My Best Informant’s Dress: The Erotic Equation in Fieldwork- Esther Newton

Abstract

We present here a first translation into Spanish of this essay written by Esther Newton, a pioneering anthropologist in studies on drag queens, sexual communities and processes of homosociability in American urban contexts. In the text she asks about the "erotic dimension" in and of fieldwork, for which she begins by reviewing the place it (did not) occupy in the writing of the most exemplary ethnographies produced throughout most of the last century. In the same sense, she pointed out the way in which this "silence" slipped into a marginal space in secondary writings or hallway conversations, producing as an effect the establishment of an obligatory heterosexuality between those who researched and those who were constituted as "research subjects". Newton proposes to question the absence of this social dimension in field narratives and raises a fundamental question: What knowledge does anthropology produce by ignoring eroticism as a constitutive dimension of subjectivity, both for researchers and their interlocutors? Between the recovery of different "consecrated" ethnographies and accounts of her own fieldwork, the author immerses us in a web of relationships where the erotic becomes a component that configures a vital dimension, producer of social ties and crossed by power relations. This text by Newton offers us a powerful invitation to think about the relationship between attraction and creativity, desire and repulsion, eroticism and knowledge. It also proposes the possibility of thinking anthropological (field) work as a seduction. We hope, then, that his prose will finally prove attractive.