Kinship in the field- or a super meta post about the doing of fieldwork

This is less about my experiences here perse or about anything fun and interesting I've been up to (although I need to write about Puebla, Dia de los muertos, and other goings on), but the rather the beginnings of something that has been sticking in the back of my mind, and an on-going meta theme of my time here.

I've been thinking a lot about a couple articles in Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork, a book a professor of mine co-edited and which I have taught. The one that keeps sticking out for me is this shock of confrontation when a anthropologist's field participant arrives one day at her apt and she's in "normal" clothes (or she may have just gotten out of the shower, my memory is fuzzy), and this moment of sexual tension when he related differently to her as a gendered subject than when she was performing "anthropologist." And this has nothing to do with my own sexual choices here, but rather about this constant tension around self-performance, gender and sexuality.

I joke about being the giant gringa in the room (impossible to overlook and used to now being the object of speculation), but only part of that is my height, my breasts too are outsized for life here and I am conscious of the height of my necklines whenever I leave the house, but ever more when I physically travel to do fieldwork (a process that gives me this interstitial space to construct a difference between my fieldwork identity and my home or "real" one.... and this is a false dualism as people from G have visited me in my house and not all my research is done out of the city). This is something I've talked about with other gueras here, that we often feel that we must wear higher necklines, longer skirts, no shorts, while Mexican women go out as I might were I in LA, based largely on the fact that so much of Oaxacan society constructs particularly American women as more sexually available, or as improperly gendered so as to be easily removed from the routines of respectful gender relations, and so we make sure that nothing about ourselves plays into this confusion, leading to undesired confrontations (as I learned three years ago, when I found myself dancing in ways that were incredibly uncomfortable and a) feeling unable to breakoff without a confrontations and b) told the next night that it was clear to all that I had taken him home... when I had in fact left early and alone).

All of this is a long preamble to this meta thread that runs through my experience of fieldwork, this sensation of performance, that I respond in gender appropriate ways that will encourage people to trust me and yet feel only partially authentic to my sense of self... and this is something I don't flatter myself is unique to me, but rather feels endemic to fieldwork.

Kinship has long been the subject of anthropology, but it is also for me the ground on which people come to understand me as a social person (also not a new insight) and a lot of what people what to know is how I'm located in kinship networks, how I talk about kinship as a window into how I am as a social person.

Because I am not married, have no kids, nor serious boyfriend, people place me as imbricated in kinship networks through my parents and extended family, and I encourage this—I talk about my nieces and nephew, mentally conflating both bio and constructed kin (although my “bio” sobrinas are through “constructed” step family relationships) and I talk about my parents, especially my mother both because they are hugely important in my life and sense of being in the world, but also because they normalize me, make me a recognizable social actor. And since people here tend to think that I am younger than my age, putting me in my early 20s rather than late, and understand somewhat that I have school, it’s ok that I’m childless and single as long as I talk about wanting these things “en la futura” or “cuando dios quiere.” Thus, by myself making kinship present, it lets me as a childless woman still talk to women about reproduction and pregnancy and children.

As I talk about my parents people seize on the fact that I’m an only child, and my pat response is that I have step sibs but I’m the baby and the fact that my parents are divorced but I have stepmothers. It's weird enough (according to standards here, although people know that they're different in the states) that I'm an only child and my parents are divorced, without adding the fact that my mother's a lesbian and my father and S aren't married. I sometimes take advantage of my own gender confusions, talking about my parents’ "parejas" knowing that this choice is deliberate but may be taken as a slip of the tongue of a non-fluent speaker. I rarely refer to a padrastra, mentally apologizing to K when I do so. I take advantage of my own conflation of S and K who in English I refer to without specificity as my “stepmom” without reference to which parent they are attached to But every time I verbally obscure my mother’s sexual identity or more importantly her relationship with K, I cringe and am reminded of the distance between my “true” and fieldwork self….. because here I don’t have what I consider the luxury of a “fuck it” attitude I would take in the States toward anyone who cringed when I causally mention that my mom is a lesbian. And it is again a reminder to me that my relationships here are very utilitarian at times dressed up in real affection.

Things I think will become ever more complicated when I move to the doing of research in LA.