Is there such a thing as pure empiricism?

It has seemed that my fieldwork has evolved into the LA-public health component more than my own fieldwork. I've constantly struggled with trying to ground myself in a community, a location, a relevant cultural group. And every time I attempt this, things fall apart. There seems to be no center and no connector. Ultimately, I suppose, this is because I'm more interested in knowledge and information than in people. That's terrible to admit, but it's kind of true, that people are the medium for the circulation of information, and therefore, they are a means for me to get to the knowledge. I've never totally written this out before and admitting to it feels a bit risky.

One of my professors in an attempt to "help" me, suggested that biosociality often doesn't have a center; the concept refers to how people organize around biological/medical identities, such as cancer survivors as a social group, even when as individuals they may not have other socially similar attributes (this is highly reduced, so forgive me). In other words, the lack of grounding with which I'm grappling is a reflection of the subject rather than my own failing. She's probably right, but it doesn't make a researcher feel better when everyone else is studying a particular community and its habits. And when asked about whom I study, I end up kind of tongue-tied and abstract.

Anyway, this apparent distaste for humans means that when the LA project was offered to me, I couldn't resist. It gave me a "location," and it will allow me to collect a huge amount of data without having to do the labor or pay for it. Also, I was seduced by the prospect of being sought out. I hadn't intended to work for/with them, I simply wanted to know more about what they were doing. I have moments of regret, where I wonder if it was a wise decision to take the job. At some point, we will start the research, but most recently, the IRB expressed concern that my observation methods would generate "bias" in those being observed. I've written about how deeply frustrating this "bias" anxiety is to me -- as it presumes that other forms of data collection (surveys, etc) are unbiased. Really, they are simply accepted biases, which doesn't mean that they don't also produce biases, it's just that we have more standardized ways of accepting these biases. The IRB honcho who has expressed his concerns has assured us that he is familiar with qualitative research methods, as he has conducted "qualitative" research around HIV, but the minute someone insists he is "familiar" with "qualitative" work, my suspicions are immediately heightened.

Those who conduct this form of research are usually pretty sanguine about the imperfection of the methods, its messiness, its risk of imprecision. Generally, and perhaps someone will object to this description or assumption, those who use these methods anticipate and find interesting the tricky moments. In fact, some would even suggest that the tricky moments are the most interesting. This is where, I think, sociologists and anthropologists differ quite clearly, and where anthropologists and other qualitative researchers differ.

Anthropologists see the process as compelling and complex as collecting "rigorous" data. The idea that clinical encounters will fit into standardized data collection methods is naive. Clinical visits vary. Human interactions are generally diverse and complex, and to try to impose a formulaic way of capturing "what happens" is to impose an external expectation of what will happen in that encounter. It seems that what we call empiricism is actually highly dependent on imposing boundaries of understanding information. Anthropology is messy and often scattershot, but I would suggest that it can actually produce a far more robust understanding of "what is happening" in the world than the most "rigorous" of experiments.

Sigh...this was useful. Now I can go and respond to the IRB meanie. Better to vent here than in a professional context.

Why I (currently) do not wish to be an academic

Listed in order of importance:
1. I have bad hair, and I blame this on my abject poverty. Also lack of hairstyle inspiration being directly related to the mind-numbing that I attribute to a life of the mind.

2. I have boring clothes, many of which I have owned since college. Most of which fit badly and/or are being worn way past their fashion and functional life.

3. I am tired of theorizing things. The world feels predictable and small and I'm not convinced that I have anything new to add to it.

I suspect that I really ought to re-order and re-prioritize the list, but right now my room is a mess, and I've not done any productive work today due to running around for my new part-time employment. How is a person supposed to think during the day when she's busy slinging to keep herself afloat? Lately, I've been making major decisions while straightening up or vacuuming. I feel that any decision made during this process should be listened to, and I'll deal with the aftermath some other time or way. So far the art of domesticity hasn't failed me yet.

