Subjectivity and transversality in mental health research: towards a post-qualitative analysis of voyeurism

Abstract

This paper offers insights into the challenge of resisting voyeurism in mental health research, whilst contributing to recent efforts to draw a post-qualitative research methodology out of Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Our analysis is motivated by a profound rupture, a break in the trajectory of a specific line of qualitative inquiry occasioned by the passionate refusal of a participant in the empirical study that grounds this paper. Borrowing conceptual and analytical tools from Deleuze and Guattari, we focus on the major ethical and methodological implications of this participant’s refusal. Our analysis will shed light on the rupturing forces of stigma and voyeurism in qualitative inquiry, as well as the symbiotic proliferation of possibilities for collaboration and change that post-qualitative social research might enable. We close by reflecting on the role of affect, rupture, sensation and transversality as sources of, and provocations to, post-qualitative inquiry in mental health research and beyond.