II Breaking a Taboo? Talking (and Laughing) about the Vagina

It’s scary saying the word. ‘Vagina. ’ At first it feels like you’re crashing through an invisible wall. ‘Vagina. ’ You feel guilty and wrong, as if someone’s going to strike you down (Ensler, 1998: xxiii). For my PhD, I am researching social/cultural constructions of the vagina, and whether, and if so how, the vagina is part of women’s identity as women. In this context, the vagina can be a ‘sensitive ’ (see Lee and Renzetti, 1993) issue and, like Ensler (1998), I sometimes have difficulty talking about it. In this article, I explore how a critical examination of reactions to hearing and talking about my research can be used to enhance my analysis, and consider how these might impact on our ‘obligations ’ as feminist researchers. ON THE DIFFICULTY OF RESEARCHING ‘TROUBLESOME ’ TOPICS Many feminist (and other) researchers have found that researching ‘taboo’, ‘pri-vate ’ or ‘sensitive ’ topics can be problematic. As Lee and Renzetti (1993: 5) noted, researchers ‘may find themselves stigmatized by colleagues and others for having studied particular topics’. Research on sex is a prime example, and sex-ology has ‘suffer[ed] the slings and arrows of ridicule and delegitimation because of its risqué subject matter ’ (Tiefer, 1995: 192). But research on any topic con-sidered ‘private ’ could pose difficulties for the researcher. Oakley (1984: 74), for example, reported that she ‘had to insist on the seriousness of [her] aim in the face of a lot of patronising jocularity about the academic absurdity of such a topic. The idea of doing a Ph.D. on housework in Britain in 1969 was laughable.’ Topics such as these disturb the constructed division between ‘public ’ and ‘private’. The label ‘private ’ has often been used to perpetuate oppressions (Beveridge and Mullally, 1995), and feminists have succeeded in making the per-sonal political by bringing so-called private issues into public discourse – house