Queer in the Field: On Emotions, Temporality and Performativity in Ethnography1

Abstract

This chapter explains the ethical, methodological and ontological difficulties of researching the meanings of lesbian identities ethnographically with a commitment to queering some of the scholastic conventions of ethnography. It draws on research concerned with the ways in which working-class lesbian and bisexual women experience and negotiate the meanings of their sexual identities on an individual everyday basis, and the ways identity categories are institutionalised at a subcultural level. The chapter begins by setting out a case for an ethnographic approach to the study of sexuality working between the critique of queer theory as overly concerned with textual criticism and the attachment to methodological scientificity within some schools of sociology. It explores some of the tensions in ethnographic research and writing as the ethnographer moves from affective participant observation to a distanced writing up, offering a critique of the temporal and spatial fictions of ethnography.