The concept of gender in ethnomusicology is also tied to the idea of , in which researchers critically consider their own identities in relation to the societies and people they are studying. For example, Katherine Hagedorn uses this technique in Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santeria. Throughout her description of her fieldwork in Cuba, Hagedorn remarks how her positionality, through her whiteness, femaleness, and foreignness, afforded her luxuries out of reach of her Cuban counterparts, and how the magnitude of difference in her experience and existence in Cuba was exacerbated by Cuba's economic turmoil after the fall of the Soviet Union during the Cuban Revolution. Her positionality also put her in an "outsider" perspective on Cuban culture and affected her ability to access the culture as a researcher on Santeria. Her whiteness and foreignness, she writes, allowed her to circumvent intimate inter-gender relations centered around performance using the bata drum. Unlike her Cuban female counterparts who faced stigma, she was able to learn to play the bata and thus formulate her research.Hagedorn, Katherine J. 2001. Divine Utterances: The Performances of Afro-Cuban Santeria. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. pp. 20-21.
The concept of gender in ethnomusicology is also tied to the idea of , in which researchers critically consider their own identities in relation to the societies and people they are studying. For example, Katherine Hagedorn uses this technique in Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santeria. Throughout her description of her fieldwork in Cuba, Hagedorn remarks how her positionality, through her whiteness, femaleness, and foreignness, afforded her luxuries out of reach of her Cuban counterparts, and how the magnitude of difference in her experience and existence in Cuba was exacerbated by Cuba's economic turmoil after the fall of the Soviet Union during the Cuban Revolution. Her positionality also put her in an "outsider" perspective on Cuban culture and affected her ability to access the culture as a researcher on Santeria. Her whiteness and foreignness, she writes, allowed her to circumvent intimate inter-gender relations centered around performance using the bata drum. Unlike her Cuban female counterparts who faced stigma, she was able to learn to play the bata and thus formulate her research.Hagedorn, Katherine J. 2001. Divine Utterances: The Performances of Afro-Cuban Santeria. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. pp. 20-21.