CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY
3.3 R EFLEXIVITY & RESEARCHER POSITIONALITY
Reflexivity enables us to consider the ways in which who we are (our position in the world, i.e., our positionality) and what we are interested in shapes the research process. In reflecting on his own positionality as a Zimbabwean doctoral researcher, Medzani highlights that, “Researchers become aware of their positionality through the process of reflexivity which is an important aspect of any qualitative inquiry” (2020:1). My interest in adolescent girls’ experiences of menstruation in particular arose from my programmatic work in the development sector, where I started a rural-based initiative, which provides free
2 For more information, visit http://www.rcz.ac.zw.
3 They had to be sought a second time because this research, though related to, was separate to the baseline survey I conducted in 2015 when I started a free sanitary wear programme in partnership with the Umzingwane RDC.
4 I place the word newcomer in quotation marks because my father grew up in Sikelela and I would visit during the holidays with him when we would return to see my grandparents – both of whom are now late. At the time of my fieldwork, my paternal grandmother was still alive but she was of poor health, so my rural homestead (umuzi) was vacant when I first began the research. This is why I stayed with Gogo Betty and not at my family’s umuzi. Hence, in this way, I was a ‘newcomer’ because of my new visitor (umuntu womzini) status as Gogo Betty’s guest.
sanitary wear to adolescent girls in Matabeleland South province of Zimbabwe. As a result, when I first proposed to undertake this study, I was preoccupied with schoolgirl menstruation-related absenteeism as an issue affecting education outcomes. My bias resulted from my intersectional5 positionality as both a PhD researcher and a development sector practitioner within the MHM space. However, as time progressed, I realised there was a far more complicated, multi-layered narrative of menstruation to be told.
For example, the initial intervention in 2015 began by providing commercial, single-use disposable sanitary wear and rewashable sanitary wear so as to assess what type of sanitary wear is most suitable for the beneficiaries. As I discussed in the introductory chapter of this dissertation, the term MHMMMs deconstructs the assumption of a binary that classifies disposable sanitary wear as commodified (i.e., purchasable) and RUMPs as uncommodified sanitary wear (i.e., not bought or sold). There is a need to challenge this binary because re-usable/rewashable sanitary may still consist of commodified material (such as cotton cloth). As can be seen below in Figure 8, the rewashable sanitary wear in the black drawstring bags is not made of rag cloth but rather high-quality, absorbent cotton material. This re-usable sanitary wear is manufactured at an industrial scale and the finished product has a market value.
Figure 8: Sanitary wear distributed to the beneficiaries in 2015
5 I want to acknowledge Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw who first coined the term to capture the ways in which race and gender (and beyond) intersect to shape our experiences in the world.
I spoke with the beneficiaries six months after the initiative’s first intervention. Across the board, the girls preferred the commercial, re-usable sanitary wear to the disposable sanitary wear they had been given. By engaging the beneficiaries about their preferences, there was an opportunity for a dialogue with girls who are often devoiced in the construction of the MHI (global development) ‘problem’. In viewing both these forms of sanitary wear as MHMMMs, it was possible to consider complex dialectical choices and decisions that they made, and the reasons for them. Though matters of personal preference do not reveal themselves quite so starkly in the intergenerational narratives, the narratives also reveal agency in this dialectic.
As McMahon et al. (2011:9) state, “There is a need for further research that not only involves sanitary wear products that are effective, sustainable and culturally acceptable, but also evaluates the physical environment in which girls are living and looks beyond absenteeism to measure educational [impediments for the girl child]”. It therefore became apparent that I needed to revisit the field and ask more questions – different questions – If I was going to paint an accurate picture of the experiences of rural girls in Zimbabwe.
Unlike what I had at first presumed, the question was not just about access to schoolgirl absenteeism and sanitary wear or MHMMMs. I realised there was a bigger conversation my research would be a part of, and this dialogue was not one solely about the politics of menstruation and the breaking down of hierarchical binaries that contrast commodified, commercial sanitary wear as easier and better for MHM than organic (and/or uncommodified) sanitary wear in development discourse. It was a dialogue about the status of women and the politics of poverty (Lister, 2015); one in which even indigent women and girls exacted agency in the choices they made about how to manage their menses. What also became evident during the study was the principle of ukuhlonipha, which is ‘to respect’. Ukuhlonipha can be likened to research with children wherein “they would construct the researcher as an authoritative figure to whom they acquiesce”
(Mahon et al., 1996:150). It is the “[t]he ideal that [adults] have control over children needs to be understood in the context of two principles […] mentioned: kuhlonipha6 and ubuntu” (Mkhwanazi, 2014a:109).7 However, it is not just Ndebele girls (who are children relative to me)8 who would construct me as an authoritative figure, but also the Ndebele women (some older than myself ) in the study. In the first instance, a vertical power relationship was experienced due to age, and, in the second instance, it was due to my
6 ukuhlonipha in isiNdebele and kuhlonipha in Zulu.
7 It is worth noting, as Mkhwanazi states, that “The notion of ubuntu complements the principle of kuhlonipha.
Kuhlonipha is based on a tacit acceptance that the advice and words of elders are not only full of wisdom, but also are not to be questioned” (2014:109) or challenged, and as such silence becomes a form of ukuhlonipha.
8 See page 113 for a discussion on relational maturity.
being more educated (literate) than the women I was interviewing. This vertical power structure is further complicated by my involvement in a sanitary wear intervention in the village. As such, I am seen as a kind of ‘donor’ and patron in the village. The intervention also involves mentorship,9 which is itself a quasi- paternalistic vertical power dynamic. In addition to this, Ndebele women and girls are not inclined to say much or to speak too openly in general as I observed in the pilot. So, upon revisiting the field, I knew I had to probe more and have more questions set out to be answered. This is what I did to navigate this vertical relationship effectively.
