Pregnant Embodiment and Field Research

Abstract

Feminist scholars have long argued for embodied reflexivity that involves accounting for how embodiment shapes qualitative field research as an intersubjective process. This chapter draws on ethnographic research with sixty-four low-income men of color who participated in a US government-funded fatherhood program conducted when the author was visibly pregnant with her first child. It analyzes pregnant embodiment as a strategy for facilitating rapport and credibility with socially dissimilar respondents and contributes to an epistemology of embodiment that attends to how researchers’ bodily states and experiences are sources of both data and analysis in field research. It concludes with insights generated from the project about how attention to embodiment is a valuable and illuminating reflexive space from which to better understand and empathize with respondents.