Racialized Emotions in Global Ethnography

Scholars have highlighted the complex emotional dynamics involved in ethnographic research, including the formation of emotional attachments, the emotional labor required at various stages of fieldwork, and the negotiation of emotional boundaries between ethnographers and their informants. Discussions of positionality and reflexivity have largely centered on how ethnographers’ demographic traits influence the emotional dimensions of ethnographic work, as they navigate emotions such as empathy, affection, pride, honor, guilt, anxiety, frustration, loneliness, and resentment. In this presentation, I argue that these emotional dynamics are not race-neutral but are shaped by racialized logics of instrumentality and productivity, and are thus deeply embedded in the structures of global racial capitalism. Drawing on critical feminist and queer approaches to ethnography, as well as scholarship on racialized emotions, I contend that traditional ethnographic approaches have been used as mechanisms to maintain and reproduce colonial power and hegemonic whiteness within Euro-American academia, particularly through the normalization of specific emotional dynamics in fieldwork, especially in global contexts. Building on my ethnographic research with queer communities in Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea—particularly my interactions with fellow ethnographers and the narratives that circulate about us within these communities—I critically analyze how emotional exchanges between ethnographers and the communities they study are racialized. I explore how racialized emotions, such as racialized empathy and racialized guilt, influence interactions throughout the different phases of fieldwork, including entry, immersion, exit, and revisitation. Ultimately, this presentation calls for a decolonial rethinking of positionality and reflexivity that foregrounds the importance of racialized emotions in the design and conduct of ethnographic research.