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The Racialized Erotics of Participatory Research

A Queer Feminist Understanding

Jessica Fields

To study sexuality with women who are incarcerated in U.S. jails is to enter a world of stark and embodied injustices and inequalities. Incarcerated women are typically young, poor, unemployed, and undereducated people of color without affordable and safe housing (see Conly 1998; Covington and Bloom 2007). Many are addicted to drugs or abusing them (Kantor 2003). Before entering jail or prison, many women endure gendered violence and discrimination such as physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; vilification of their sexual desires; and denial of their capacity to mother (Richie 1996; 2002). Violence and discrimination often continue during their incarceration at the hands of prison staff and others (Human Rights Watch 1996).

While bleak patterns and statistics help to establish the urgency of women’s experiences of mass incarceration, they do not promise a meaningful understanding of vulnerability and risk in incarcerated women’s lives (Fine and Torre 2006). My focus in this essay is on a participatory action research (PAR) study of the felt experiences of intimacy, HIV/AIDS risk and infection, and systemic violence and regulation (Fields et al. 2008). With funding from the California HIV Research Program and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Isela Ford and I secured the assistance of student researchers and launched workshops in which incarcerated women would participate in research design and inquiry, rather than serve purely as objects of research. So too would jail-based educators and students who might otherwise only support faculty researchers’ aims.

Isela and I adopted PAR as a methodological framework that prioritizes learning for and with, not only about, people who might otherwise be only the objects of study (K. Lewin 1946). In PAR, students, teachers, study participants, and researchers work together as co-researchers, participating in research design and inquiry that supports their making meaningful social change in their lives. Isela and I were especially interested in PAR’s capacity to counter the conditions of incarceration, in which prisoners are systematically “robbed of any right to complex personhood and robbed of any capacity to change” (Gordon 2004, 43). Allowing for complex personhood would resist pathologizing hierarchies and lay bare that “all people . . . remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others” (Gordon 1997, 4). Our inquiry came to be marked by the embodied experiences of researchers, collaborators, and participants, including those which are racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed; participatory and exclusionary; enervating and exhausting. Shifting relationships created a new terrain on which we could meet and exchange ideas. When we met on this new terrain, the differences among us proved troubling, exciting, and inseparable from any insights we might gain from our work.

PAR serves as a call for community members to enter the process of knowledge production and for researchers to participate in embodied curiosities. Working at the intersections of PAR, queer theory, and women-of-color feminism, I explore the place of “the erotic,” which I understand as an entanglement of visceral sensations (Allen 2012; Lorde 1978), in these calls. I focus on my own erotic experiences: met and unmet, palpable, straining, and enlivening desires—what Sharon Patricia Holland describes as the racialized and sexualized “feeling that escapes or releases when bodies collide in pleasure and in pain” (2012, 6). Methodological attention to those feelings can help queer, feminist, and PAR researchers remain cognizant of the stark vulnerabilities that characterize our participants’ lives and the snarl of social interactions that threaten and promise to undo our sense of who we are in queer feminist PAR, in social research, and in the world.

PAR across Differences

I first met Isela, an experienced jail-based HIV educator and counselor with a graduate degree in public administration, in a summer course I co-facilitated for sexuality educators on questions of social inequality and justice. I accepted a general invitation to visit the jail that Isela issued to the class, and we talked more over a long lunch. Isela shared with me her commitment to working with marginalized Latinas and to ensuring women of color were among San Francisco’s priorities in HIV treatment and prevention strategies. I shared my history as a gender and sociology instructor in men’s and women’s state prisons, as the daughter of a corrections officer and eventual warden, and as a teenager who, after trouble at home and in school, had been sentenced to a year in a drug and behavioral treatment facility.

