For those who don’t know, I have decided to change my dissertation research project from Japanese gay men in Tokyo and their experience of electronic and physical spaces to Mexican-American women in the U.S. and their performance/experience of family on Facebook. Yes, it’s a big change.
The main reason I changed was a desire to be able to participate in the dialogue about social media in the United States. This work also opens up projects that wouldn’t necessarily have been possible before, such as sharing photos and video of my research participants. Moreover it opens up the possibility of doing tech related service projects that run parallel to my work.
All along, though, I was experiencing anxiety about my project. Gay men in Japan are very private, and I worried about the ethics of shining light onto their hidden world. I also experienced a lot of resistance and hesitation from men I interacted with about participating in my research. In addition, I didn’t feel like I would ever reach the level of language ability that I would like to have for the kind of research I would like to do, such as having an intimate, if not embodied, knowledge of pop culture in the country where I am doing research.
One of the main reasons I experienced anxiety, though, had to do with my own sexuality. I had already been identifying as “mostly straight” for the past few years, but this became pronounced in the field. What I mean is that in this context I discovered just how terribly straight I am after all. I do think it’s possible to do research on Japanese gay men in Tokyo without being open to having sex, but I think it creates certain difficulties that cannot be ignored, especially when it comes to establishing relationships. Relatedly, I felt self-conscious about the fact that when I spent time in gay bars and struck up conversations with men, I was primarily interested in establishing a platonic friendship, while they were typically interested in a sexual and/or romantic relationship, which made me feel as if I was wasting and/or abusing their time.
So, that’s that. I’ve talked to my committee and my department, and they understand and are supportive. It was a tough decision after spending so many years on this project. As an indicator of how much it meant to me, after I dropped my Japanese class because I would no longer be needing it, I came home and bawled because of how much of a break this was with the community I had been becoming part of and the self that I had been creating.
It will be tough, though not as tough as my research in Japan, and for that, among other things, such as learning Spanish, I am terribly excited. My encounter with Latino anthropologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign made me aware of work I’d embarrassingly been unaware of before, and made me feel guilty after a while for not doing work on Latinos, so that is one other aspect of this new path.
