9. FREAKS OF NATURE:

While autoethnography can be productive, it can also make me cringe (Ellis, 2004). I feel honest when I am deeply reflexive about my own lived experience and social position as I investigate different life worlds. But I also acknowledge how truly self-involved it feels. It’s a delicate balancing act of sharing intimate details of my process and subjectivity, while also maintaining the critical sociological stance of my training. It feels risky, the potential perils of resisting the presumptive safety of an omniscient narrator. Accusations of bias abound, igniting me to swiftly assert that reflexivity is actually a way to engage with bias in an honest and open fashion. Trained in the traditions of feminist standpoint epistemologies (Smith, 1987; Harding, 1991), I maintain a stance of critical circumspection as I interrogate the dizzying flows of power between and among myself and the objects and subjects of my study. Entering the field sites of multispecies auto-ethnographic projects – urban honey beekeeping, horseshoe crab citizen science, and transgenic goat husbandry (Moore, 2022, 2017; Moore and Kosut 2013) – I have taken my whole self with me into the field: my body, my statuses and my memories. I have been variously accompanied by my partners, my children and my dog. 

My formal methodological training began as a graduate student in a programme developed by Anselm Strauss, an originator of Grounded Theory. According to Strauss, it is through one’s immersion in the data that these comparisons become the ‘stepping stones’ for formal theories of patterns of action and interaction between and among various types of data. By triangulating data sources from wide ranging data sites, analysts are able to establish various points of comparison to explore the range of dimensions of concepts. Working with analytic memos, researchers can establish interrelationships between concepts. ‘Theory evolves during actual research, and it does this through continuous interplay between analysis and data collection.’ (Strauss and Corbin, 1990: 273) 

I have used Grounded Theory in many of my research projects because it is a flexible method that can be adapted to suit the needs of the research project. The approach is not prescriptive, and researchers are encouraged to be creative in their methods. Also, Grounded Theory is particularly useful when the research aims to understand the context in which a phenomenon occurs. The method emphasises the importance of understanding the social, cultural and historical context in which data is collected. Furthermore, Grounded Theory lends itself well to creative and artistic methods because it is an inductive theory; it starts with empirical observations and then develops theories or explanations based on those observations. Inductive reasoning involves moving from specific observations to broader generalisations and theories. In grounded theory, this involves analysing data in an iterative process, searching for patterns and themes, and gradually developing categories and concepts that explain the data.

One place I can generate a lot of ideas for my grounded theory on any topic is through the work of other creative artists, particularly the authors and illustrators of children’s books. As a former child and now mom of three daughters, I have spent a lot of time reading children’s books. Whenever I am beginning a new research project, I go to the Brooklyn Public Library and take out all the children’s books available on the topic. When my daughters were younger, I enjoyed reading these books to them. I’d often ask the girls what they thought of the text or the illustrations. Part interview, part maternal nudging; for example, I’d ask them whether or not the Billy Goats Gruff were smarter than the troll and how they knew. Reading Eric Carle’s pop-up book The Honeybee and the Robber (Carle, 1994) was an opportunity to think about how honeybees have to work together to protect the hive from honey thieves. From these conversations and my own reading and re-reading of the books, I developed research questions or themes that I was interested in exploring in my ethnographic work. Seeing first-hand how the anthropomorphism in children’s books encouraged my daughters to establish empathy for non-human animals, I could see that the personification of bees, goats and horseshoe crabs (among other animals) offered humans some angle of connection. 

Being able to represent the ethnographic field can be a challenge for social scientists. The writing techniques of using metaphors, similes and imagery can generate linguistic capacities. For example, channelling sensory perceptions of a place – the smells, sights, taste, sounds and textures – provides material to sketch out all the ways in which a place is sensed. In this vein, creative writing exercises often involve generating a vivid setting similar to the concept of thick description in the tradition of Clifford Geertz. Geertz’s concept of ‘thick description’ is a method of interpreting and explaining cultural phenomena by providing detailed, contextualised descriptions of cultural practices, symbols and meanings (Geertz, 1973). I use voice memos to quickly describe my feelings when I come into a new field site. Taking many photographs of the physical site as well as recording some of the ambient sounds helps me to later free-write about my sensorial impressions. Transcribing my voice memos while flipping through my photographs often looks like stanzas of poems, which can generate new insights (Richardson, 1993). 

Another technique I use to creatively generate ways of seeing and interpreting data from a multispecies field is stimulating my capacities for empathy. ‘Verstehen’ is a German term that means ‘understanding’ or ‘comprehension’ in English. It was introduced by the German sociologist Max Weber, who used it to refer to a method of understanding social behaviour and action from the perspective of the individual involved (Weber, 2011). In sociology, ‘Verstehen’ refers to the process of empathetic understanding the subjective meaning and motivations behind a person’s behaviour, rather than just analysing it objectively based on external factors. This approach allows sociologists to gain a deeper understanding of social phenomena by considering the unique perspectives and experiences of the individuals involved. Conducting a multispecies ethnography typically means researchers must establish empathy for non-human animals. Taking on the perspective of the other is enhanced through creative writing skills, especially the reading of fiction, including fables and myths. For example, Perumal Murugan’s The Story of the Goat (Murugan and Raman 2019) reminds me of the power of fables and allegories. This book taught me about our human capacities for cross-species compassion and love. The simple writing style and pacing of the story can sneak up on you as you develop sincere feelings for the main character, a small black goat. 

Using these techniques – reading children’s books, vivid setting exercises and sensory free writing, empathetic understanding and flirting with fiction – in what follows, I share an example of my creative writing about spider goats. By means of framing this creative writing, I share that I have used scientific innovations (however low tech, like at home insemination with a syringe) in order to reproduce my own children. In my previous work, Sperm Counts published in 2007, I ‘came out’ about this practice (Moore, 2007). I am a queer, menopausal mother of three daughters (ages 27, 24 and 16) conceived through donor insemination using both known fresh semen and unknown banked technosemen modified by scientific manipulation, stored in liquid nitrogen, and shipped across the country. While things have shifted in the sixteen years since Sperm Counts was published and queer reproduction has become more prevalent, contestations over the creation and existence of queer families persist – my daughters are ‘freaks of nature’. Because of my personal life juggling the ‘relatedness’ of my kids, the ‘naturalness’ of our family, the incubation of biological experiments inside my body, and the cultural surveillance of my family, I feel an affinity toward spider goats. These goats are genetically modified through the addition of spider DNA in order to lactate spider silk for military and medical innovation. For three years, I spent time with these spider goats in Utah and found our ontological strangeness to enhance my epistemological interpretation of goats. I draw on my lived experiences to subvert the notion of the natural and the constructed. In many ways, my life reconstructs the natural and at the same time foregrounds the constructed nature of everything we call natural. Sometimes I do experience ‘Nature’ as oppressive, and believe it can be reconstructed to better serve those whom it oppresses.