The study began on grounds marked by these divergent and shared biographies and commitments. Some critics assert that disparities in power and privilege make collaborative and egalitarian relationships impossible despite PAR researchers’ intentions and practices (Williams et al. 2005). Indeed, equality was elusive in our work, even if collaboration was possible. Participants included researchers from San Francisco State University (student assistants and me), HIV educators from the San Francisco Department of Public Health (Isela and colleagues), and women incarcerated in San Francisco County Jail. We were women of color and white women; researchers, educators, and students; in our twenties, thirties, and forties. We were lesbian, queer, and straight; mothers and women not parenting. Some had spent time in jail, prison, and treatment centers, and others had never been arrested or locked up. Some held high school, college, and postgraduate degrees, and others had not completed high school. We were members of the middle class and people living in poverty.

Categorical disparities fostered additional disparities in collaborators’ experiences of the study. Isela, the student assistants, and I had reliable access to project resources, including funding and supplies. Incarcerated researchers’ access was contingent on our returning to the jail, admitting them to the workshop, and welcoming them into the practices of inquiry. Isela also encountered limits: though a lead investigator, she did not spend her days at the university and could not incorporate the collaboration as neatly into her workday. At the jail, however, Isela enjoyed inestimable credibility, and the balance of power shifted. Her endorsement allowed the team access to the jail, and her ongoing counsel helped us navigate unfamiliar and intimidating bureaucracies and interactions. Isela’s direction was sometimes difficult to follow. For example, she urged us not to share our personal lives with prisoners. As an out lesbian, I found the direction to keep my sexuality private discomfiting, but I heeded Isela’s advice.

The incarcerated women faced the greatest obstacles to collaboration. The militarism and restriction inherent in jails and prisons make PAR with incarcerated populations particularly challenging (Fine et al. 2003; Fine and Torre 2006). Prisoners have little control over their time, and correctional staff can place a unit or facility into lockdown, allowing no movement or visitors. Unlike state and federal prisons, jails are city and county facilities in which prisoners usually serve shorter terms, typically seventy-two hours to five months. The higher turnover means greater uncertainty and volatility and greater opportunity to provide short-term education, health care, and other services to which women may not otherwise have access (Clarke et al. 2006). We could not expect women inside the jail to be long-term collaborators. However, we could expect to involve many women and to work with some of them outside the jail after their release.

To maximize access to the project inside the jail, the workshops allowed incarcerated women to join at many points and, whenever they entered, to help shape data collection, analysis, and dissemination. This gesture built on established PAR practices of offering training in study design, implementation, and analysis, and ensuring collaborators have the skills necessary for meaningful participation (Minkler et al. 2003). Each cycle consisted of four two-hour training and research workshops. Figure 2.1 depicts workshop aims and activities. Isela and the student researchers with training as HIV educators opened the first workshop with a discussion of health-promotion strategies. The workshop concluded with a collective effort to identify obstacles to adopting these strategies. This discussion informed an interview guide that participants constructed cooperatively. In the second workshop, student researchers and I trained women to implement the guide. Incarcerated researchers then interviewed one another in pairs, audio recording their conversations. Over the next week, student assistants, Isela, and I identified one to three recordings to transcribe. We then supported the incarcerated researchers in the third workshop as they examined the selected transcripts for themes and patterns. This coding generated new questions and observations for discussion in the fourth workshop. The outcomes of that discussion guided the structure and content of the next cycle. For example, when interviews about discussing safer sex with partners revealed that women stay in relationships they consider bad for them, the next workshop series focused on women’s decisions to stay in unhealthy relationships and obstacles to their leaving. Analysis workshops never focused on the erotic experiences I examine here; this theme emerged after the workshops concluded.

Figure 2.1. Participatory workshop cycle.

Workshops began in January 2007 and continued through June 2007 in a housing unit dedicated to drug treatment. The meeting room was small, allowing eighteen women to sit comfortably. Deputies could look through a wall of windows at the workshops, but they could not hear the discussions. The limited space and the popularity of the workshops meant we turned people away each week and added names to a waiting list. In order that the project could benefit from participants’ growing research expertise, women who had previously attended a workshop had priority. Because we wanted to understand HIV in the context of racial, gender, and sexual inequalities, women of color were the next priority. To make room for newcomers, women left the cycle after four workshops. We offered refreshments and twenty dollars in exchange for participation (up to eighty dollars for four workshops). Isela’s and my work on the project was folded into our salaried positions. We paid student assistants an hourly wage using grant funds.

