Queer(y)ing the Ethics of Research Methods: Toward a Politics of Intimacy in Researcher/Researched Relations

Abstract

This chapter discusses a methodology of a politics of intimacy, deployed through a queer ethics as method for crafting and defending alternative social worlds. It recognises that rural sexual minorities are in a particularly vulnerable position, socially, economically and politically. The bulk of research on sexual minorities has a metropolitan bias and it is time to recognise how sexual minorities in rural contexts articulate themselves socially, geographically, historically and so on. Ethical constructions speak to the ethical entanglements and emerging intimacies produced through the researcher/researched relation. It is in the rational flip of ethical and the methodological, of ethics and methods, as a means to constitute complex researcher/researched relations, that queer enters as a technique. As queer theory has come into its own as a set of academic discourses, its methodological potentials to interrogate not only the contingency and complexity of human subjectivity through an optic of sexualised/gendered constructions, but other social and political formations have become ever more apparent.