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My email: megan.little@mail.utexas.edu |
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Welcome to my website. Browse around to learn more about my work history, research interests, and teaching. This site also includes informal blog posts around two areas of my dissertation project: national events related to Domestic Partner Benefit (DPB) advocacy and feminist and experimental forms of qualitative research.
As announced just this past June, state universities in Wisconsin (as well as all other public institutions) will soon be able to offer DPB. This is partially the product of advocacy on campuses, and notably, of vocal student groups demanding access to LGBT teachers and mentors. Looks like this will be a state-wide policy, as the legislature is creating a new registry of "domestic partnership." In the past, similar constructs have been challenged as an illegal "proxy" for marital status. Wisconsin's constitutional amendment challenges recognition of gay marriage or anything "substantially similar" to marriage. It is unclear what will happen when this registry is challenged in the courts (as it undoubtedly will be). Perhaps this will be the next "test case," after Michigan. (Update: looks like the challenge is underway, see here.)
Zora Neale Hurston's first ethnography, Mules and Men, is based on folklore research she conducted under the tutelage of Frank Boas. Scholars of her life and work suggest that this ethnography informed the novel hailed as her masterpiece: Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Mules and Men reads like elegantly revised field notes--not much by way of analysis or interpretation here. Instead, the reader basically gets a retrospective on Hurston’s experiences as she makes her way through the field. She occasionally reflects on the challenge of occupying a role somewhere between insider and outsider, but the bulk of the account consists of carefully reconstructed dialogue and stories (mostly around porches, at dances, during moments between work, and other social gatherings). Because of my research and teaching interests, I tend to be most drawn to passages where she devises insightful strategies for locating informants and gaining their trust, especially since this isn’t easy.
Even though she grew up in the same area she studies, as an educated woman, returning “home,” Hurston is elevated in status over other people. Plus, she describes the inherent difficulty of her task: “Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually under-privileged, are the shyest. They are more reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by. And the Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive…We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing.” She describes the “theory behind this tactic”: “’The white man is always trying to know somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the foot of my mind for him to play with and handle.’”
Hurston seeisms ambivalent about which pronoun to use in this passage. The first person plural, speaking as a member of that community? The third person, speaking as a distanced outsider, a trained anthropologist, and the community an object of study? Or, in the first person and in free indirect discourse (a precursor to narrative strategies she uses to shed light on her characters in Their Eyes), where she can step into the minds and perform the thinking of her subjects? Negotiating the roles between partial insider and partial outsider not only leads her to mix pronouns and narrative personas in her write-up,it also leaves her skeptical about the data she collects. Through out the ethnography, she lets the reader know when her attempts to build rapport have failed, and when it's time to change a strategy. She modifies her dress, participates in the ritual of “woofing” (playful flirtation whereby a man flaunts his prowess with the ladies), and even stands on a tabletop singing a verse of “John Henry”--all to gain access to her informants. Thus, Hurston reveals her ability to fine-tune herself as research instrument. We watch her try out strategies to convince her informants that she is both trustworthy and "one of them," even as she confides in us, the "outsider" audience, about her successes and missteps.
In the process, she manages to collect richly different kinds of discourse. First and foremost are the folktales and stories, the “lies” and "lying contests" as her informants call them. People take turns telling tales, and with each turn, the stories evolve through a central theme or morph through a succession of themes. Each chapter is more-or-less organized around each lying contest and its theme(s): why men are stronger than women, the struggles between “John” or “Jack” and “Ole Massa,” creation stories about white and black folk, and allegories based on familiar animal characters like Brer Rabbit. Hurston not only collects these stories, but demonstrates how her subjects use them to spar with each other. Her project seems to be more than capturing and preserving the stories themselves, but also documenting the ritual of storytelling as a vehicle for communal bonding, group and self-identification, and organizing and interpreting the world (in this case, that includes intra- and inter-communal power hierarchies, especially with the white community that employs and otherwise holds power over them). Besides, these contests seem fun.
A long entry, I know. Can’t get enough of this lady. I’ve taught this text before, and discovered that it needed more strategic framing and guidance than I provided. It’s a curious thing to teach: an ethnography, but probably best taught similar to a piece of literature where you’d ask students to close-read and interpret important passages. In effect, it could be promising to have students treat her write-ups "like data," and ask them to venture secondary interpretations and ideas. For me, the richest moments and best spots for class discussion are where Hurston negotiates her own position as simultaneous insider and outsider, encountering challenges in the field and actively rethinking how to deploy her methods. One could ask students to evaluate the reliability of her narrative, as "raw data," given her ambivalent position. Further, the dialogues and stories themselves are certainly rich fodder to close-read and/or place within the framing narrative to explore why and how cultures invent elaborate linguistic rituals to organize and constitute themselves.