Seventy-four women participated in at least one workshop, with an average attendance of three workshops. Incarcerated participants were an average of thirty-six years old, with ages ranging from nineteen to sixty-three. In a typical workshop, nine women were African American, three women were Latina, one was Asian/Pacific Islander, and one was American Indian or Alaskan. Three quarters of the women were mothers, with an average of three children. Workshop participants reported an average of five male sex partners, less than one female sex partner, and no transgender partners in the last year. Almost four in ten women reported having had sex for money, food, or drugs in the last year, and approximately two in ten said they had injected drugs. Three reported HIV-positive status in an anonymous demographic survey.

Of the seventy-four women who attended a workshop, thirty-seven completed four workshops; we recognized these women as “graduates” with certificates and applause at the end of their fourth workshop. Those who wanted to continue working with the project joined a “graduates group” of five to eight women. These graduates designed projects of their own, including focus groups on women’s health concerns and a report on violations of women’s privacy in jail-based health care. The graduates successfully used that report to advocate for better jail medical treatment, including increased safeguards for prisoners’ privacy. Graduates also conducted an evaluation of the workshops and presented the results to the housing unit. I conducted in-depth, open-ended interviews with four graduates in part to better understand the differences between interview data collected in peer interviews and in more conventional researcher-researched interviews. I wrote this second interview guide with Isela and the student and formerly incarcerated research assistants, and the questions focused on vulnerability and intimacy in the women’s lives inside and outside jail. I conducted interviews in private meeting rooms inside the housing unit in late 2007. Women received twenty dollars for their participation.

Since the workshops, graduates have been active participants in the team’s work, including feedback sessions held inside and outside the jail over a two-year period in which we shared emerging analyses of the interview transcripts and field notes. Two graduates joined the team as paid research assistants upon release from jail. They and other team members have presented project findings at professional conferences and on university campuses. Other collaborations have built on the project, including a digital storytelling project Isela facilitated with Margaret Rhee, Kate Monico Klein, and Allyse Gray (Rhee et al. 2013).

Queer Feminist PAR Methodology

For some social science and public health researchers, community-based participatory methods represent an opportunity to produce more reliable and valid research findings (cf. Minkler and Wallerstein 2008). PAR promises to support vulnerable communities in a move from being studied (objects of inquiry) to doing the studying (subjects directing inquiry). Scientific discoveries and subsequent changes in practice and policy should thus reflect community needs.

I bring to PAR an additional commitment to the contested cross-disciplinary project of articulating an empiricism that is rooted in feminist and postpositivist social research and queer thought (Browne and Nash 2010; Ferguson 2007; Love 2015). My PAR reflects a feminist understanding of “knowledge production as the scene of political struggle” (Wiegman 2012, 71), and a queer commitment to that struggle’s generative possibilities. I pursue queer feminist PAR as a response, not a solution, to what geographers Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash, who write about queer methods, describe as “the messiness of social life and the place of the research/researcher in (re)creating it” (2010, 14). Even when committed to methodological integrity, insights emerge not with answers to questions or the settling of uncertainties but from collaborators’ struggles to know and be known in our complex personhood.

Queer feminist PAR refuses to seek refuge in methodology from the ethical, affective, and intellectual challenges raised in inquiry. Instead, it lingers in the demands of systematic, empirical inquiry and lays bare and learns from moments of difficulty. Maintaining a sense of social life as “contingent, multiple, and unstable” (Browne and Nash 2010, 4) and finding insight even in failure (Halberstam 2011) requires what sociologist Avery Gordon, writing about radical thought in action, describes as “a different way of seeing, one that is less mechanical, more willing to be surprised, to link imagination and critique” (1997, 24). Research is enlivened by turning away from methodological conventions that “drain anxiety from situations in which we feel complicitous with structures of power, or helpless to release another from suffering, or at a loss as to whether to act or to observe” (Behar 1996, 6). Anxious situations—failures, flirtations, and misreadings—are not obstacles to empiricism; rather, I see them as visceral experiences of social difference and affinity in which researchers, participants, and collaborators assert their personhood. Such moments facilitate queer feminist empirical inquiry.