Basically, I do not want to be an academic because I hate the desperation of needing to secure financial support, and the desperation of trying to prove oneself intelligent through publishing and self-aggrandizement. It all feels very distasteful. I would much rather work mindlessly for a for-profit organization where I have only my scruples and morals to contend with. Also, recently someone told me he thought he'd like to go back to school for a PhD, and I realized what a crock the romanticism of advanced education can be. Having seen, at one point, how deeply miserable I was for a good semester or so, I can't quite understand why he would even consider it. But I suppose we all fantasize about the world that is not our own. And if I were at a desk everyday, I'd surely be getting off by perusing academic books and academic papers. That is just so so sad.

This concludes my snippet of personal ruminations. I've tried hard not to be a personal confessions blogger...but sometimes, I feel I need to vent a little.

Re-thinking the medium

I started this blog as a site to work through some of my initial ideas about my research, while in the middle of fieldwork. But as fieldwork became increasingly amorphous and unclear, it became harder to keep a blog on it, and as with everything, I increasingly became distracted by all the other worldly things that are tangentially related to my research. My problem, in my work, in my writing, and possibly in my life more generally, is that I find it very easy to get distracted by all the data surrounding me. It is as though I were hyper-sensitive to all information and can no longer parse out the important stuff. It used to make me feel like I had a super-power, but I've started to worry that it actually is a hindrance. I want to move toward tunnel-vision, focused and ready. But it's really damn hard.

Anyway, I present this dilemma here in order to remind myself that the next three and a half months or so need to be uber-precise. I want to finish this project (aka the dissertation, grad school, doctoring, etc) by 2010, not because I have a clear sense of what comes next, but because I'm weary of the world of studenthood. Perhaps my biggest problem in completing the tasks at hand is that I'm still unclear what the future projects will be. Academia often makes me nauseous, yet I've been there (is it a place? a mindset?) so long, that I've started to worry that I can't function in any other environment. Any time the threat of staticness, or narrowness, or confinedness rears its head, I start making plans to leave. It has happened frequently in grad school, but now that I'm far away from the city of my institution, all I can think about is quitting. A friend sent an address update that informed me that she had taken an assistant professorship in Northern NY. She was always so adamant that she wouldn't leave the west coast. But the idea of her now being a professor, when I knew her when we were idealistic college students, freaks me out. She's really in it. And I'm not sure that I want to join the fray.

Crap. Beat to the Punch.

I can't bear to link to the NYT long article on my research topic. Makes me feel lousy. I know I should be pleased that much of what they "expose" is stuff I've already noticed, but still. One of the key problems of academia is trying to feel new and "fresh". I feel neither new nor fresh.

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Just noticed that they have misspelled trials as "trails". I feel a little better.

Phenomenological versus the Empirical

I commented to someone on Friday night that I was really more interested in phenomenological data collection as opposed to being a strict empiricist. It made me realize that I need to clarify my terms a lot more -- for myself, more than anything. I see that clarification as part of getting closer to a personal research philosophy, which I wouldn't say that I have right now. Or rather, I have one, it's just not clearly defined. It's hard to sit down and make proclamations about research, research methods, etc. When glimmers of clarity come up, it's like the golden hour in filmmaking -- too good to pass up. Obviously, there are others who have written on this, and I'm not reading them, but I tend to like to frame my ideas and then seek out sources to figure out how others make sense of something. Perhaps all part of the phenomenological approach...

I am pleased with myself today. And it's only 8:30am.

Also, I realized that my nickname for my cat sounds vaguely like a new pharmaceutical drug, for a new non-specific ailment. I can already see the billboards plastered all over BART stations. It would be especially awesome if the billboards had huge photos of cats jumping with joy, further baffling consumers about the actual purpose of the drug. I still remember the "Purple Pill" full-station ads from when I lived here 6 or 7 years ago. That's how powerful pharma ads are. I have no clue what the purple pill is, but it dominated the station for quite some time.

