Reversing the ethnographic gaze: Experiments in cultural criminology

Abstract

The first change of mind happened in 1991. I was about to analyze a toast, an African American oral narrative about a pimp and prostitute. The toast was recited to me from memory by Loki, a man I did some AIDS intervention with in 1988 on the South Side of Chicago. He told it to me one cold day when the going was rough. The night before I left town, he let me record it, along with several others from his repertoire. What struck me about the toast was that although it was clearly a fiction, the reality the fiction indexes doesn’t exist in the same way or degree anymore. I thought I’d talk about the changes in the prostitution industry brought about by the drug trade, especially cocaine, and AIDS. Pimping as a way of organizing “the life” has been eclipsed to a large degree by the intensification of the drug trade, and the implications of the pimp and pro (prostitute) relationship have been altered by the risk of HIV infection. Thus, I would use the toast as a sort of myth that I could then demystify by relocating its poetically portrayed gender-role stereotypes within local social history. I thought the toast would make an interesting point of departure for a feminist analysis of prostitution, one that would allow me to give a toast of a different sort to Loki.