Even in its most conventional forms, PAR draws attention to relationships between researchers and the people we study. Although PAR may cast those relationships as paths to democratic inquiry, queer feminist PAR approaches participation and inquiry as deeply felt encounters rife with possibility and disappointment. Collaboration incites not only a process of knowledge production but also (and of particular interest in my essay and in this volume) the erotics of racialized, gendered, and sexualized power—erotics that can span differences to bring collaborators together even as they also threaten to disrupt the promise of shared effort and insight. Indeed, as the celebrated Black, feminist, lesbian, and activist poet Audre Lorde argues, the erotic offers a “basis for understanding much of what is not shared” (1978, 56; emphasis mine), allowing for the possibility of connection between those who differ. At the intersections of PAR, queer method, and women-of-color feminism, erotic exchanges serve as “a bridge” (56), sometimes solid, other times swaying, still other times foreclosing crossings, and always reaching between and across particular locations and forging relationships between researchers’ own situated selves and those of the people they seek to understand. A new relational terrain becomes apparent, a terrain pitted with power, difference, affinity, and desire and marked by the vulnerability of recognition and misrecognition.

In other words, this is not an erotic simply of pleasure. Building on Lorde, anthropologist Jafari Allen argues the erotic is central to “deepening and enlivening” people’s experiences of themselves and one another as it traces and bears traces of the ways people’s bodies, desires, and relationships are inhabited by the worlds in which they live (2012, 327). The erotic is found in “practices of desire” that are “not only realized by confrontations with extrinsic power or structure but also, more pointedly, are made through and form one part of a complex process constituted by embodied experiences, which include gender, race, color, and nationality” (326). Such a definition of the erotic is decidedly queer, reflecting “a praxis of resistance . . . marking disruption to the normative order” (Tinsley 2008, 199) and grounded in queer of color critique that begins with “explicit formulations of racialized sexuality and sexualized race” (205). A queer feminist PAR engaged with the erotic thus points to want and to wanting, that is, to the ways race, gender, sexuality, and other social differences and inequalities inflect desires, their satisfaction, and their denial.

In queer feminist empiricism, the erotic becomes something to document and analyze, part of a faithful recounting of researchers’ time in the field. In the methodological considerations I offer here, I look for explicit accounts of desire in field notes and transcripts. Recognizing implicit injunctions against erotic attachments in the field, I also read for traces of the erotic in research. These moments are among the many in which researchers help constitute the realities they study, co-construct knowledge with other participants, and establish the racialized, gendered, and sexual stakes of the worlds they seek to understand (González-López 2011; E. Lewin and Leap 1996). I present extended accounts of data collection and excerpts from field notes and transcripts in order to suggest what was said and left unsaid. I offer the data and my interpretation and then leave room for “disagreement and alternate readings” (Frankenberg 1993, 30). Throughout, I ask: How does methodological attention to the erotic expose fault lines between the promise and limits of democratic inquiry and thus open PAR to the surprise and demands of participation?

Tracing Desire in Field Notes

Our assigned room and workshop budget accommodated fourteen women per workshop (and four researchers), and every Monday the demand for seats exceeded the available space. As lead researcher, I took on the task of welcoming women and turning others away. I was the classic gatekeeper: gesturing toward a door behind which food, cash, and attention awaited, but allowing only some women access to those resources. Though our project’s limited resources frustrated me, I was pleased by the popularity of the workshops. My authority to adjudicate the difficult scene embarrassed me.

