“Are you going to be a nun, too?”: Reflection of the Field

How and why can’t a research be done? What should we do if we cannot obtain enough information as a feminist researcher? What should we or shouldn’t do if our research consists of questions we can’t ask, appointments we barely make, and waiting for days? From our informants to our attempts, to the solutions we found for the course of the research and the issues we prefer to keep silent about, how does it make us feel? Or how does research position us? In this article, some situations encountered in the fieldwork of my doctoral thesis, which is still ongoing and which focused on the unconditional labor of Orthodox and Catholic nuns in Turkey from a feminist anthropological perspective, are shared. In this context, from choosing a research topic to feminist dilemmas, positionality, to how we feel about our attempts, whether we make on or not as a feminist researcher, various information that we can call self-reflective, which emphasized the background rather than the visible face of research, is included. So how do we deal with the difficulties we experience during the research process as a feminist researcher? What makes the background of a research so important, from the choice of topic to the difficulties we experience in the field, is that the researcher themselves is visible in this process. Therefore, this article is based on the information obtained from the field study part of the doctoral thesis. Rather, it is mostly based on the researcher’s early experiences and observations about the study. In this respect, the study also shows us how the religious identity attributed to the researcher, the researcher’s gender and perspective were decisive in the course of the research.