Fear in the Festival Field: Threat, Apprehension and Apathy
University of Kentucky (US)
<http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.11>
I BEG YOUR PARDON?!
After more than fifteen hours of driving and the associated strains that attend new field sites, I wanted to give the group of neighboring campers the benefit of the doubt—even after calling them out on their ear-splitting racist banter. They couldn’t have actually said that. After all, I was alone and in an unfamiliar place; no less, this band-of-brothers was quickly draining any physical or emotional capacity to ignore their grotesque impersonations of racial stereotypes. I was no stranger to the jam band/EDM events that I had spent the several years prior enjoying as a fan and was used to the customary off-color shenanigans of festival participants. Yet, it was different now. I was now approaching them as researcher who desperately needed “rapport” to elicit the honest and insightful conversations that would substantiate and validate my project.
The emergent spokesman of the offending group repeated it again, slowly and fueled by the icy support of his brethren. “If we see you again, we will rape you”.
It felt as if the entire universe had been sucked through a pinpoint to the right of my heart. Turning away, I heard the quiet murmurs of the group rising to a buzzing roar as I disassembled the tent that I had spent too long assembling a few hours before. I could still hear them through the glass windows of my locked car as I tried to sleep, knowing that I’d need to be in tip-top shape for tomorrow’s rounds of dissertation interviewing at this large EDM festival located in the Midwestern United States.
Still now, several years later, I wonder if they watched me sleep.
***
Women experience marginalization in all scenes; EDMC is no exception. Women’s experiences are infrequently represented in dominant EDMC narratives and positions of power within the subcultural scene (Farrugia 2009; Olszanowski 2012). As I navigated my dissertation fieldwork exploring identity, belonging, and the impacts of EDMC’s mainstreaming, I began to notice the many ways that women who participate in EDMC are marginalized, even as researchers. For some researchers, ethnographic fieldwork magnifies the intersecting inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability that they face outside of these settings. Researchers’ social locations may offer them enhanced access to field sites, rapport with study participants, and a sense of security within these spaces (Bhardwa 2013; Robinson 2013; Rosendahl 2013). However, researchers who are marginalized by their social positions may experience heightened interpersonal discomfort as they interact with antagonistic research participants (Perrone 2010; Bhardwa 2013) or as they negotiate their own identities and actions in response to the ever-shifting dynamics of the field (Rooke 2009; Norris 2013; Rinaldi 2013).
Some field researchers, especially if they are of marginalized genders or sexualities, experience heightened concern and fear of sexual violence, including ogling, verbal harassment and unwanted sexualized contact (Lee 1997; Coffey 2002; Bhardwa 2013). This fear is not an overly-paranoid response; women’s experiences of sexual violence in research settings, particularly within ethnographic fieldwork, are incredibly common (Green et al. 1993; Coffey 1999). Researchers’ concerns for personal safety deeply impact the nature and scope of their inquiry—the topics they study; the practices framing their data collection, the physical, financial, and emotional resources invested in the research; what biases underpin analyses; and how the findings are communicated to varying audiences (Green et al. 1993; Lee 1997; Kenyon and Hawker 1999; Sharp and Kremer 2006; Perrone 2010). In the libertine and masculinized contexts of EDMC events, patterns of sexual violence mimic larger issues of gender and sexual inequality (St John 2012). Thus, already sparse academic considerations about researcher safety must explore who is “safe” to study EDMC and what privileges underpin scholarly participation within this discipline.
***
But... Why won’t you just go over there and talk to them?
I didn’t think that the universe-containing pinpoint in my chest could get any smaller, but it did. The security guard I approached appeared to be an “adult” that could mediate this tension. Play nice, kids. Share the campground. Be kind to your neighbors. Rape threats aren’t PLUR, boys.
“It’s a festival”, the unfazed guard muttered over a chewed cigarette. “What’re you goin’ to do about it”?
This “adult”, a figure of authority in a purposefully chaotic realm, told me exactly what I had heard thousands of times before. Boys will be boys. Fests will be fests. The risks that you take by simply being here are yours and yours alone. Don’t take candy from strangers. Always watch your drink. Better yet, don’t drink at all. Don’t be a snitch. Be a big girl. Take off some clothes and let loose, you’re being a prude. For God’s sake, put on some clothes—you’re asking for trouble. Deflect, defend, diffuse your problems, always with a smile.
The guard subsequently rejected my plea to move my campsite somewhere else. “Then everyone would want to move. Sometimes, you just get [placed next to] assholes”.
I wanted to turn the stinging well behind my eyes into tears. Tears would have shown just how vulnerable and terrified I felt. Now what? I couldn’t go back to my campsite, as I didn’t want to encounter the death-drop in my neighbor’s conversation, followed by grossly sexualized slurs. I couldn’t go home—it was too far away and I was fixed to a rapidly diminishing data collection window. Should I contact the on-site police? I knew I would be immediately castigated, losing credibility with potential research participants. I wanted to call my committee members, to see what they would do—but then feared that they would see my apprenticeship as amateur. After all, the historical ritornelle of ethnographic research poses fieldwork as a scholarly “rite of passage”—particularly for graduate students (Roguski and Tauri 2013). I infrequently heard about the issues my advisors faced in their fieldwork experiences. The only thing I gleaned from those battle stories was their unanimous triumph: what problems they faced, what problems they solved—skilled and field-savvy, coolly resilient and independent. Just as an academic should be. Just as I feel as if I am, in this moment, not. If I couldn’t do this work on my own, effectively navigating the field and “wrangling” research participants, how could I be entrusted with their research legacies? If I discussed this event and its discontents, would they withdraw support of the project? Would they think I had underprepared for this inquiry, despite years of personal, non-academic participation and several pilot sites?