One Monday morning, agitated and tired after admitting fourteen women, I took my seat in the crowded circle of gray plastic chairs. Bianca—a young African American woman attending her second workshop—took a seat across the circle and then, spotting me, quickly stood. As I wrote in my field notes in 2007:

Bianca grins at me and says she wanted to “come over and sit next to Jessica,” the person in the room who is “in charge.” Her comment is flirty, and I laugh as she walks toward me. Shana [another incarcerated woman] tells me Bianca has just talked on the telephone to “one of her baby daddies” and is feeling good. I ask Bianca if this was true, and she nods at me with a smile on her face. I laugh again as I take in how absolutely gushy Bianca seems. Bianca seems turned on, feeling good about herself, and wanting to stay in the moment a bit longer. (Unpublished data)

The laughter suggests I was rattled; I recall also feeling flattered and hoping to appear good-natured. I enjoyed being pulled into Shana’s and Bianca’s confidence and the feeling of Bianca having chosen to sit near me. With my laughter, I hoped to appear friendly and to defuse an erotically charged moment. I did the same with my field notes, describing Bianca as “turned on, feeling good about herself, and wanting to stay in the moment a bit longer” and not claiming those feelings for myself. I was turned on; I felt good about myself; and later, as I composed an extended field note account, I lingered in the moment a bit longer. I defended myself against these uncomfortable feelings of desire and pleasure by projecting them onto Bianca’s body. My field notes continue:

Bianca turns toward me. With something of a pout, she says, “You didn’t even notice my braids.” I look at the tiny cornrowed braids weaving across her scalp and say that I like them. I ask if she did it herself. She shakes her head “no” and turns so I can see the back of her head, where there is a larger braid making its way up the center of her scalp. This one she did. I hadn’t seen that one, I say, but now that I have I can see how good it looks. I tell her I remember her hair from last week: it was straight and swept around her head, and I’d liked it. (Unpublished data)

I remember looking closely at the hair wending its way up Bianca’s scalp, the smell of her hair and skin, and the sight of pores and freckles on her scalp. I remember sensing that, though undisclosed as Isela had encouraged, my lesbian sexuality was not necessarily undetected. Regardless, occupying as I did the role of “person in charge,” I was available to offer Bianca the attention her absent lover might have offered. Finally, I remember finding in this exchange with Bianca momentary relief from constraining ideas of authority and difference.

Having not reflected on these feelings in my field notes, I can now only recall my experience of occupying the authority, aesthetics, and demeanor of a white woman professor as the workshop began. I describe in my field notes Bianca’s body, behaviors, and (observed) feelings, but the field notes offer no details about my body and behaviors and little account of the relief and other emotions I felt. Obscuring my embodied erotic experiences and speaking with confidence about those of Bianca, the ostensible object of inquiry, I elide questions raised by imagining myself as an object of desire in a setting marked by stark inequalities. For example, how do race and gender help constitute the terrain of PAR? How does the researcher navigate that terrain and its erotics? How might a concerted and collaborative investigation of erotic desire—including researchers’ desires—have allowed me to interrogate the ethical and methodological implications of being a free woman wanting to learn more about a woman in jail, a white woman imagining herself the object of a Black woman’s desires, and a researcher finding pleasure in a flirtatious moment with a participant?

Finding the Erotic in Transcription

While the erotic’s traces are sometimes faint in field notes, the convention of recording researchers’ and respondents’ contributions in interview transcripts renders my participation in erotic exchanges more transparent. My experiences and behaviors become discernible and thus available for analysis and critique in ways field notes may hinder.

Undone by the Erotic

Jaye was a leader among her peers: other women cheered when she spoke with a preacher’s cadence at a Black History Month celebration and sought her friendship inside the jail. She was among the first to hug team members at the close of workshops; she frequently declared that she considered the workshops “a blessing.” Jaye completed the workshop cycle and participated in the graduates group; she encouraged other women to attend workshops and vouched for our trustworthiness.

The interview guide included questions about vulnerability and agency in women’s sexual lives. When I asked Jaye about a time she got what she wanted from a sexual partner, she described smoking crack and then “pay[ing] a lady” four or five times in a single night. I did not understand and asked her to elaborate. Jaye explained:

When I get so high, I go looking. Just like an old man, a pervert would do. And I mean, not saying taking advantage of them because I don’t do it. Now if you weren’t out there and I felt that if you weren’t out there, and you’re looking for something and you ask, I say, “Well, maybe you can accommodate me and I can accommodate you.” (Interview with the author, November 20, 2007)

Still unsure, I asked Jaye again to elaborate:

JESSICA: Okay. Let me, I just want to make sure I understand a couple things.

