Thoughts on Grenz

Power has proven extraordinarily difficult to conceptualize, and we as researchers seem to have the most difficult time theorizing power when it comes to sex.  Grenz's (2005) article, "Intersections of Sex and Power in Research on Prostitution: A Female Researcher Interviewing Male Heterosexual Clients," examines power dynamics within the interview process between a female researcher (Grenz) and heterosexual German johns.  Prostitution is legal is Germany, but still deemed "immoral," so Grenz notes a number of tensions arose in the interviewing process due to the nature of the topic and the gender/sexual power relations imbued within it.

First, she struggled to achieve an open, anonymous space where the men could fully participate and where she herself could feel safe.  The interviews took place at a colleague's office space, as Grenz (understandably) did not feel comfortable meeting at the clients' homes and did not expect they would be able to share fully if the interviews occurred in public.  Grenz was not able to employ what we would consider feminist methodology because she was wary of developing rapport and of divulging details about her own life; instead, she functioned as a listener only.  Even though this risked placing her in the dominant position of researcher versus the lowly researched, Grenz still found that her probing into the experiences of these johns could be conceived of a challenge to hegemonic masculinity.  Indeed, these men were not accustomed to being subject to study, investigated, and picked over as a research curiosity - such a research project was read "as an irritation to socially dominant perceptions of masculinity."

Second, Grenz navigates how 'confession' functioned in the interviews given her role as a researcher.  Due to the "immorality" surrounding prostitution, the men appear to not have many opportunities to process their consumption of women, leading Grenz to note the "compulsion" for confession.  The confession, however, was not itself a hierarchical relationship where the men were subordinates 'confessing' a shameful practice to a higher figure like Grenz.  Instead, Grenz suggests that the confession is more of a self-exploration, and, in the context of social science, a confession to be made in a neutral, non-judging space.

Grenz, despite noting that "the dangers these clients faced were minimal compared to dangers people are confronted with when they come out as gay or lesbian," still uses 'coming-out' as a framework for interpreting the confession.  In terms of the 'confession' experience, I disagree that it can be paralleled with a 'coming out' experience.  Such an interpretation of 'deviance' is far too broad and overlooks how some kinds of deviance can get you killed while other kinds of deviance can get you back slaps at the local pub.  Grenz gets to the heart of the matter when she writes: "The important question is whether concealment in this case is about being minoritized or about the privilege of having a position that basically allows one to be silent about one's "deviant" sexual position....The dilemma lies in the question of whether sex purchase - despite its social and legal status - is a so-called sexually deviant behavior that, like homosexuality, needs moral liberation or whether, instead, it is an exercise of power, an opportunity for men to opt out of private and personal conflicts."  Although she doesn't concretely side either way, I think it would be dangerous of us to conclude the former due to the way in which prostitution is structured on class, racial/ethnic, and gender lines.

Third, Grenz notes the way homophobia functions within the interview space.  None of her participants wanted to be interviewed by a man, and many explicitly suggested that being interviewed by a woman would be far preferable.  They were wary of intimacy and vulnerability with other men because of a homophobic discomfort with male-male intimacy.  Homophobia, as Suzanne Pharr so rocking-awesomely tells us, is a weapon of sexism; the homophobia of the johns served not just to distance themselves from intimacy with men, to but establish gender difference and hierarchy.  Women are clearly burdened with emotional labor, as indicated by the participants' expectations that Grenz would listen without judgment to their 'confessions' and the way they perceive and treat prostitutes as "emotional resources."  The men can "display their neediness," Grenz writes, "and women, like mothers, will care for them."  They can offer their vulnerabilities and insecurities to Grenz, tentatively asking "if they should tell her" things that might lead to her rejection of them, but these insecurities are purely self-centered and masculinist - Grenz notes that they had no qualms about extolling "collective beliefs about sex and gender that result in social relations that privilege men."  Due to her positionality as a researcher, Grenz did not challenge these comments.

Fourth, Grenz delves into how eroticism and sexuality played out over the course of her interviews.  She faced the problematic dilemma of being an object of eroticism on the part of the clients, or experiencing the projection of their desire/lack of desire on to her.  Interestingly, Grenz says that she did not necessarily interpret these eroticisms as the men exerting power and control, but rather as further "emotional neediness" and, therefore, vulnerability!  Grenz notes several times over the course of the article of her sense of 'control' and 'power' in being able to deny or grant these men's sexual expectations.  She never states that such power is illusory, but suggests that the power of the researcher and the power of men were interacting in particular ways. She has the 'power' of denial, but the men have the 'power' to ask such overt sexual requests in innocent, easy ways.  Such a variable use of 'power' means we risk losing the structural ways in which it is reproduced and functions. 

Grenz does note that "the most prevailing force that shaped the interviews was the gendered relation" between herself and the men she studied, and that the heterosexual eroticism of the interview process was understood by the men to "necessitate the presence of a woman as listener" due to their homophobic aversion to intimacy with men.  In this sense, the eroticism projected onto the interview is coupled with the use of women for emotional needs.  In conclusion, she argues that we must be careful to not see the researcher-researched role as one of a strict hierarchy and power dynamic.  And while this is true, I find it interesting that we have taken 'feminist methods' to mean one that explicitly and singularly critiques the "researcher as god" and "researched as lowly other" model (especially considering that this is a point that comes up regularly in the articles from the summer 2005 edition of Signs).  Have we forgotten that feminism also means a historic critique of the way gender and sexual hierarchies play out within the interview process, too?