I shouldn’t feel this way. I had meticulously prepared a small forest’s-worth of ethics review paperwork which challenged me to consider risk and techniques for minimization of it at every turn. But as Sharp and Kremer (2006) note, many ethics review applications primarily focus on protecting research participants and the institutions that sponsor research; seldom do they address risk considerations for researchers themselves. All of the language within these review documents, all of the research trainings in which I had participated, and all of the texts I had read to prepare for the application process centralized on protecting subjects, and perpetuated a professional myth that “successful” researchers are wholly immunized from (much more, totally cognizant of) the inevitable risks a field may pose (Green et al. 1993). The message from these sources was clear: even when researchers did encounter risks, the prospect of “good data” outweighed whatever vulnerabilities they faced (Punch in Bhardwa 2012: 50).
... It’s all a part of the job.
***
Okay, Plan B. Find some allies.
As hopeful as I was about finding kindred spirits to befriend and find protection with during the event, my apprehensions couldn’t be quelled. I was a researcher, an outsider. Everything that I had taken in about ethnographic reciprocity and rapport was organized into a gross form of ethical calculus. Would this be exploitative, taking in physical and social protection from others? How would my role as a researcher impact the likelihood of finding “shelter”? Would I somehow have to compromise my demeanor or research, in an effort to secure “emergency rapport”?
Researchers are encouraged to gain rapport while being sensitive to the frequently marginalized nature of research participants. But what considerations do we as scholars give to the similarly complex identities that may endanger researchers? Our lives, including our participation within field sites, are framed by power dimensions. As researchers, it is too easy to forget that we are not wholly sheltered from these echoes.
***
Six interviews. Six interviews out of a goal of thirty.
I could not help but to feel ashamed. I had completed a mere 20% of the interviews I had planned for this field site, wanting to reduce the times that I crossed paths with my offending neighbors. Unable to make the necessary trips to retrieve and secure my recording device, I simply went without it—and went without collecting the needed interviews. I returned only to sleep, departing well after my harassers left for the night’s revelry. Their daily exit did not occur until dusk, after the collective sobriety of festival-goers had diminished—making it nearly impossible for me to comply with the ethical standards approved by my university. Although ambitious and energetic at the beginning of the project, the fear and frustration that I had initially felt within this space morphed into an apathy toward interacting with other festival-goers, undermining my data collection. There’s nothing more I can do. I’ll just work harder and longer at the next field site.
But, I didn’t. The betrayal that I had felt resonated through how I prepared and participated within subsequent field sites, in some cases risking ejection from event grounds to be able to sleep behind locked doors and to carry contraband self-defense products. I adjusted my already modest sample size to accommodate future fallouts from similar aggressions. I politely feigned camaraderie with many festival-goers I interviewed, even as they spouted a spread of “-isms” while lauding the wholesome, inclusive nature of EDMC. My silence eschewed prospective backlash, but also compromised opportunities to foster much-needed dialogue on these glaring contradictions. Momentum slowed, as it was perceivably safer to make gradual, stinted progress rather than rebrand myself as a target. Three years since, I am still coping with the reverberations of this event. What happens if I publish my work? Will someone in that group (or someone akin to their casual use of violence) read it and have direct means to contact or find me?
***
For many women in EDMC, threats and experiences of violence (particularly sexual violence) become so afflictive that it delimits the ways they participate in this scene, if not discourage their participation altogether. My own experience of harassment lends light to how researchers are not guaranteed immunity from these threats, despite public and scholarly perceptions of their objectivity and skill. Although participant safety is paramount, researcher perceptions and experiences of threat cannot be ignored—especially when study participants compromise researcher safety, as well as the projects they undertake. Although this inversion disrupts conventional power dynamics between the researcher and the researched, it also imparts widespread and long-lasting ramifications to how researchers approach the field, build rapport with study participants, collect and analyze their data and communicate their findings to wider audiences. Here, I detail some of the complex and contradictory concerns that framed my experience of this upheaval. Specific preventative prescriptions in minimizing researchers’ experience of risk may not respond to the consistently evolving nature of field sites and the phenomena that takes place within them, nor to the unique ways that researchers may experience threat (Kenyon and Hawker 1999; Roguski and Tauri 2013). Instead, I present three broad suggestions for addressing this issue:
I survived that weekend without experiencing physical harm, but the psychological echoes of this threat continue even to this day. To cope, I took to sharing my story with fellow woman-identifying festival participants. Over the span of three years and twenty festivals, scores of women disclosed their own perceptions of risk, affirming that my story was tragically common. Despite their victimization and persistent marginalization within EDMC, many women nurtured their unwavering love of festivals through community advocacy efforts, instituting programs to address the unique problems that women face in EDMC. The stories and strength of these women encouraged me to revise the focus of my dissertation. Within this new directive, I am exploring how norms of gender and sexuality within festival events contribute to widespread physical, sexual and psychological threats to women and how these impact women’s participation and identities within EDMC/jam band communities. Despite renewed gusto, growing personal networks within EDMC and jam band communities and ample experience within festival field sites, I still sleep in my car.
Kaitlyne Motl is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Kentucky. Her research explores intersectional inequalities of race, class, gender and sexuality as they manifest in hybridized jam band/EDM festival scenes. Specifically, her work focuses on women’s unique experiences of physical, social and sexual threat within “Jamtronica” festival participation. She enthusiastically welcomes contact through email: kx.motl@uky.edu.
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