ABSTRACT
During doctoral field research, I followed the work of a few White female doctors in their activities of conducting clinical research protocols. My presence in their offices was conditioned to the use of a white lab coat, which sometimes put me in a position to explain to patients that I was not a medical intern and, at other times, made explicit the limits of supposedly automatic confusions between me and a medical professional. By analyzing situations of gendered racism that I experienced during the fieldwork while wearing a white coat, I characterize medicine as a space marked by Whiteness and, extending this reflection to anthropology, I argue that ethical issues on anthropological fieldwork must necessarily take into account the racial and gender hierarchizations that make up interactions with research interlocutors - particular those experienced by Black female ethnographers in contexts where Whiteness is normalized.
KEYWORDS
Racism; body; fieldwork; ethics; medicine