Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of ... - Yuuyami.com

in ethnographic narrative, which has been undergoing a trend toward a more
self-reflexive stance. Naturally, our notions of key concepts towards which we
gear a socio-cultural analysis must not only inform methodology and research,
but will ultimately impact on the process of writing itself. We can then discern
two trends of writing, formal versus self-reflexive, which ironically bring us
back again to an academic debate of “objective” versus “subjective,” which
places both terms on opposite ends of a scale that reaches from “good” to
“bad.”
Though it was tempting at the onset of my formalized research to
establish an “objective” line, through which I would gather material entirely
unconnected to my own identity as a fan, and which could possibly have
allowed me to take the 1 st person singular out of my writing, I soon realized
that “objective” as that approach may have been, it would have been a equally
flawed as it would have forced me to deny a large amount of data either
directly or indirectly connected to myself. Based on this realization, my text
aims to neither establish itself as neither “objective” nor “subjective,” but
rather orients itself towards complexity. Drawing on the self-reflexive
narratives with emphases on personal testimony and personal experience
particularly advanced by feminist Anthropology, and specifically influenced
by the manifestation of these narratives in Women Writing Culture (Behar &
Gordon, 1995), I firmly believe that it in order to write a complex
ethnography, in this case at least, it is necessary to include myself as both, the
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