Affecting Affiliations: Queer Relationality and the Boy in the Dress

• In Event: Methodological Affects: Considering Researcher Emotion in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Objective-Purpose
This paper considers how data analysis which prioritizes an affective reading, can be instructive in troubling theoretical ideas about queer affiliations and queer publics. Drawing on findings from an international research study that investigates the affective atmosphere beginning teachers face as they think and talk about LGBT issues in and out of the classroom, I focus on the notion of queer affiliations and their constitutive relationship to analysis of research data involving researchers and participants who identify as queer. Funded by the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada, the three year study (PI: Jen Gilbert; collaborators: Jessica Fields, Nancy Lesko, and Mary Lou Rasmussen), is being conducted across three sites: Toronto, New York and Melbourne, Victoria.

Theoretical framework
In an article entitled Queer relations: A reading of Martha Nussbaum on same-sex marriage Janet Jakobsen writes that “Queer relationality explores the nonnormative or alogical forms of affiliation on which social relations depend but which are rarely socially recognized or are considered only pathological.'” (2010: 138). The focus of this paper is on my own affective response to participants – a response that I would describe as decidedly homo-normative. In taking this inquiry towards homonormativity in affective relations, as they emerged in data analysis, I endeavour to demonstrate the power of affect in shaping relationality in ways that frustrate my theoretical bent towards non-normative forms of queer affiliation.

Mode of Inquiry
I ask how researchers and participants responses to a scenario in which a boy wears a dress to school can transform understanding of how counter-publics related to gender and sexual diversity can flourish and wither within the space of schooling. Following Ann Cvetkovich’s, Archive of Feelings, I endeavour to bring “traumatic histories into the public sphere and use accounts of affective experience to transform our sense of what constitutes a public sphere” (2003: 16). If perceived queer affiliations merge with traumatic histories to construct a pathological public sphere in data analysis, how does this transform my own thinking and feeling about queer affiliations in education?

Data/Evidence
This paper is based on data collected in focus groups with participants who are beginning teachers. In particular it relates to a scenario related to participants involving a boy who wears a dress to school and is subsequently sent home. My focus is on my own feelings about how some participant’s responded to this scenario.

Substantiated Conclusions and Scholarly Significance
By analysing my feelings about how different participants responded to the boy who wore a dress to school it is possible to see how queer relationality both imbues and troubles Jakobsen’s alogical and non-normative queer affiliations. This is significant because it extends understanding of the value of attending to affect in data analysis and also underscores the limits of queer theorizing that assumes affiliations based on identity categories, as well as the limits of a queer critique that seeks out non-normative affiliations.

Author

• Mary Louise Rasmussen, Monash University