Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T10:13:06.404Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter Five - Thick Descriptions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2024

Sidra Lawrence
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University, Ohio
Michelle Kisliuk
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Get access

Summary

This essay contains descriptions of sexual harassment and references sexual assault.

Shortly before 2 a.m., I reach my limit, overcome by one, or two, or fifty touches too many. My awareness resets at every squeeze of my thigh, every touch on my shoulder that becomes a caress in its slow, silent recession of skin from skin, dropping downward to light upon my back, my hip before pulling away in a brief respite. Begin again. The tacit timer clicks along, my body tensing as I wait for him to wrench it back to zero; still, I startle at the pressure of his hand reattached. I’m alert to where he is at every moment, to people's eyes on us, to the way he claims and directs my body, pulling me here and there until we move like conjoined twins connected not just at the hand but at the shoulder, arm, and hip; linked—no matter how many times I make myself small and pull away.

Ethnography is haunted by stories left untold. Lines of prose thicken into images of life, of being there, of presence narrated into truth only through absences and unspoken moments. Experience splinters in the writing, where thickness redacts as much as it reveals. I am pulled to invert this thickness, to throw the unseen into relief. To read the gaps, to recognize the fictions; to hear what's not said, what can't be named. To imagine what becomes of scholarship—to the publishable account—when description reveals what it is meant to conceal. To speak that which in turn becomes unsayable.

He had picked me up nearly twelve hours earlier. Emerging from the hotel, I glanced right and left, my eyes initially passing over the parked across the way, expecting a silhouette, realizing his was the lone car on this sandy expanse passing as a road, drifting toward him. A man sitting outside the neighboring restaurant took my hesitation as an opening, hurling greetings that intruded on the midday quiet; I paused in the abandoned road, torn between a spectacle of rudeness for the interlocutor ahead and my resistance to the stranger behind. In those seconds of indecision, he looked past me to the car. Oh, you’re with a man—he said, returning to his careless squat in the shade of a striped awning.

Type
Chapter
Information
Intimate Entanglements in the Ethnography of Performance
Race, Gender, Vulnerability
, pp. 107 - 113
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×