What Does It Mean to Be an Ethical Researcher Subject? Talking Back to Norms Embodying My Conflicted Subjectivities in Researching Homosexuality in Uganda

• In Event: 35.082 - Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: 35.082-12 - Autobiography as Postfoundational Curriculum Research: Toward an Ethics of (Im)Possible Representation

Abstract

As a teacher educator in Uganda, where homosexuality has been recently criminalized, I feel compelled to undertake a study on it in the context of school. Schools in Uganda have been sites where attempts have been made to root out homosexuality through practices like corporal punishment, and, expulsion of students “guilty” of homosexuality (Chew, 2013; Lule, 2009; Wandawa & Semakula, 2013). For this, teachers and school administrators received a “tongue-lashing” especially from students’ parents, criticizing them for acting unprofessionally. My broader study is a forum to listen to voices of educators in a context where homosexuality is considered “difficult knowledge” (Britzman, 1991).
I use this autobiographical narrative to reflect on norms engendered in my subjectivities as a Black, heterosexual, female, Christian, mother, wife, educator, Ugandan researching homosexuality in Uganda. These norms revolve around historically prescribed codes governing how certain subjects are expected to behave as ethical in the Ugandan context. Such norms, according to Foucault, “are invested with power and recalcitrance, setting the limits to what will be considered to be an intelligible formation of the subject” (cited in Butler, 2005, p. 17). Accordingly, these norms orchestrate possible forms a subject can take, simultaneously foreclosing possibilities outside this matrix.
In grappling with norms deemed moral in my context, I am propelled on by Foucault’s insights in regard to ethics. He emphasizes that “for an action to be ‘moral,’ it must not be reducible to an act or a series of acts conforming to a rule, a law, or a value” (1990, p. 28, cited in Butler, 2005, p. 18). Put differently, moral conduct is not a question of complying to prescriptions constituted in a code. To this extent, Butler suggests that “even if a morality supplies a set of norms...it also remains a set of norms…a subject must negotiate in a living and reflective way” (p. 10). She speaks of ethics as a critical relation to pre-established norms, which is “but a necessary resistance to discursive norms which have congealed into givens” (Salih & Butler, 2004, p. 303). This suggests a radical suspension of belief in matter-of-factness of norms which should be interrogated.
Both Butler and Foucault deem the critique of norms “a risky business” because “it is likely to expose the utterer-questioner to the denunciations of those who may have a vested interest in protecting ontological certainties in order to conceal and congeal the operations of power/knowledge” (Salih & Butler, 2004, p. 303). Nonetheless, critiquing the limits of norms within which subjects come to be is according to Foucault “precisely to engage in an aesthetics of the self that maintains a critical relation to existing norms” (cited in Butler, 2005, p. 17). It is to this that I commit, self-interrogating and engaging with my affective struggles in talking back to conflicted voices embodying norms of my multiple subjectivities in researching homosexuality in Uganda. I believe that the very idea of talking back to norms that foreclose other ways of being is an ethical and social justice endeavor.

Author

• Lydia Namatende-Sakwa, Teachers College, Columbia University