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Accepted Paper:
On the Possibility of Writing about Transgender Joy/Suffering
Ellis Kokko
(University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork with a network of trans-identified researchers, clinicians and professionals working in transgender healthcare, this presentation reflects on the epistemological, political and ethical questions posed by writing about transgender joy/suffering as a transgender researcher.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I will think through the epistemological, political and ethical questions posed by writing about transgender joy/suffering as a transgender researcher. Drawing on fieldwork with a UK-based network of trans-identified researchers, clinicians and professionals working in transgender healthcare, I interrogate the tensions that arise when joy/suffering is both an object of research that must be made intelligible to wider audiences, and an embodied aspect of everyday lives of researchers. Historically, trans people in research have been subject to what the Puerto Rican intellectual Ramon Grosfoguel (2019) has called “epistemic extractivism” – a logic according to which trans lives and bodies provide ‘data’ for theory and analysis that is reserved for other, non-trans (cis) researchers. Trans scholars’ increasing insistence on making space for trans knowledges and epistemologies echoes calls in anthropology to re-imagine our ways of producing knowledge and to bring in “epistemological elsewheres” (Reese 2019). Focusing on three different sites – a gender identity clinic, a large-scale psychiatry research project, and a private clinic – I explore the strategies, knowledges and affects that get enacted when working with what researchers feel to be intimately familiar but that often evades capture by traditional research methods and categories. I suggest that in this context epistemology becomes above all an ethical practice. At the same time, the very sense of ‘stuckness’ that often characterizes researchers’ attempts (including my own) to reconcile their multiple commitments and identities, can also open up a potentiality for moving differently as anthropologists and researchers.