Il genere sul campo: alcune riflessioni metodologiche

The Phenomenology says that every knowledge is a perspective knowledge, because every knowledge is situated in a time and in a space. The human s embodiment discloses a perspective overview on the world. The paper claims the aim to analyze how the sexual and gender dimensions, which are incarnated in a determinate body, are present in the qualitative research, specifically into the ethnographic observation. First for all, we hypothesize that the gender is a border for the access into a field and not in other, so to be man or woman is not neutral for the knowledge of a specific social context. Moreover, the performative dimension of the gender, which shows the norms that pre-exist and that conduct the role s interaction (i.e. the role s gendered content and the role s gendered language) is another tie in the participant observation. The awareness that all the knowledge is gendered, requires to the fieldworker to play a double competence (ability). The researcher must use the self reflexivity to point out his gender identity and his background on this theme: he must point out his background frame relatively to the gender, his gender behaviour s expectations in the interaction, and his correlated opinions. The researcher, moreover, must know that exist a cultural mainstream about the gender, but that the concrete gender playing is based on the interaction in a concrete frame. So, we have a lot of concrete ways in which the gender is embodied. The researcher on the field, so, must enter in a knowledge s circulation in which must point attention to: the epistemic interdependence, i.e. the knowledge borns in the symbolic interaction between the researcher and the subject; the gendered nature of the communicative interaction between the researcher and the subject; the negotiable nature of the concrete managing of the gendered role in the interaction.