Research methods
While sitting down to have our first interview, Leko had asked what I had been up to with regard to research. “I have been observing,” I said. She responded to this absurdity, giddy and loud: “What is observing!? Observing is just having fun, looking at people, and making conversation!” While there was more to it, Leko was right. Participant observation formed the most significant part of my research methodology, and it consisted of taking part in NGO-sponsored and related meetings, workshops, rallies, and other activities; attending performances, church services, and get-togethers like birthdays, braais (barbecues), picnics, and parties; and engaging in other everyday interactions, just as it consisted of watching, listening to, and pondering Leko’s commentary on the foolishness of participant observation. Participant observation became an important way to mediate the sensitivity of my research, and allowed me to negotiate discretion and layers of anonymity in different settings.
In addition, I conducted archival research at GALA,29 and held interviews with NGO directors, academics, NGO staff, and affiliated LGBT1 activists, and with female izangoma who engaged in same-sex relationships. 1 also conducted interviews on personal sexual subjectivities and perspectives on same-sex visibility and representations, and in-depth biographical interviews with Black lesbian and bisexual women from K.ZN townships. 1 selected participants, seeking diverse personal narratives from women who varied in age and in the ways they viewed their own sexualities. Throughout this text, interview and other direct quotes are cited in notes with locations and dates.
The unstructured biographical interviews 1 conducted, and the semistructured interviews that focused on the life stories and sexual subjectivities of five participants in particular (Leko, Thandazo, Fikile, Ayanda, and Thembeka), are treated as key stories. As personal narratives, these key stories illustrate the influence of culturally specific storylines on how people talk about their lives in different historical and geographical contexts (Maynes et al. 2012: 75). As theorists, research participants crafted their own stories as histories of moments in time and space.30 This extended to other interviews and interviewees 1 worked with, and to the participant observation that formed the crux of my methodology.
In Pietermaritzburg, an organization that provided workshops, training programs, HIV testing, and counselling served as a necessary gatekeeper that was invaluable to my research. When 1 arrived back in the city in February of 2015, I had arranged to meet with the organization’s staff. 1 ended up volunteering there for over six months, and again when 1 returned for a little under two months in 2016; and during that time we negotiated my role at the office and my ethical obligations to the organization, staff, and beneficiaries. 1 chose to use the pseudonym Spectrum LGBT1 Forum (SF) because of concerns around the anonymity of research participants.31 At SF, I was able to be present in the office to observe program work in exchange for my assistance as a volunteer. 1 attended, observed, and participated in workshops on sexual health and reproductive rights, sexuality and gender identity, religion and sexuality, and other topics. 1 also had access to SF’s informal archive of newspaper articles, magazines, films, and in-house and outside publications. The program manager at the time allowed me to approach and interview SF service beneficiaries, affiliates, and staff with their consent. As 1 became more integrated into life at the organization, people became more comfortable with me, and with my research. This was helped by my willingness to do administrative and other work, and my positionality as a lesbian inclined toward transnational queer activism in an LGBTI organization setting.
The excerpts of daily life I captured through participant observation in and beyond proximity to SF are threads that tie other moments and themes together. Participant observation as a core method entailed transforming interactions into objects of analysis through my reflexive writing in the field. This involved finding a balance between questioning and not asking questions; observing interactions, settings, spaces, and non-verbal practices of the body and body language; and using the senses. The presence of my recorder, and even note-taking, was sometimes an awkward imposition, and thus recorded interviewing had to be minimized and 1 had to approach interactions with flexibility. Applying such flexibility, 1 attempted to retain language use, distinguishing between local terms and observer terms, and maintain a verbatim record wherever possible.
1 had conversations with strangers, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues that shaped my understanding of key questions. This also provided insight into the local, historical, and racialized geopolitical context of Pietermaritzburg in particular. Everyday observations and interactions also revealed much about contexts saturated in gender, or what might be better described as a dialogical difference which presents as gender. Focusing on these two framings throughout my immersion in moments of everyday life became an important aspect of observing ordinary interactions that were of use to my analysis. As I will continue to discuss and interrogate, female same-sexualities are both problematically understudied and studied problematically. This book is not immune from the problems of the latter by attempting to remedy the former. Problems with inscribing gender, and particularly sex, to individuals speak to the limits of language and the concepts such fraught terms represent, but also to the potential and possibility of continuous engagement with those contestations.
At SF workshops, 1 was observing community interventions, each falling under a different SF program. Those I attended mostly came under two of them, one focused on anti-discrimination and the other on sexual health, both funded primarily by a national health organization. Several of the workshops 1 observed were on ‘gender and sexuality,’ in and around Eden-dale and Imbali. For the purpose of protecting anonymity, 1 describe some workshop settings but avoid naming more specific locations such as township neighborhoods. Workshops were conducted in a mix of mostly isiZulu and some English. Due to my limited grasp of isiZulu, my primary focus was gauging how core topics were understood, elaborated on, and curated by workshop participants; and also contextualizing and following discussions of the questions that they raised, which were recorded on flip charts in English, mainly for the benefit of funders and other stakeholders.
The words this book pays close attention to are likewise both English and isiZulu, examined here as they were iterated by interlocutors and became recurring concepts and signs in the research 1 conducted. While 1 do not feel that interviewing interlocutors in English obstructed the research, I recognize that performing the vast majority of research tasks in English narrowed the scope of this work, and 1 do not seek to disguise or underestimate the limitations of it. 1 recognize for example that there are differences between the snapshot of time and space this book captures, filtered by my own interpretation as an ethnographer, and the comprehensive record another body of work spanning decades could result in. 1 am not of the belief that those limitations and differences remove isiZulu words present in interlocutors’ narratives from the purview of ethnographic speculation.
My attempts to learn and speak isiZulu were appreciated by interlocutors and led to productive discussions, where we used and theorized on words and phrases used to directly and indirectly refer to issues of sex, gender, sexuality, identity, and embodiment. Doing participant observation in mixed-language settings allowed for an acute attention to sounds, and to emphases, inflections, and volume, along with visceral reactions to them, in the form of interjections, winces, and gestures. Through my particular and bounded interpretation, I am thus not attempting to present a comprehensive oral history or a detailed record of specific words themselves, whether English or isiZulu. but to discuss the ways they can sound when they are said, the way silence sounds when they are not said, and, above all else, how interlocutors used them to craft theory through story.
