>So if I want to interview disabled people and I put myself in a
>wheelchair and make up some bogus story about how I became disabled so
>others with disabilities would open up to me this is cool in everyones
>opinion, right? Assuming I am writing a book about how unfair society is
>to the disabled, the nature of the obstacles the disabled face and
>finish with comments about how inadequate our disability legislation is
>and how much I've learned about the true nature of disabilities of course.
>If it's not cool then someone please tell my how this is different than
>what EB did. If it is cool does it matter that it probably won't be
>looked upon kindly by those who actually have disabilities?
I don't have a problem with what E did, which isn't, in fact, what you describe above. She only interviews people and asks how they feel after they know who she is. As for your example, under the rubric of investigating the social construction of reality (berger and luckmann) people have done the above. invariably, in almost any one of these i've read, the person wrestles with the issues of speaking for, etc. etc. i'm pretty sure academics don't bother with the scenario above because literature on this topic is not lacking. there are plenty of books about what it's like to be disabled. what they might do, however, is write about what i mentioned: not what it's like to have to figure out how to get somewhere without wheelchair accessible walks, elevators, busses, etc. but what it's like to be perceived as disabled, if only for awhile. The argument is that social structure is so powerful, manifesting itself in repeated, subtle ways every minute of the day, that, while you don't know what it's like to be bound to a wheel chair or blind or deaf, you get a good sense of how quickly your whole life as an able-bodied person can melt away in the face of the huge influence exerted on you in the way people treat you.
People who write disserations have done variations on this since dogs ruled the earth but, again, they do it the way Ehrenreich did it/ Robin Leidner is an example: she becomes a MacDonald's worker; she trains as an outside sales rep. A friend went into a religious community, like an anthropologist, to study a particular aspect of a theory prominent in soc of religion; Another friend substitute taught to get an angle on the life of her study of proms, never telling students what she was doing; still another famous study is, IIRC, "JOcks and Burnouts" a sociologist goes undercover as a teenager at a school. Others are substitute teachers studying teachers, never telling the others.
Again, E doesn't really interview people. She's not there to investigate their lives. She's there to find out if if _she_ can survive on low wages -- not how they do. and she does so to counter those who believe it's quite possible and can even lead to wonderous things: like maybe a mansion in yer future if'n ya work hard.
So, she reports how _she_ feels. You can check my work of course, but IIRC she only interviews her co-workers or asks them how they feel after they are aware who she is. Otherwise, she only reports what people say because they say it without her prompting them. Which means most of the book is about how she responds to her situation, how she thinks and rationalizes, how she responds to long shifts or working two jobs. And from there, she speculates as to why people may do what they do. That's it. Many of the folks there don't volunteer much on their own, in terms of how they feel about their jobs or other issues, because that's not what interests them. Rather, she learns about their living circumstances or shopping habits or what they do on days off because they mention it while working. (The only guy who appears to tell her much about himself was, well it was two, one guy who seems to be angling for a date and so tells her about his past as a student at coronary (culinary) school and the e. European guy she's helping learn English who shares that he lives something like 8 to an apartment, hotbunking, to get by.
The other person she interviews is a colleague's relative who happens to have packed her bags and two kids and taken off for parts unknown. And she does this because a lot of folks point out to her that most folks don't arrive in a new city looking for work as she did: they have support networks and know things about places to live (or not live). So, she's curious about this woman (see below).
But back to faking it: someone wrote an utterly fascinating ethnography of homelessness simply by dressing up and behaving as if they were. What they were writing about was how your whole sense of self changes based on how people treat you. Ehrenreich started out simply to discover how she could get by on low wages -- if she could get by. That was all. What she ended up writing about was how *she* responded to her circumstances and, thus, she wrote an ethnography about how the work made her feel, making no claims to representativeness since, she argues, people in this strata are all so different, do such different jobs, have such different stories, that it would be impossible for her to make any more generalizable claims in terms of a sociology of feeling.
The passage about the woman who went to a new city on her own:
A New York friend, a young African American feminist, had urged me to look up her aunt in Minneapolis, and I have a reason beyond sociability for doing so: I have been worrying that the scenario I have created for myself, both here and in Maine, is totally artificia l. Who, in real life, plops herself down in a totally strange environment-without housing, family connections, or job-and attempts to become a viable resident? Well, it turns out that my friend's aunt did exactly that in the early nineties: got on a Greyho und bus in New York, with two children in tow, disembarking in the utterly strange state of Florida. This is a story I have to hear, so I call and get a wary invitation, to come on over this afternoon.
...
When, after two hours, I get up to go, Caroline asks if I'm a vegetarian. I apologize for not being one, and she rushes into the kitchen, coming back with a family-sized container of her homemade chicken stew, which I accept with heartfelt gratitude: dinner. We hug. She walks me to my car and we hug again. So I have a friend now in Minneapolis, and the odd thing is that she is the original-the woman who uprooted herself and came out somehow on her feet and who did all this in real fife and with children-while I am the imitation, the pallid, child-free pretender.
and, I'm sorry, but if I felt as you do about lying, then I'd say that Studs Terkel lies just as much. If you have such a purist notion, that's precisely what your view forces you to admit if you've had the experience of interviewing people about important social issues of which you have an opinion. You can't tell them what you really think about their opinions, fo rexample. Do you know how much your face hurts when your done? It hurts because of the hours of having to suppress what you really think, what you really want to say, etc. I don't think like you, though, and I hardly think it's shameful. As someone pointed out about Terkel's autobio, you never learn about Terkel because he's too busy telling you about everyone else. That's what he does. Ehrenreich doesn't presume to do this and, instead, tells you about _her_ experiences as a pretender -- and she calls herself that several times.
> > as for the rest, i read her very differently than you -- which happens. i
> > saw her wrestle with the morality of what she was doing, often beating
> > herself up (i thought needlessly) for not really being poor.
> >
>
>It isn't that I didn't see all these things, I did. If I only saw
>negatives I would not be ambivalent about her.
>
>
> > cards on the table: i have nothing but contempt for people who think that
> > having been poor (or whatever) gives them some sort of identity license
> for
> > being outraged when someone else dares speak to "their", viewed as some
> > sort of impostor or some shit. i understand the impulse, but i rilly rilly
> > RILLy don't think that playing "I'm more authentic than you" gets us
> > anywhere. it's, as Doug might put it, regressive and "deeply silly"
> because
> > it makes a fetish out of pain and plays right into the victimization
> > narratives so loved by the identity politics movement in its worst forms.
> > here i'm taking my cue from Wendy Brown's work on "wounded identities" --
> > so getting the bright idea that i'm opposed to id politics wouldn't be
> > especially bright.
> >
> > so basically, were i ehrenreich in the face of these accusations, I'd just
> > say, "Yeah. Isn't it nice." (maybe that's a longer way of saying,
> > "whatever"? heh.)
> >
>
>I'm not claiming any of the above and I haven't said I understand people
>who feel this way. I agree with you but that makes me no more
>comfortable about her dishonesty.
>
>John Thornton
>
>
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