70s Feminism Seems to be in Vogue

I recently received a notice that Our Bodies, Ourselves was looking for a new assistant director. The email was charming because as any young feminist who grew up with a progressive mother knows, this is THE book that many women turned to to learn about their bodies. And sure, like any document, any attempt to define, explain, and bound information, it is flawed. But as a text, it has been remarkably fluid, and I have the sense that the collective has made a concerted effort to integrate criticisms and change as the times change.

Shere Hite is another 70s icon. Her book The Hite Report was a series of quotations and discussions on different aspects of female sexuality, and it was pretty damn revolutionary. I remember reading it in high school and being a little bored (I'm not sure what I expected)...but I know that it still remains an important text, at least conceptually. Hite has an article on Alternet that's worth reading. It's kind of clunkily written, and at times hard to figure out what she's arguing for. But the gist, should you not want to read an article entitled "Female Orgasm and the Need for a New Definition of Sex," is that our understanding of sex and sexual pleasure has changed a lot in the recent past. Calling for new expectations and definitions of sex is necessary.

She challenges the idea that penetrative intercourse is the self-evident way to pleasurable sex. I took a Freud seminar a few years ago, and I remember hanging out with a couple of the men from my seminar one evening. I made some comment about Freud's weird obsession with the vaginal orgasm (as he believes that women's proper and full sexual maturity depends on the experience of male penetration, and he doesn't believe clitoral orgasms are "legitimate" expressions of sexuality), and these two men (who also were taking the seminar) were really baffled about the possibility of something other than the vaginal orgasm. Young 20-something heterosexual men were baffled. The whole conversation made me uncomfortable and also disturbed, and I didn't push the issue (though I was grateful they were not my sex partners). Hite actually suggests that vaginal orgasm is a total myth, which I would object to as her major limitation as a researcher. But most importantly, Hite concludes by trying to remove the "goal" of orgasm as the sole purpose of sex. And I think this is a useful addition. While she makes good points about needing more egalitarianism in sex between men and women (and yes, I fear I'm hopelessly heterosexist in my writing on sex), she also wants to emphasize sex as more than just the wham-bam endpoint fixation.

In the course of my 3 week sexuality institute, I pointed out that we weren't talking much about desire. I do think this is an aspect of sexuality that gets muddled, because it's awfully hard to theorize and even articulate "desire" as a concept. Usually sexuality refers to some kind of category or expression of sexual behavior, rather than conveying how desire may be something uncategorizable, unhinged/unattached in a way. This is why sexual identity always baffled me -- as it seems what drives sexual behaviors is more about desires than some clear-cut attachment to physiology. It's tricky even for those who are desiring to communicate fully what they experience. But I'm really invested in phenomenological intellectual pursuits, and I think this is a great concept to develop further. Part of me thinks the most important first step is just to write about this stuff. A lot. I'm as fascinated by absences these days as presences, and, while not a perfect solution, I think trying to undo the problem of absence, by calling repeated attention to it is a useful start.

This is What I Accomplished

The last two days, officially the beginning of the two weeks of SHIT TO DO, have not been terribly productive. Last week was the week of MAKE A LIST, which, yes, this is very sad to report, took an entire week to do. Even with capital letters and self-flagellation. I got distracted, what can I say? The ambition of starting a "phase" of the work sometimes can distract me for multiple days, as I contemplate the anticipation of the potential of starting the planning for the thing. Dear lord.

Yesterday was a major wash due to health issues that continue to plague me and lead to napping with a surrogate cat for whom I have been caring the last couple of days. He also napped, so I didn't feel so guilty. Today, it took most of the day to wade through a 9 or 10 page article. In my defense, because I had already anticipated the need for one, even before I began, the article was somewhat irritating and incoherent. Not as bad as the bitched about article a few posts ago, but still kinda sorta bad. I realized, in revisiting that incoherent monstrosity, that the authors are not native English speakers. Thereby making me evil and thoughtless. But I'm not sure I'm persuaded that English language journals should not be required to meet standards of coherency. Those natural science journals get away with murder. I get chastised by the English majors in my life about things like over-blown metaphors, and the scientists get off scot-free.

