Practicing a “Love Ethic” and Academic Dissimulation as Queer Resistance: Reflections on Subverting Institutional Review Boards

• In Event: 20464 - Queer of Color Critique and Sociology

Abstract

Drawing on my experiences collecting qualitative data on the cruising and anonymous sex practices of gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM), I develop a critical queer autoethnography through layered accounting to demonstrate how the positivist and biomedical frameworks of research ethics that Institutional Review Boards (IRB) enforce failed to account for the ethically ambiguous sexual dilemmas I faced in the field. The institutional constrains rooted in these ethical frameworks determine both how researchers conduct research and who gets to be a producer of knowledge. Such constraints contribute to epistemic injustice for marginalized researchers. Engaging with Black feminist thought, queer of color critique, and queer methods, I advocate for the deployment of academic dissimulation as a performative resistance strategy to subvert the institutional constraints IRBs impose. Moreover, I demonstrate how bell hooks’ “love ethic” became a queer method that allowed me to navigate ethically ambiguous sexual situations during fieldwork despite feeling the burden of those institutional constraints. Practicing academic dissimulation and a love ethic become resistant strategies that disrupts IRB conceptions of research ethics by honoring our shared humanity and subverting the traditional researcher/participant power dynamics that flattens participants into passive, sterile, and one-dimension subjects.

Author

• Jacob Wesley Richardson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign