Doing Gender in a Hospital Setting: Reflections of a Male Researcher

Very little attention has been afforded to how male researchers actively position their gender in their studies, particularly in ethnographic research located within settings populated largely by women. In this article, I reflect on my own gender work during an ethnography of prenatal clinics and how this was articulated with other aspects of my researcher self. By reporting on the successes and failures of this performance, I argue that my gender constituted an essential element in the everyday negotiations between myself and female participants. In so doing, I suggest that reflexive commentaries of how researchers perform gender should not be viewed as a form of egotistic self-indulgence. Rather, they should be read as valuable statements for rendering the researcher visible and, here, for revealing how issues of doing gender play out during fieldwork.