In keeping with ways by which I can not accomplish things, I have decided to take a much needed vacation at the end of the month. Prepare yourselves, as I will not be blogging about extra-marital affairs, STIs, scientific journals, or any of such things. There will be no internet action for me, and I can't wait.

It does seem odd, and here I break the 5thD wall (what the hell is the wall called on the internet, anyway -- or rather, I should ask, is there any wall at all? Doesn't the over-sharing nature of the medium suggest that there are no walls and wouldn't we all be better off if there were more walls, or at least fences?), that I have decided to vacation when clearly I have stated mere paragraphs ago that I have done nothing of late. But, the beauty of the grad student lifestyle is that one must think about the doing nothing a lot. And that is exhausting itself.

Quantifying "Slut"

Wow...so no sooner have I mentioned Carla Bruni, it turns out that her exact number of sex partners is being discussed by the UK Daily Mail (actually, in "Femail," which is tinged with lavender headers -- making me feel a bit queasy). In this article, Ironside, the author, argues that Bruni's 15 lovers prior to her current husband is just about right (though perhaps a "touch on the high side") -- given that Bruni is 40. I found this discussion so appalling. Ironside dares to suggest that "more than 15" and you've "demean[ed]" sex, which is no longer "special". Apparently, also, male partners will start to distrust your male friends, wondering if you've slept with all of them. Clearly, once you've crossed the line into the >15 sex partners, you're morally suspect. What man would trust a woman who's been with so many men? My favorite question, however, is Ironside's baffled, "But what would be the point of Carla - or anyone else - accumulating more lovers?" As though having sex with more than 15 men is simply gluttony. How many varieties can one person need?! [That was sarcasm...]

Rachel Kramer Bussel, who is known in the sex blogger world and sex writing world, attempts a rebuttal on Alternet. Rightly, Bussel debunks Ironside's argument that the number of sex partners has to do with one's "quest for experience" or that the number has to do with your own happiness.

I realize I'm seeming awfully prurient lately, but I think writing about sex is important. My work depends quite a lot on cultural ideas about sex and public understanding of medical and scientific phenomena about...sex. And I just can't believe that it's acceptable fodder to discuss how many sex partners a president's wife has had. Or rather, not that it's unacceptable, just totally irrelevant. Similarly, I'm not sure why people feel they need to know how many sex partners their current partner has had before them. Knowing about STIs, health concerns, concurrent sex partners, these are good things to talk about. The exact number (if known) seems to add nothing to one's sexual relationship. Unless you're into that...

Idiot Scientific Writing

Please to explain what: "The same genes were able to immortalized human anogenital epithelial cells (but also other cell types) upon transfection and to malignantly transform rodent cells" means?! Is "to immortalized" even grammatically possible? Ok, maybe it's a typo but it's a very perplexing typo. And even if we remove the "d" at the end of "immortalize," are we any closer to having a coherent sentence? Who are these cracked out researchers who do not use basic English?

I am in a "boring" phase of research (self-imposed), in which I commit to the archives a bit more. I am a skimmer when things are of moderate interest to me. I have resisted reading all the scientific articles that I've assiduously collected because it can be very dull. And also bloody incomprehensible. Please do write in to help me understand the above sentence. I am really really baffled.

Internets makes all things possible

I just read about this site, InSpot, to anonymously notify your sex partners of your STDs (or as I prefer, sexually transmitted infections, STIs). Baltimore has not yet made the list, though many of us who have done research there know it ought to get its own hook-up. I'm a bit ambivalent about the anonymous sending of this info -- it seems like if you're sleeping with someone (or have been), you ought to be able to tell them this. Of course, if you're no longer sleeping with them and would prefer not to speak to them, this could be quite useful. Or vaguely passive-aggressive, depending on your interpretation.

Anyway, this concludes my friendly health advisory for the day. Go forth and avoid those STIs (though really, to tell or not to tell when it comes to HPV is another story altogether). We'll discuss HPV, wtf, at some other time.