Abstract :
As a white, working middle-class adult queer from the Southwest USA, my
subjective relation to the Mexican (im)migrant, poor, working, straight adolescent
boys in California participating in my study was tentative, politicized,
controversial, and surveilled from both social and individual lenses. Our
relationships were also mutually caring, loving, supportive, stimulating, and
challenging. Our ethnographic encounters carried with them some long-standing
and dynamic social narratives that surround relations between and across groups
of relative privilege and oppression. These narratives produced ‘ethically
important moments’ wherein I confronted microethics of research practices that
remained largely under-theorized and misunderstood in methodological literature.
By critically examining my reflexive processes and practices within one of these
moments, insights into the workings of social narratives about race, class, and
sexuality are revealed that can potentially assist future researchers as they confront
the politics and microethics of working within and across the intersectionalities of
oppression and marginalization.
