Abstract
This chapter discusses how marginality is conceptualised in various places and how these conceptualisations are used. It does so in relation to social theory, empirical data and selected research practices. The discussion raises the possibility that, in some social research contexts, practices which assume marginality can reproduce social deficit accounts of the groups being researched, and in the process reinforce social marginalisation of those groups.
I really love the sense that I have lived through history too. That we have in my lifetime, and in the years that I have been politically active and out, gone from being a vilified, marginalised, criminalised minority to being a people that have come out, forced the world to change and built a community.
(Australian gay historian Graham Willett, 2005: 4)
What is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central.
(Stallybrass and White in Shields, 1991: 5)
Minority discourse is thus not simply an oppositional or counter-discourse: it also undoes the power of dominant discourses to represent themselves as universal.
(Gunew, 19941)
They’ve turned their suffering into a resource.
(Genet in Dollimore 1991: 352)
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Notes
I include page numbers for direct quotes, except where documents are accessed electronically.
There is no assumption here that change is permanent or always understandable as ‘progress’. Often what happens is that the political field shifts in ways that reposition the issues under discussion and, in that sense, new agendas emerge (Gane 2004; Hall 1996).
Note that this is different from a more traditional account of the distinction between subject (researchers) and object (the researched) in which distance is understood as requiring separation.
The size of gay and lesbian populations is difficult to estimate, much less their involvement in community. The Australian Study of Health and Relationships survey (n = 19,307) reported that 1.6% of men and 0.8% of women identified as homosexual, however ‘8.6% of men and 15.1% of women were not exclusively heterosexual in either attraction or experience or both’ (Smith et al., 2003: 141).
de Certeau (1988: xvii) suggestively remarked that ‘Marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive’.
Willett (2000) makes a more substantive case for his claims of major social change.
Personal communication, Rachel Thorpe, Data Manager, HIV Futures surveys.
Indigenous Australians position themselves outside of ‘ethnicity’ because inclusion as another ‘ethnic’ group hides their status as the original inhabitants. ‘Ethnicity’ refers to the cultural origins of subsequent immigrants to Australia: English, Irish, Italian, Greek, Vietnamese etc. See, Bottomley, de Lepervanche and Martin, 1991; Langton, 1993.
In anthropological literatures ‘marginality’ has been used to refer to transitional states — rites of passage — and in that sense closely linked to what it means to live within those states as experiences of social liminality.
In case I need to say it, this is not a claim about human sexual behaviours and the order of their emergence (though it could be).
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© 2007 Michael Hurley
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Hurley, M. (2007). Who’s on Whose Margins?. In: Pitts, M., Smith, A. (eds) Researching the Margins. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230224476_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230224476_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-51394-9
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