Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This contribution explores ‘disobedient’ queer and trans researcher bodies as sources of knowledge and meaning making in fieldwork, focusing on skin, sound, and feet in nightlife dancing as un/comfortable sites through which the researcher critically negotiates fieldwork relations and geographies.

Paper long abstract

As queer people, we are often told that our bodies do not belong. The queer body may appear in a way that is unexpected or discordant with the surrounding bodies. It does the ‘wrong’ things or does them in the ‘wrong’ way. Similarly, as researchers we are often told that our bodies do not belong in the research process. While there is work being done in many fields to dismantle this presumption, there remain few resources available for queer researchers to understand and work through what this intersection—queer and researcher—means in the field. Field research is disobedient. You prepare, plan, theorize what will happen and what you will do, but nothing goes precisely as planned. Equally, my queer researcher body is disobedient. This paper situates the researcher’s body as a site of knowledge and aims provide new insights into this question by providing reflections on various ways that a researcher’s body can be ‘disobedient’ during fieldwork and looks at nightclub dancing as a means through which these ‘deviant’ states of being can be filtered and coped with. I argue that going out to dance at clubs and other nightlife venues can act as sites through which the researcher both critically negotiates fieldwork relations and geographies and also provides an avenue for working through and expressing discontents and challenges in the research process. As this contribution derives itself from the body, I focus on skin, sound, and feet as sites of discomfort and dis/emplacement.