Embodiment and sexuality in cross-cultural research

Abstract

In this paper, I reflect on the impact that my embodiment and the sexed subject positions that I took up at various moments in the field had on my research on cross-cultural sexual encounters between Thai men and tourist women. I explore the negotiation of sexed subjectivity and positionality and the implications that these negotiations had for research ethics in the project. The issue of research ethics is bound up in the conceptualisation of power relationships between researcher and researched. Here I argue that power is not necessarily already distributed between researcher and researched; rather, that power can shift in different context.