This article is a little dated, even though it was published in 2005. This is because events are changing so rapidly with the case of DPB. While this article predates some important rulings, it does provide great background on the legal issues at the heart of DPB, including a concise history of routes taken to try to defend an existing policy of DPB (given new DOMA laws) or to establish DPB where they did not exist. The cases are organized around which laws and statutes were under scrutiny: state constitutional protections, state anti-discrimination laws, municipal anti-discrimination ordinances, collective bargaining agreements, and local institutional policies.
An array of arguments here, since local laws can differ so much between states. I'd like to think a little more about two of them, since they relate to my research in policy classifications and the legal construct of status in the case of DPB.
Back in 1996, Oregon attempted to defend their policy of not offering DPB by switching the pertinent classification: they are not making classifications based on sexuality, they argued, but on marital status. Thus, their classification is not discriminatory because it treats all unmarried people the same (Tanner v. Oregon, 1996). This move to switch the pertinent classification has been used to defend discriminatory workplace policies in other areas as well, for example, that a policy is not discriminating against women, because the policy classification is about pregnant versus nonpregnant women, not women versus men (UAW v. Johnson Controls, Inc., 1991). Neither argument convinced the courts: the first classification does not hold because LGBT unmarried people cannot marry, and thus, all unmarried people are not targeted equally by the policy; the second does not hold because only women get pregnant. The first classification is deceptively broad (overinclusive), the second, deceptively narrow (underinclusive).
This strategy interests me because it relates to a central identity political debate connected to DPB: whether policies should include non-married straight people, or only people who do not have the choice to marry. The different policy approaches enable different public arguments about rights and entitlements. The first is about social equity, the discrimination of a particular group. The second is less clear-cut, about restrictive social institutions and the rights of individuals to remain outside them if they so choose. A third and most recent option is a "novel" policy classification that covers simultaneously everyone and no one--as in a more open "plus one" or "other qualified adult" arrangement. The social justice argument this policy relies on is basically the failure of the current health care system to address the realities of today's families (in which more and more people are caring for people outside the traditional nuclear family, as in an aging parent). The problem with this last model is that, while it may side-step restrictions on same sex status recognition, it also is interpreted as an "overinclusive" policy model. Clearly, while what is "over-inclusive" and "under-inclusive" is often described as a quasi-empirical demographic measure in legal discourse, it's a highly strategic and subjective concept.
Another interesting breadcrumb from this article is a little reference tucked away within one of the cases: a series of precedents that successfully argued the distinction between DPB entitlements and marital status. From the Michigan case in 2004 (National Pride at Work v. Granholm): "The employees’ brief supporting their motion for summary judgment cited cases from eight state high courts holding that receiving domestic partnership benefits does not constitute a new form of marital status or create any sort of policy on marriage. These courts held that domestic partnership benefits are unrelated to marital status and were not preempted by state laws governing marriage." I will need to look into this brief to find these citations. I'm not sure how useful these arguments will be to activists today, as current interpretation seems to be going in the opposite direction. For example, in May 2008, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled struck down arguments about the distinction between status and entitlements, arguing that recognition of the "part" (one benefit of the hundreds associated with marriage) essentially equates to recognition of the "whole" (status). Still, it's worth having a look at these prior cases to learn more about how the relationship between classification and status has been argued in the past. More to come.
In the headlines today: Obama is trying to extend same sex benefits to federal employees. However, reading deeper we learn that these "benefits" are unlikely to include anything substantial, such as health care benefits or life insurance. Legal analysts are saying the Federal DOMA prevents this: http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid90945.asp Yet, the HRC is saying that the bill will offer all comparable benefits (see here). A little confusing.
Shostak, Marjorie. Nisa; The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.
A classic work that blends ethnography with oral history to offer a glimpse of a !Kung woman's life from her own perspective. In the first chapter, the author begins with a short excerpt in which Nisa recounts the birth of her first child. We get a taste of Nisa's striking talent to craft a narrative, and also how her unique renderings of events can teach us about a young woman's rites of passage, gender and generational roles, the practices and customs of a culture, and so on. Each chapter begins with a brief anthropological overview of the general behaviors of the !Kung people, each focusing on a different stage of life (from the "earliest memories," to "growing older"). Then, the bulk of each chapter is life history told by the subject, Nisa's "life and words" uninterpretted and uninterrrupted.
