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You Got It, So When Do You Flaunt It?

Building Rapport, Intersectionality, and the Strategic Deployment of Gender in the Field

Kent State University, Ohio

Erin E. O'Brien

University of Massachusetts Boston

Building on existing literature and disparate field experiences, this article forwards a thesis that status group memberships such as gender are not destiny for building access and rapport during fieldwork. Rather, the female researcher is an active participant in how she is perceived and received by informants, capable of negotiating socially constructed scripts that dominate the field setting to her analytic advantage. Analysis demonstrates how field settings deem various combinations of a researcher's attributes relevant and how researchers can strategically utilize established scripts regarding these status group memberships to ethically gain the trust of informants. Our comparative case study design uses the concept of "deploying gender" to build this more general, intersectional thesis on the role of a researcher's status group memberships for gaining rapport.

Key Words: fieldwork • gender • intersectionality • access • rapport • identity

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 38, No. 3, 358-383 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0891241608330456


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