This blog is inspired by the recent controversy surrounding that paper published in Qualitative Research. The paper, titled ‘I am not alone – we are all alone: Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan’ (Andersson, 2022), focuses, frankly stated, on a man’s experiences masturbating to Japanese comics of underage boys. At the time of writing, it has been removed by the journal and is under investigation ‘due to ethical concerns … and the social harm being caused by the publication of this work’.
The ethical issues of the paper have been well covered in recent articles (see for example Cole, 2022). What I want to focus on in this article are perceived issues with the paper’s methodology, which, as far as I can tell, appears to be some twisted form of ethnography. Despite the fact that the paper claims to use ethnography, many on social media, such as Twitter, have used this incident to draw attention to the shortcomings of qualitative research in general and, for some reason, autoethnography specifically.
