Playful boundary-testing made the male ethnographer the object of the café’s conviviality.

Evidence

The first time I met her, I spent much of the conversation flustered and blushing. Among the café’s regulars I was one of the few men around. While my presence as an ethnographer elicited curiosity, my gender made me genuinely conspicuous – and a regular target of jokes. That afternoon, Klara’s friends had invited me to join their table, but when talk turned to parenting, and when I confessed to not having children myself, a game quickly developed. As conversation bounced from diaper mishaps, to childbirth, to sex, to attractive men and ‘useless’ husbands, members of the group would trade glances, or fix me with grins or mock-stares, playfully testing to see what might faze me. Over time, I witnessed other male visitors encounter similar treatment. — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others, 44

Categorization

• SHARE: A field-note detail a scholar of gender-and-method would enjoy: the ethnographer’s gender, not his presence, made him conspicuous and ‘a regular target of jokes.’
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others: for a…, 44