Paper short abstract:

Conducting research in a German right-wing populist party, I developed the methodological notion of "strategic agonism". Its aim is to help manoeuvre the paradoxes between ethnographic openness and anti-fascist stance an engaged ethnographer of the far right may face in the field.

Paper long abstract:

When I first started researching homosexuality in the far right, I entered my field, the German right-wing populist party "Alternative für Deutschland", with a clear sense of political distance vis-à-vis my interlocutors. The relationships I was about to establish were going to be purely professional, and under no circumstances was I to form friendships in the field. But weren't friendship and appreciation indispensable methodological tools for an ethnographer, especially one informed by feminist engaged anthropology?

During my two years of fieldwork, I realised this research required a methodology of its own. In my paper, I am going to propose the notion of "strategic agonism", inspired by political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2005, 2013). Mouffe proposes the notion of agonism as a political space in which the enemy is recognised as a legitimate one. On the one hand, agonism is opposed to the liberal political space based on compromise and consensus, and, on the other hand, to the political antagonism that distinguishes between friend and enemy, and ultimately seeks to destroy the enemy.

In my own work, my field and I manoeuvred between an agonistic and an antagonistic position towards each other. We had to build a relationship that was based on trust and reciprocity. At the same time, I maintained my political conviction that this was a dangerous field that had to be stopped. However, strategic agonism is not a neat methodological solution for this kind of fieldwork - it keeps alive the tensions that accompany an ethnography of the far right.