Contagious Sapiosexuality: Conferences, Seduction, and Possibilities of Qualitative Research

• In Event: Forces of Seduction in (Post)Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to foreground forces of seduction in learning, doing, and presenting qualitative research at academic conferences. Focusing on the academic conference as ‘thirdspace’ in which “subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable…”, come together (Soja, 1996, p. 57), we seek to reveal how conference seductions – human and non-human entanglements of sexuality, desire, passion – can be vital to qualitative research. We bring seduction to the fore not (solely) to be lurid or exhibitionist, but to show how conferences foster productive tensions and contagious desires (sapiosexualities) to open up possibilities for creative, experimental, and deeply theorized qualitative research.

Theoretical Framework
In addition to theorizing the conference thirdspace, we also draw on Gibb’s (2010) post-affect concept of affect contagion to discuss seduction as “spontaneously and simultaneously in two orders of reality, one local and learned or intentional, the other nonlocal and self-organizing” (Massumi, 2003, p. 151). Our analysis also takes inspiration from feminist (and) affect theory scholars (e.g., Gallop, 1988; hooks, 1996; Probyn, 2004; Kipnis, 2017; Probyn, 2004) whose varied work speaks to seduction, sexual desire, and associated bodies and affects as productive of learning and scholarship.

Data and Modes of Inquiry
Drawing on our memories, notes, and writings from separate and collective conference experiences, we think our data with the motley crew of thirdspace, affect, and feminist theories above (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). In this way our theories adopt a “heuristic function” as we draw “creatively on different forms of knowledge to ask what if one conceived of the world in this way?” – what becomes possible when we think of conference seductions and/for/with/in/necessary to qualitative research (Gibbs, 2010, p. 188)?

Results and Conclusions
In one analysis of our collective experience planning and conducting qualitative research at AERA (Authors, in press), we show how spontaneous and planned seductions produced the possibility of a qualitative project and then, when other contagious affects seemingly opposed to passion and desire took precedence, how the project became undesirable and threatened overall. In a second analysis, we show how a conference seduction was tied up in the first authors’ research agenda and the eventual demise of her marriage. Both analyses reveal the conference-seduction-theory-qualitative-research assemblages that opened up new possibilities for doing and being (qualitative researchers).

Scholarly Significance
The significance of our work is arguably that of any analysis of the underlying forces and affects of qualitative research that are (un)intentionally ignored – it 1) challenges simplistic linear accounts of qualitative research, 2) belies myths of agential and empowered qualitative researchers and participants; and, particular to our focus on seduction, 3) challenges norms and boundaries associated with doing ‘polite’ scholarship, showing how transgression may be both desirable and unavoidable in (qualitative) research. The significance of this work lies for attendees (qualitative scholars) to open to the possibilities of thirdspace thinking, to risk and transgress (their own) boundaries of qualitative research and therefore plug into more experimental, creative, complex modes of qualitative inquiry (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016).

Authors

• Jennifer R. Wolgemuth, University of South Florida

• Travis Marn, University of South Florida