ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author reconstructs the nature of her own comfort and conflict as an ethnographer. In the context of the politics and scholarship of the times, the chapter explores the nuances of doing and writing ethnography as a white working-class woman. The two projects in the chapter, looks backward from the perspective of the present. Dramatizing both writer and subject in the historical context, the author in the chapter focuses on to engage in writing culture as feminist critical practice. The feminist criticism of fieldwork and the writing of ethnography in the 1990s are far less sanguine with respect to what constitutes good social science. The flat accent on reliability and objectivity of data is transformed through the filter of critical and feminist theory. Agendas that tie research to social change can be at odds with current postmodern trends in the academy. Critical theory and radical postmodern discourse have transformed ethnographic writing.
