Queer Identity Critique and Reflexivity

• In Event: 14.045 - Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: 14.045-23 - Queering Positionality

Abstract

In conducting a study of HIV positive college men framed through the lens of queer theory and queer activism, I ran into an ethical and theoretical conundrum.  Most critical scholarship asserts the imperative for reflexive practice.  Here, questions arise around what is my positionality in regards to those living with HIV?  What are my privileges? What is gained or lost in disclosing (or not) my serostatus (i.e., HIV positive or negative) as researcher?  Reflexivity is a response to past iterations of research that supposed an objective, detached scientist, represented by absence in the research text.  As Johnson (2005) explained, critical and queer work “requires an acknowledgment by the critic of her or his position within an oppressive system” (p. 135).  This ethical mandate cannot—and should not—be easily disputed.
Yet reflexivity—the attempt to identify one’s positionality--smacks of essentialism and confession (Foucault, 1999).   Reflexivity roots in an assumption that sufficient revelation of social identities and researchers’ epistemological stance, truth about the self might be revealed that will presumably mark researchers as qualified or disqualified relevant to their subject(s) of inquiry.  Yet, the corrosion of identity posed by queer theory—and poststructuralism broadly—challenges this critical endeavor.  Lather (2007) explained the impasse between reflexive research and poststructuralism: “Reflexive ethnography authorizes itself by confronting its own processes of interpretation as some sort of cure toward better knowing, while deconstruction approaches ‘knowing through not knowing’” (p. 17).  Lather (2007) asserted the need to “not get too enamored with reflexivity” (p. 30).
        Another challenge related to reflexivity from a queer lens is that identifying one’s positionality presumes a stable, coherent subject-in-relation.  However, in doing research with a heavily stigmatized population, I wanted to resist the creation of a unitary research participant identity (i.e., the gay male college student with AIDS).  Additionally, interviews revealed that living with HIV meant an ever-changing relationship to the self and to the virus.  Bringing HIV positive participants into authorized spaces like the academy risks trying to normalize people, to try to rehabilitate them (i.e., to make them fulfill the normative imperatives of being a productive citizen, McRuer, 2006).  However, Weigman (2012) asserted that, invariably, “it is impossible not to traffic in the reproduction of identity from within the auspices of identity knowledges, no matter how resolutely one may be moved by their traditions of anti-identity critique” (p. 113).
        Finally, this critical-poststructural bind requires scrutiny of the relationship between researcher and participant.  Detamore (2010) described “a ‘politics of intimacy’ as an outcome and progenitor of research [that] becomes a queer project in its disruption of normative considerations for research relationships, while challenging the conventional regimes of oversight for research methods” (pp. 173-174).  A politics of intimacy may provide one ethical route through the dilemma of queer reflexivity. In dialogue with colleagues, I hope to map some possibilities for ethical research positioning in light of queer identity critique.

Author

• Michael Denton, University of South Florida