JAYE: [Laughter] I know. Jessica, are you okay?

JESSICA: I’m totally okay.

(Interview with the author, November 20, 2007)

I was okay, though not totally. I was confused by Jaye’s account, and I recall feeling simultaneously grateful for Jaye’s solicitousness and anxious about losing control of the interview. To regain my footing, I asked some clarifying questions: What drug was Jaye using? (Crack.) Did “accommodating” mean she and the woman she approached would trade sex for drugs? (Sometimes.) What did “sex” mean in this context? (Sex began with a flirtation as Jaye assessed how far women would go and how safe she felt with them.) Where did Jaye go to meet women? (Several neighborhoods.) Jaye then took a breath and described these interactions:

I would have her to, uh, just sit there and kinda admire her own body. You know, like kinda play with herself or whatever and I’ll look or you’d like to dance or whatever. Whatever’s going to turn me on that night and whatever I like. Something that’s going to make me climax. Sometimes I won’t even climax. Sometime I just admire them, sometime I help them to get them off the street. Then I tell them, I say, “Well, check this out ’cause I don’t play games. . . . If you want a hit of crack I will give you a hit of crack, but if you’re not sure then don’t come on. . . . ’Cause if you freak out I’m going to freak out ’cause I’m high too.” (Interview with the author, November 20, 2007)

Jaye described herself high on crack, admiring a woman she met on the street, exchanging drugs for the promise of sexual pleasure, watching a woman dance, masturbating to orgasm (or not). The account was filled with risk—drugs, exchange sex, the possibility of freaking out. While I recognized those risks, I also recognized the pleasures—a woman’s body, intoxication, and a fragile agreement to articulate one’s desires and remain true to the exchange.

In a moment reminiscent of the care she offered to women she met on the street, Jaye asked again if I was okay. I was, but the exchange had become, for me, more than a research interview. Jaye’s story not only helped me understand what it meant for her to make a sexual life in the midst of vulnerability but also compromised any claim I might make to a dispassionate stance. Though the transcript includes no description of my visceral experience of the moment, it does document some of my efforts to regain control in response to Jaye’s evocative description—for example, asking clarifying questions, asserting that I was okay, and remaining in the interviewer’s role. I remember appreciating why one would pursue the promised pleasures of sex, drugs, danger, and excitement despite the risks; I also sensed the pleasures available to objects of Jaye’s attentions. I felt Jaye treat me much as she described treating women from the street—asking, “Jessica, are you okay?” and seeking reassurance I would not “freak out” and exit.

Jaye’s story allowed me to glimpse the impossibility of disentangling pleasure and vulnerability on the streets, in interviews, or in participatory research. I encountered both of our personhoods through the intermingling of violence, pleasure, affirmation, and exploitation. Method offered me no refuge from the realizations that I could easily imagine the pursuit of risky pleasures and that Jaye’s desires were not so distinct from mine. I could seek clarity and maintain a facade of composure, but I could not escape the demands of erotic connection—a connection through which Jaye resisted the pathologizing of her behaviors, forged a link with me, and called on me to recognize her humanity and rethink normative responses to risk.

Made in the Erotic

Caia—a charismatic African American woman in her early thirties—had an enviable sense of humor, a history of crack use, and a longer history of sexual abuse perpetrated by men in her family and on the streets. Like Jaye, she completed four workshops and entered the room each week enthusiastically. Caia chatted and laughed easily with us; her gently teasing jokes often came quietly at our expense.

