RESEARCH ARTICLE Pregnant, privileged and PhDing: exploring embodiments in qualitative research Victoria Kannen* Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada (Received 27 September 2010; final version received 25 September 2011) The appearance of bodies in social space is a theoretically rich subject for discussion. The study of bodies and identities is a personally complex endeavour as researchers are often implicated in their own subject of investigation. This article explores one researcher’s engagement with issues of power and identity; while undertaking a study on gender, race, and ability in the critical identity classroom (i.e. Women and Gender Studies), I, the researcher, became part of the study as my age and non/pregnant body began to emerge as crucial to the study itself. In this paper, I examine how my body became intertwined with notions of the ‘right and wrong’ pregnant body, the ‘good and bad’ mother/ academic/feminist/researcher, and the ‘insider and outsider’ within academic hierarchies. Keywords: embodiment; higher education; identity; pregnancy; privilege; qualitative methodology Introduction As a woman who is 6 feet and 3 inches tall, I am used to people staring at me. As a young, white, straight, femme I am privileged in that my height is usually the only thing people find remarkable when they first see me. My race is often invisible, my sexuality ‘appropriately’ secure, my height extraordinary. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson contends, in social interactions we use appearances to guide our sense of how to relate to others as ‘[w]hat you look like, rather than who you are, often determines how people respond to you’ (2009, p. 34). This has been made explicit to me on a daily basis as many people comment on my embodiment as a tall woman. Interestingly, what became significant about my body in the process of studying identity was not my height, or even the topics that I was explicitly exploring – gender, race, or ability – rather, what was significant was my identity as a 7-month pregnant 27-year-old researcher. This pregnancy, as combined with other aspects of my identity, exposed the complexity involved in the process of interviewing and its relation to notions of social power. Thus, while my work here agrees with previous feminist research in claiming that the researcher’s body is never in exteriority to the ways in which social research is carried out (Stanley and Wise 1993, Acker and Feuerverger 2003, Somerville 2004), yet I expose how the positionalities of bodies within the academy influence the ways in which the researcher’s body can be ‘read’ (for example, as a ‘right or wrong’ pregnant body, a ‘good q 2013 Taylor & Francis *Email: v.kannen@utoronto.ca Journal of Gender Studies, 2013 Vol. 22, No. 2, 178–191, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2012.745681 Downloaded by [Victoria Kannen] at 10:36 26 June 2013