Imagining the Field: Learning from the Absence of the Queer Mothering Subject

Abstract (English)

From writing speculatively (Garcia, 2010) to taking the reader on a “sensory-immersive” journey (Denyer Willis, 2022), anthropologists have experimented with the aesthetics and possibilities of ethnographic writing to gesture towards the unknowable, the ephemeral, and the incomplete. In doing so, these texts have tested the boundaries between ethnography and fiction – galvanising the powers of the imagination (Narayan, 1999). While an inquiry about fiction, as a practice, in ethnographic writing is worthwhile, this paper ruminates on the part of the research process that precedes ethnographic fieldwork – the process of imagining and establishing an ethnographic field site. It argues that this process entails a particular kind of imaginative labor, which further complicates the binary between “reality” (what happens in the field) and “fiction” (how we write about it).

Based on a “failed” attempt to conceptualise and establish a field site to pose questions about queer mothering in England, it foregrounds “the field site” as a fictional space. In taking absences (of queer women-as-parents) and refusals (by organisations for queer mothers) as a starting point for doing ethnographic fieldwork, this paper thinks with fiction (the un-imaginable and the not-yet) to do anthropology otherwise. It makes a case for being re-oriented when fictional field sites evaporate (or never existed in the first place) and shares a tale of where the unknowable led before fieldwork even began. It contends that thinking with fiction to re-imagine what constitutes “the field” has the potential to become a decolonial praxis – making space for the ethnographer-to-be to take absences and refusals seriously (Liboiron, 2021) that give way to alternative lines of inquiry.