What do emotions do? Circulations of annoyance, hostility and shame in fieldwork

This chapter explores and reflects on how fieldwork is shaped by affectivity as a premise for producing empirical material within the scholarly field of prostitution. Informed by poststructuralist feminist thinking at Judith Butler and coined by Sara Ahmed’s theory on affectivity, the chapter analyses how emotions of annoyance, hostility, shame and empathy circulate between the researcher, the gatekeepers and the studied people. Asking what do emotions do? the chapter looks into how the circulation of emotions establish both distance and proximity among the subjects. Spanger argues that such circulations of emotions springs from particular discourses of feminism and social policy. From this stance, emotions are approached as discursive practices that establish hierarchies among the implied subjects that forms the premises for producing knowledge. The chapter is based on empirical examples from Spanger’s fieldwork among Thai migrants selling sexual services in Denmark from 2005-2006.