Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T17:55:17.808Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Unwilling Participant Observation among Russian Siloviki and the Good-Enough Field Researcher

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2009

Janet Elise Johnson
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College, City University of New York

Extract

In 1999, on a trip to Russia to study gender violence, I was sitting in on a special training at a Moscow police academy. In between jokes about the impossibility of prostitutes getting raped, the cops-in-training could not stop focusing on me, the one American and one of three women in a rowdy room. For example, one man loudly asked me whether all Americans had cars and followed up with a comment that, of course we did, because this is where “you” (meaning me) would have sex. The training on rape and sexual harassment that I had come to observe had come to a halt because the new police were so intent on making sexual jokes. These comments felt even more threatening than they might otherwise because, a few days before, I had been picked up by the Russian police, shoved into a police car with several drunken officers, and driven around Moscow until I offered a bribe.

Type
Symposium
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 2009

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.)

References

James, Susan. 1992. “The Good-enough Citizen: Citizenship and Independence.” In Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity, ed. Bock, Gisela and James, Susan. New York: Routledge, 4865.Google Scholar
Johnson, Janet Elise. 2009. Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar