LA RESISTENICA OCULTA

One: An issue I’ve already touched on relates to the status of the interview as a window onto “reality”, a form of naturalistic fourth wall. The issue is not the

interviewees’ honesty or intergrity, or even of the reliability of memory per se. It’s simply a matter of speech as a problematic and unlike[ly] signifier of experience. Hunt & Davies (Hunt & Davies, 1991) reported on this after asking interviewees the following question:

Suppose someone asked you ‘How many sexual partners have you had this month?’, what must have happened sexually for someone to ‘count’ as your sexual partner? (Hunt & Davies, 1991: 46)

Many of the interviewees expressed surprise that the question needed to be asked at all, yet the range and variety of responses was comically vast (“Must go to the cinema”, for example) effectively rendering the term “sexual partner” almost unusable in research without high levels of further investigation. Likewise, in

Enacting Sexual Contexts, McInnes et al. distinguished between what they call “the material” (“what the interviewees did and saw”) and “the discursive” (“the set of values and meanings which these men attach to their experiences”) as if the former were somehow unproblematically known via speech, even though the fallacy of assuming so is evident in the following slippage noted elsewhere in their report:

Some of the men didn’t recognise some substances as drugs until prompted in the interview. Amyl nitrate, marijuana, and especially alcohol were all ‘remembered’ by

interviewees when asked about them specifically, but not mentioned when they were asked generically about drug use. (McInnes et al., 2001: 16)

Instead of regarding the interview as a window onto reality, I begin to wonder about its status as a reality in itself, what Denzin, in an important discussion of the interview as performance, has called “a perfectly miniature and coherent world in its own right” (Denzin, 2001: 25).

Two: The Sydney research shifts attention from the scene of the sauna to the scene of its representation. In this way, the sauna is no longer analysed as if it were an object. The interview, however, is; or so it seems. What actually happens is that the interview is staged, performed, and then the transcript is later analysed, the situation of such analysis, the place from which it is done, not being

disclosed. The work that counts, in a sense, is not being done in the interview itself, which becomes just a stage the research is going through, albeit a necessary and important one. This procedure diminishes the status of the interviewee’s experience and knowledge; it becomes undynamic, no longer processual or in formation, no longer interrogative or critical, no longer live. It is the researcher who “professionally” takes on this role, anatomising the

interviewee’s words like so much dead meat. I begin to wonder if this ancient and predominant convention can be shifted, if the work of analysis can be undertaken within the interview itself, with the active participation of the interviewee.

Three: I question the relative invisibility of the researcher in relation to the figures researched. Dowsett repeatedly brings himself into focus in Practising Desire to a degree unmatched in the other Sydney-based studies, but the interview, even by him, is not represented ultimately as an occasion that’s shared, as an event profoundly organised in relation to a mutual co-presence. The interviewer- researcher’s position is understood as given, as relatively inert or neutral, as if in the scene of the interview, the interviewer were sitting in the wings or in a

position in which he could be overlooked; beside the reader, say. A consequence is that in all this research the interviewee is constructed as the “other”, as the research subject who effectively performs as research object. How can this be critically addressed?

Four: The interview transcripts in all these reports are rendered as literary speech with Enacting Sexual Contexts alone allowing “em”, the sole phatic

representation. In producing legibility, the origin of the transcribed interview as

performance is erased. How to resist this dominant convention?

Five: In the studies focussing on sex-on-premises venues, the interviewer

interviews the interviewee across a professional abyss: that of HIV/AIDS and the need to contain the epidemic’s spread. This is not to state that the interviewees do not share the interviewer’s epidemiological concerns, but it is to state that the interest and investment in sex-on-premises venues in general, and in saunas in particular, profoundly differs depending on whether the figure in question is the interviewer or interviewee. All research interviews in the projects to which I’ve alluded were effectively constructed as encounters between health researchers, on the one hand, and sex-on-premises venues clientele on the other as if these two categories were mutually exclusive, and as if such an encounter were uniquely proper for research. I begin to wonder about the possibilities of an interview unfolding on, indeed, producing, common ground.

Six: I wonder about power and narrative. McInnes & Bollen (2000) identified a series of five generic applications to practice or “moments” from which venue “trajectories” seemed to be inevitably composed: (1) “orientation”, which oddly includes both arrival and departure; (2) “attending the self”, effectively things done alone; (3) “doing the circuit-checking out-cruising”, similar to (2) but with a widening of scope; (4) “contact-negotiating-time together”; and (5) “doing sex” (McInnes & Bollen, 2000: 30-31). Even though they stated that such moments “do have a loose sequential relation to each other”, but that trajectories “more often” accommodate “repetitions, jumps, skips, aborts, returns and restarts”, McInnes & Bollen nevertheless sequenced their five generic “moments” according to the consecutive numerical sequence outlined above. The model trajectory becomes, in this way, the path from which interviewees digress. It stands effectively as a

structural narrative norm. Further, there’s little difference between this schema— for the “trajectories” have no other ontological status within the research than as the narratives in which they are described—and that of commercial US gay video porn or, indeed, that of Martin Hoffman’s exemplary bathhouse narrative— ”Jack’s” typical “Friday night out with the boys” [as his wife understands it]—of thirty years before (Hoffman, 1968: 48-52). I am particularly struck by the tell-tale elision of departure narratives in McInnes & Bollen’s schema, which effectively disappear like the post-ejaculation image in gay video porn’s closing fade-to- black. One Sydney-based researcher, Michael Hurley, has produced a non-linear narrative, “Wet spot” (Hurley, 2000), that effectively deconstructs the

predominant narrative schema in interesting ways. I, too, wonder if the

representation of sauna experience needs to be organised in relation to classic linear narrative form.