Throughout more than 6 years, I performed an ethnography about heterosexual and homosexual serodiscordant experiences (couples where one member lives with and the other does not) in Mexico City. A crucial element for my research was related to the suitable methodological strategies to obtain the testimonies of people affected by both HIV/AIDS and serodiscordancy. Since HIV/AIDS has been highly linked to stigma and discrimination, several NGO´s and people in serodiscordant couples questioned my personal reason to research their lives. They also demanded me clear statements about my implications to HIV/AIDS. They wanted to know what political and social commitments I had with these topics. This represented a very relevant methodological interruption in my fieldwork and research practices that obliged me to reflexively analyze how my approach methodological strategies were, as well as an important self-confrontation about the place my informants take in my research. To solve this huge dilemma, I attended Clínica Condesa, a renowned HIV/AIDS attention Clinique in Mexico City with a new methodological strategy that took into account feminist epistemological frameworks, trough situated knowledge (in the way Donna Haraway proposed in 1995) to co-produce the ethnographic knowledge with my interlocutors. This feminist epistemological approach let me re-position myself in the fieldwork as another subject that has been shaped as a sexual risk subject for my homoerotic experiences. Re-direct my research from this point of view contributed to work in a feminist performative ethnography that took as starting point the affective encounters with more people to build my research and to re-construct, in a collective way, the testimonies of HIV and serodiscordant experiences in Mexico City.
César Torres Cruz, "Introduction", contributed by César Torres Cruz , STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 31 July 2019, accessed 25 August 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/introduction-1
Critical Commentary
PENDING