An Auto-ethnographic Critique of the IRB as a Technology of Power in Researching LGBTQ Identities

• In Event: 308 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 07. Non-heterosexuality: Session II

Abstract

The IRB is a relatively new technology of power in our modern academic era as it simultaneously denies, shapes, and creates particular forms of knowledge about gender and sexual identities by transforming sex into discourse through confession and medicalization of gender and sexual identities. In this auto-ethnographic case study, the author examines, through a Foucaldian lens, the challenges she encountered while gaining IRB approval for research on LGBTQ military members. The IRB is a modern day panopticon. Researchers, especially those who study queer, “perverse,” identities police themselves because they know they could be under the watchful eye of the IRB and that the IRB has the power to shut down their research altogether. Further, the IRB requires confessions that must be quarantined, decontaminated, or at the very least, documented to the fullest extent possible to protect the university from potential legal recourse should anyone find out the researcher “extracted” them.

Author

• Courtney Caviness, University of California Davis