Catch and Release. Lisa Jean Moore

      PREFACE

      I get irritated by a certain type of academic voice. I react at times with both envy and incredulity at the ability to make sweeping declarations about large-scale interconnected phenomena spanning time, space, and economies. These statements resound with a manly, assured forcefulness of Truth, and I nod along in supportive feminine pantomime. I secretly think: “How does he know that?” and “How can he say it so definitely?” Everyone else seems to buy it, so I shrug and go along.

      The contemporary cultural meme of how men explain things, or mansplaining,1 so diverges somewhat from my own reaction to this kind of academic voice. It is as if I hold out hope that I can do womansplaining, my own way of claiming a valued and respected voice, without having to be an annoying know-it-all. I want to be able to break out of the standard performance of scholar and be valued as a significant contributor, even if I am less declarative and more circumspect. And yet I certainly don’t want my methodological rigor and status as a reliable narrator to be dismissed because I openly voice these internal dialogues. Instead of being seen as someone who produces knowledge in spite of this internal struggle, I want to deploy this struggle as an integral strength of my method and my scholarship.

      Even as an undergraduate sociology student, I was drawn to symbolic interactionism, a theoretical and methodological perspective that examines the creation of social meaning. This sociological paradigm nourishes me at my intellectual core. I enjoy reveling in the creativity of meaning-making humans, learning and relearning the concept of the definition of the situation, and examining the unfolding human conflict inherent in wrestling with normative expectations. When making claims about my own research, I’ve always been more comfortable keeping my analysis on the level of the microsociological—symbolic interactionism’s bailiwick.

      My brand of qualitative research—immersion in a field site, long unstructured interviews with humans, learning new skill sets from indigenous knowledge producers—serves as the basis for my interpretations about social life. So, for example, being on a blistering hot urban rooftop with a beekeeper as she carefully explains how to do a hive check becomes the basis for my grounded theories about the social world of urban beekeeping and its cultural significance. And watching a lab technician observing sperm through a microscope and using a hand tally counter, I can understand how sperm count comes to be pragmatically and discursively quantified as a measure of a man. As in all my empirical work, rarely do I stray too far from my data to make grand claims, relying instead on informants’ quotes for “evidence” of the claims I make. Deploying their words allows me to make larger observations—about human reproduction, the spread of disease, the world, or the climate—as a safeguard against my own grand theorizing or deploying my intellect.

      When I signed the contract for this book, my lifeline and editor Ilene Kalish said, “Well, we don’t think this book will have a very large profile. Especially if you don’t answer any questions, just raise them.” Ouch. She referred to my previous books and my ambivalence in adding my voice to large-scale sweeping claims. Am I an academic wimp imprisoned by my femininity? Do I hedge my bets rather than stake my place as a knowledge producer? A dear friend encouraged me, after reviewing multiple drafts of my work, to liberate myself from my tendency to quote or genuflect textually to others. Why do I feel so uncertain about “proving something,” having a conclusion, or making a point? I do understand the critique, yet I can’t manage to wholeheartedly embrace the epistemic authority of making definitive statements rather than raising important questions.

      Perhaps I am a day late (2 decades?) and a dollar short in trying to amplify my voice as a “knowledge producer”—someone who makes definitive statements about FINDINGS. During my graduate school years in the 1990s, the swirling debates about human subjectivity and epistemology generated lively discussions of who has the permission to access and create knowledge. In particular, we examined what qualifies a scholar as “legitimate,” especially one from an “othered” position. We analyzed the feminist philosopher Nancy Hartsock’s now oft-quoted lament about the plight of so many of us: “Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to