Worthy of Trust: A Feminist-Queer Ethic of Trustworthiness (Poster 6)

• In Event: Manufacturing Trustworthiness in Qualitative Research

Abstract

This poster considers trustworthiness in interview-based research through the overarching question, “What does it mean for a researcher to be worthy of trust?” Trustworthiness is generally positioned as a matter of research quality, such as how believable, publishable, and/or fundable scholarship is. We disrupt these understandings through a feminist-queer ethic that highlights emotionality in interviews and trust-in-action as an iterative, reciprocal, and dynamic methodological concept. Ahmed (2014), whose “politics of emotion” inform our work, emphasizes that “emotions [...] involve bodily processes of affecting and being affected, [...] emotions are a matter of how we come into contact with objects and others” (p. 208). Emotionality is inevitable in human engagements, including research interviews, and to ignore the role of emotions in earning, keeping, and returning trust erodes trustworthiness and humanity in scholarship. We offer examples and explorations of this feminist-queer ethic of trustworthiness by highlighting specific emotions that we have encountered, negotiated, reciprocated, and honored in interviewing. For example, pain is generally a “sexy” and “useful” concept in research, as pain is often integral to the evocative stories that researchers and journals love (Tuck & Yang, 2014). It is also an emotion that IRBs do not prepare researchers to manage when we unexpectedly confront it in our work. Ignoring pain as uncomfortable or irrelevant, or commodifying pain for career advancement, produces research(ers) unworthy of trust. In their interview, “Andy,” who identified as a queer lesbian Chicana woman, shared intense pain, grounded in personal and professional circumstances. As Andy kneaded a tissue, wet with tears, between their trembling fingers, their pain became an immediate, palpable, and undeniable part of the research process–even if the emotion was unanticipated. Andy’s eyes searched Author 1’s for clues about how this pain, which had abruptly bubbled up from their stomach and chest, would be received within the interview. Would the interview continue? Should it? Could Andy trust Author 1 with this pain? With more pain? Through examples of pain, care, and (dis)comfort in interviews and focus groups that we have facilitated, we emphasize the necessity of care and reflexivity woven into feminist research and the elasticity and disruption foundational to queer scholarship to offer a feminist-queer ethic that highlights trustworthiness that requires emotionality in order to be worthy of trust.

Authors

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Kelly W. Guyotte, University of Alabama