographic methods in language and gender studies, focusing on such questions as standards of ethnographic validity and the methodological and ethical issues surrounding how the researcher is perceived by members of the group under study, an issue she has addressed in her own research. She has also done research on how racial and gender identities are negotiated through language use by white users of African American English (and in African American beauty salons); the latter study introduces the use of new video technologies for the study of language and embodiment.

Abstract

This workshop grapples with the politics of representation that characterize research on language and gender, a subfield in many ways born from a need to talk back to stigmatizing representations of "women's speech" (Lakoff 1975). Our discussion will focus on the representational politics that shape our inquiries in and beyond the field, including such issues as: the politics of gender identities in the field (Abu-Lughod 1988, Kondo 1986, Williams 1996), manifest power differentials between the researcher/researched (D'Amico-Samuels 1997), and dilemmas of translation (Jacobs-Huey 2002). While often relegated to fieldnotes or footnotes, these issues are fundamental to the process of discovery and interpretation (Tedlock 1995). To facilitate discussion of the ways these topics can inform language and gender research, data will be presented from a five-year multi-sited study of African American women's everyday talk across multiple hair care locales that illuminate the linguistic and corporeal resources women draw upon to construct identity, fields of knowledge, and socialize others within shared communities of practice (Jacobs-Huey 1999). We will pay special attention to key "behind the scenes" engagements that expand prior understandings African American women's talk within their own speech communities and cultural practice. Participants will be asked to reflect upon their own fieldwork experiences, including moments of vulnerability or "failure," and probe what these moments say about questions of language and gender and the process of inquiry. Workshop participants will also read attempts by other scholars to reconcile the intersubjective realities of their fieldwork in their final analyses and ask how their work might enhance theoretical and methodological paradigms in language and gender studies.

Workshop Materials

Click here to download Lanita Jacobs-Huey's workshop handout in .pdf format.
Click here to download Lanita Jacobs-Huey's powerpoint presentation.



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