Participant sensing as a feminist methodological tool: an application to gender studies

Abstract

This article reflects on the sensory tradition within the ethnographic method and defends the value of participant sensing as a feminist tool in socio-cultural research. This methodol-ogy would help to overcome the androcentric bias reproduced by participant observation as an eminently visual and auditory practice. Firstly, the article highlights the link between masculinity and sight, which is forged historically in the West, and reintroduces gender analysis in the anthropological study of the senses. Sensory anthropology, a recent perspec-tive in the study of the senses which brought about participant sensing, did not continue gender analyses proposed in the preceding anthropology of the senses; therefore, its meth-odological concerns lacked the feminist reflection that I intend to redress here. Secondly, this article presents the ethnographical application of participant sensing for gender analysis, in the context of an adapted sport as football 5-a-side for visually impaired people. The em-bedded practices and experiences of a group of blind men and of the ethnographer, as viewed from a multisensory prism, reveal a new dimension of gender which helps to comprehend how adapted football 5-a-side contributes to the re-production of hegemonic masculinity and therefore of the patriarchal gender order.