The reticence of adolescent girls at the time of the pilot study is unsurprising, as a cornerstone belief in Ndebele and African culture is that children must respect their elders. This often translates as being silent in their presence, and so there was a peculiar dynamic to be negotiated by myself as the researcher when I revisited the field. While I had seen myself as a peer of the girls in the pilot, I needed to be conscious of the fact that, to the girls, I was an adult (and therefore needed to be revered and respected as such). Though I am an adult in the eyes of the law in Zimbabwe (cf. page 58); to the grandmothers and mothers I was interviewing, I was a child. A concerted effort thus had to be made to make them feel at ease so they could speak openly and freely about their menstrual experiences without fearing that doing so would a transgression of principle of ukuhlonipha abadala (respecting one’s elders). Making the research participants feel comfortable and confident enough to speak to me openly represented a kind of invisible reproductive labour-work that assured them of their role as co-producers of knowledge in the research process. It is also worth noting that it is a cultural trait for Ndebele women to be silent, not only in the presence of elders, but also men other individuals whom they deem worthy of being respected. This was more of an issue with daughters than it was among the grandmothers and mothers in the study and other adults in the village. It is in these various power dynamics that I first witnessed my ‘relational maturity’ at play. Certain experiences in the field shaped my theorisation of this concept, which I expound on page 113.
I have chosen to honour the co-production between the research participants and myself by including one of the original hand-sketched maps that a teacher in the village drew for me of the amenities and geological features of Sikelela village as there is nothing detailed available of Sikelela by way of Google Maps rather than enhancing it through a software programme in this dissertation.
9 Sullivan states that “The role of mentor, as described in literature on ‘at risk’ teens, is devoted to teaching, socializing, and acting as a role model for the adolescent” (Sullivan, 1996:224).
Agar (1980) conceptualises the “professional stranger” in ethnographic research. Unlike the professional stranger who is unknown to the village and the villagers and may have to navigate a very complex pathway to the fieldsite and the research participants. I am not a complete stranger to the village of Sikelela. The villagers know me as a menstrual activist and development practitioner, through my initiative that provides free sanitary wear to girls in the area and other parts of Zimbabwe. My pre-existing relationship with the villagers made it easier to recruit them to participate in FGDs. The villagers also felt that they needed to air their views about girls in the village as concerned parents, in the hope I could perhaps lobby for improvements and further interventions alongside the sanitary wear initiative. When taking this into account, it is natural that a man (motivated by this same desire to air his views as a concerned parent) attended the meeting.10
As laid out in the introductory chapter of this dissertation, the study sets out to break away from dichotomies. Burrell highlights that, “The term fieldsite refers to the spatial characteristics of a field-based research project, the stage on which the social processes under study take place” (2009:182). This assertion suggests a static boundary wherein the fieldsite can be and is located. Anthropologists locate the fieldwork (carried out in the fieldsite) within “another culture ‘away’ from home”, where the ‘other’ culture exists.
However, in my own case – while Zimbabwe is home – in many ways I have also spent most of my adulthood outside Zimbabwe. I studied in Cape Town for four years continuously from the beginning of 2009 until the end of 2012. During my Master’s programme, I spent alternate semesters of six months in Cape Town, with exchange semesters in New Delhi, India and Freiburg, Germany. I began my doctoral studies in 2016. I spent part of my studies in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Scotland. I therefore had to travel from one home (in the UK) to my country of origin and ‘home’11 (Zimbabwe). In my Master’s dissertation, I highlight the complexity of ‘homecoming’ after living, studying or working abroad in two countries or more (Ncube, 2015). Just as the fieldsite is not a fixed site, the home culture is also not static. It “may have undergone its own changes which may range from the physical to the linguistic, social, relational, religious and familial during the [transnational] student’s time abroad” (Ncube, 2015:35-6). At times, although I am a Zimbabwean, I do not always feel Zimbabwean; or at least not Zimbabwean enough. This signifies a battle between my multiple identities, that is: my “patriotic self” and my “contaminated self” whose (mono)national identity has been “diluted” (Ncube, 2015:53-7) by my “intersectional culture exchanging
10 He attends to provide his opinions on what the elders perceive to be Sikelela’s early unintended pregnancy crisis.
See also page 162. His attendance reveals my pre-existing relationship with the villagers as a mentor, through whom parents may mediate concerns for their girls.
11 I highlight in my Master’s dissertation that transnational study complicates our constructions of home. At the time of submitting this PhD dissertation, Aberdeen held a strong sense of home, as it is where I had spent the majority of 2018 to 2020.
self” whose identity is complicated by a transnational, hyphenated identity (Ncube, 2015) as a South Africa- based or UK-based Zimbabwean. Methodologically, “the duality of observed and observer” (Coffey, 1999:20) is assumed in ethnographic study. Coffey remarks that, “The [researcher] initially and purpose[ful]ly divests him/herself of knowledge to achieve eventual understanding” (1999:20). However, my personhood as a Ndebele woman from Zimbabwe means that I cannot completely divest myself of all knowledge of Ndebele cultural norms in the pursuit of deeper understanding. I lie at the boundary of observed and observer – the participant observer who is both researcher and subject.
There was another ethical matter that I had to consider, which would have implications for the reporting of my research in the dissertation. As a relatively young Ndebele woman interviewing elderly; middle-aged and young Ndebele women alike, I found that the elderly women were forthcoming in imparting insider secrets that would not otherwise be shared as easily and openly with an outsider. I concluded that in honouring the trust that my research participants had taken me into I had to use my discretion but be mindful of how and what I conveyed in this dissertation.