Fictionalizing Our Sexual Bodies as Data?

• In Event: "Mirror, Mirror on the Walls": Co-Interrogating Heteronormativity, Bodies, Masculinities, and Power in Multiple Educational Contexts

Abstract

Purpose
The authors critically examine the risky truth of data (Kuntz, 2017) by re-turning (Barad, 2014) (to) our gay and queer bodies. Re-turning is to “turn it over and over again—iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings), new diffraction patterns” (Barad, 2014, p. 168). In this re-turning, we inquire, Are we fictionalizing our data in research? According to Blaikie (2021), “data is further fictionalized and re-worlded” (p. 41). Therefore, we further this idea to explore if data is fictionalized, especially by examining gender and sexuality in different contexts (Vietnam and United States).

Methodology
Life writing is an autobiographical, interdisciplinary, practice-oriented inquiry stance (Denzin, 1998) that involves a narrative of a personal experience documented by a life text. Therefore, life writing allows the authors to explore how the truth of data is “contested, partial, incomplete, and always in motion” (Tullis Owen et al., 2009, p. 185) to think about queerness and bodies in this paper.



Theoretical framework
This work draws on new materialism that challenges binary understandings, such as mind-body and human-nonhuman intra-active process (Barad, 2007). Intra-action recognizes that the distinct agencies do not precede but come into being through the mutually material entanglement with one another (Barad, 2007). Intra-action emphasizes the relationality of thinking, connecting, entangling, and theorizing with multiplicities. We use this lens to look at material-influenced view of gender and sexual bodies as data emergent from iteratively reconfiguring intra-active life writing process to understand gayness and queerness in different contexts, such as gay relationships in Vietnam and the roots causing suicide for queer individuals in the United States.

Methodology
Van Cleave and Bridges-Rhoads (2017) ask, “What if data was not data?” (p. 108). Data is never pure and never for being caught. Using our lived experiences as Vietnamese gay and queer educational scholars as data also means we are taking risks in re-examining, re-turning, and re-defining our life-data personally and academically. By using our-sexual-bodies-as-life-data, we hope to understand its relationality with power and heteronormativity in queer educational research.

Argument
We argue that our sexual bodies are materialized, fictionalized, and reworlded depending on what stories we write, what descriptions, what materials we use to describe descriptions, and what ties tie ties (Haraway, 2016). We acknowledge that power and heteronormativity (Foucault, 1997; Staley, 2022) are on-going forces that oppress our stories/data/sexual-bodies in and outside of educational contexts. In fact, our life-data are empowering and collective materials to challenge the universal representation of gay and queer bodies in research.

Scholarly significance
This paper explores the process of materialization-fictionalization-personalization in writing data and how data “interrupts our encounters with theory” (Van Cleave & Bridges-Rhoads, 2017, p. 114). The theories presented in this paper are interwoven with our data and lived experiences. We are both materializing, fictionalizing, and personalizing our own data, exposing our vulnerabilities to the readers, narrating our search for data and its thoughts, and offering a nuanced way to qualitative inquiry research in gender and sexuality in education.

Authors

• Ethan Trinh, Georgia State University
  Presenting Author

• Nguyen Hoang Giang-Le, Brock University
  Presenting Author