This telling of the story from the subject's own experience and through her unedited words--it's the hallmark of oral history, which aims not to reconstruct an "objective," comprehensive, or triangulated view of a phenomenon, but instead, to gather words, impressions, and recollections in order to reproduce what Allesandro Portelli calls a "cross section of [cultural] subjectivity." At the time of publication, this was certainly an innovative approach for a trained anthropologist. So, early in the work, Shostak explains her rationale. In focusing on Nisa's experiences, Shostak engages in what she understands as the feminist project of filling the blank spots of the traditional anthropological accounts. As she writes, she benefited from the findings of numerous prior anthropological expeditions to study the !Kung; however, these accounts simply came up short: "When I asked questions about they were like as people and how they felt about their lives, I received answers so varied that they seemed to reflect as much the personalities of the individual anthropologists as anything they had learned about the !Kung."
Interestingly, Shostak points to the limitations of traditional anthropology in terms of the way prior ethnographic accounts were unable to articulate the subjective, felt lives of the people. To really "know" a people, Shostak explains, she would need be able to answer questions such as: "How did they feel about themselves, their childhoods, their parents? Did spouses love one another; did they feel jealousy; did love survive marriage? What were their dreams like and what did they make of them? Were they afraid in growing old? Of death?" (5)
Shostak is the first to acknowledge the possible methodological limitations of her approach: in Nisa, she found an extraordinary storyteller, who sometimes may have embellished or even invented events. She recounts how she interviewed several !Kung women while seeking a suitable subject for a life history. The reader may wonder--how wise is it to discount so many potential subjects because their approaches to storytelling, their reticence, or some other personal characteristic fails to fit the needs and goals of the researcher? I wonder what gets left out when a researcher seeks out and finds precisely the kind of narrative she desires?
While this question had me scratching my head from time to time, I spent far more time appreciating the possibilities this work suggests about what might constitute a compromising and flexible "feminist empiricism," that is, a research agenda that can be conversant with other paradigms and approaches. Because Nisa's personality and narrative style sometimes lead her to "over dramatize" events, we as readers are reminded of the theoretical question (sinkhole?) of whether empirically "real" experience is any more "valid" than subjective, perceived, and imagined experience: which "experience" holds more sway in a person's imaginative and emotional life? Which "experience" makes for more reliable fodder to answer the questions that interest Shostak? Even as Shostak provokes this feminist empirical argument, she also gestures toward more traditional canons of accuracy and reliability in qualitative research. She frames each of Nisa's stories within a more generalized interpretation of the culture, in which she reports on the findings of more traditionally ethnographic studies. Thus, the reader can transpose the single voice against the anthropological summation of the culture, which has been gathered and refined following more traditional methods.
And we are still captivated most by Nisa. As Shostak writes, "Nisa's narrative is just one view of !Kung life. Her history does not represent the whole range of experience available to women in her culture" (43). In spite of some methodological questions (or perhaps because of them), I come away from this book, and all of Nisa's rich narratives, wondering how Shostak could have done otherwise. How could a researcher pursue the questions Shostak pursues, without relying on highly subjective, felt accounts? Since this kind of expression isn't common, and is often culturally discouraged, could she do otherwise than seek out this account by sifting through informants and relying so heavily on her ideal "find"?
I haven't taught this text yet, but plan on doing so in my Fall 2009, Rhetoric and Research class.
A ruling in CA on the state DOMA received a lot less attention than concurrent developments in gay marriage, but it seems to be of significant importance in terms of the efforts to distinguish between status and entitlements (at heart of the DPB debate). The court ruled that the government objectives for withholding benefits from same sex partners listed in DOMA (to nurture the institution of heterosexual marriage), failed to pass even a rational basis test under Title VII. The justices reasoned that taking benefits away has nothing to do with encouraging people to marry straight (a gay man is not going to "see the light" and marry a woman because he can't get benefits for his male partner), and so, under just a "rational" review, DOMA does not serve the stated government objective. (A classification, under rational basis scrutiny, has to "rationally" serve a government objective to be non-discriminatory. Usually, complaints that receive rational basis scrutiny are most easily dismissed.) What does this mean? That LGBT legal arguments are increasingly not needing to rely on sexual orientation being an established protected class which warrants "strict" judicial scrutiny.
In addition to this case being interesting because it is another ruling saying classifications based on sexuality cannot be upheld on any rational basis (as was another case on same sex partner's right to adopt in Florida), it is also especially important to the case of whether conferring health benefits and other entitlements is considered technically equal to the kind of recognition that comes through marital status. This particular court ruling has the impact of further unbundling entitlements from status. Keeping status and entitlement bundled is the key argument for the case against offering public employers DPB in Texas and other states.