The interview guide included the question, “You identified as [racial identity] on the fact sheet; can you tell me what that has meant for you in your life?” When I asked Caia, she explained being Black had meant

a lot of hard times . . . like, growing up, “Nigga this, Nigga that.” But, it adds trauma to you. It really don’t bother me. I don’t, the ignorance doesn’t bother me. . . . Me and my girlfriend, we be like, “Bitch, come here.” It’s a habit, and it’s no disrespect. I look at that like: people say things, and it ain’t even meant like that. It’s just—it doesn’t bother me because I’m cute, so it doesn’t bother me. (Interview with the author, November 29, 2007)

I wanted to learn more about Caia’s resilience, so I asked, “What do you mean, ‘because you’re cute’?” She replied:

Everybody that gets high, and stuff, that’s Black, the majority of them, they teeth are missing, they all fucked up. I got all my teeth, they cocaine white [laughs]. So, I still got action in this game, you know. . . . [B]ecause when I go on a john, I got action, you know? I still got back [laugh]. You know? I could still get married, find me a good man. He say, “My baby got all her teeth.” That’s right, baby. (Interview with the author, November 29, 2007)

With that, Caia laughed, opened her mouth, and asked me to look at her teeth. Startled, I leaned forward, peered inside, and agreed. “It’s true,” I said. “You look like all your teeth are right in there.”

The moment was intimate and horrible. Looking inside Caia’s mouth, I felt myself pulled into a reenactment of images of Southern white slave traders and owners inspecting slaves’ teeth for signs of disease and inferior market value. As much as I wanted to pull away from the interaction and the history that haunted it, I felt obligated to remain. To retreat would be to deny Caia the affirmation she sought. To stay was to participate in persistent degradation and violence.

I turned away from Caia toward the interview guide. However, when I tried to wrest myself out of the moment, Caia insisted I remain—a source of routine trauma even as I tried desperately not to be:

JESSICA: And, so, um. Does it matter if it’s uh—like who says “bitch” or who says . . .

CAIA: Nigga.

JESSICA: Yeah. Does it matter? You know what I mean, like?

CAIA: Say it: nigga, nigga.

JESSICA: You want me to say it? Why do you want me to say it?

CAIA: Yeah. ’Cause, you actin’ like you scared to say it.

JESSICA: I’m not scared; I just try not to say it.

CAIA: It doesn’t bother me. To me, I don’t know. It might bother other people, but, it’s like, I don’t pay attention to a lot of shit that other people say, right. I always blank people out.

(Interview with the author, November 29, 2007)

With that, Caia relinquished her call for me to utter a racist epithet. Her point was made. Without my even saying the ugly term, it loomed—an everyday traumatizing utterance that could not be reclaimed, that scared me, and that Caia could taunt, ignore, and ultimately survive.

I could not affirm Caia’s desirability and strength—inspecting her teeth, witnessing her resilience—without also enacting white racism. The collaborative spirit of PAR, the queerness of my questions about incarceration and sexuality, and my refusal to “say it” do not allow me to escape that legacy—they instead suggest my desires to escape. Caia, on the other hand, was unwilling to articulate or satisfy any desires I might pretend lay outside the racist structures defining our collaborative exchange. As Sharon Patricia Holland notes in The Erotic Life of Racism, “[D]esire and subjugation, belonging and obligation, are linked in theory and practice” (2012, 14). Researchers may try to fashion a space beyond this link, seeking refuge in conventional empiricism and method; lingering in the erotic, queer feminist PAR remains accountable to the link’s demands.

Sustaining Methodological Tensions

Workshops and interviews in this project took place at discomforting intersections of sexuality, racism, and incarceration in women’s lives. The insistently alive personhood of incarcerated women, queer feminist scholars, and those committed to democratic knowledge production became clear once we no longer leaned on “the whole panoply of rational argumentation and knowledge” about not only jail and prison but also sexuality, vulnerability, and research (Gordon 2004, 65). As personhood became apparent, so too did an embodied history of U.S. racism that infused my careful looks at their sexualities and that haunted even the democratizing efforts of PAR.

Perhaps I should have extricated myself from these moments with Bianca, Jaye, and Caia once I noticed their erotic character. Readers might worry that allowing for the erotic compromises researchers’ ethics, invites coercion, and undermines absolutely the possibility of democratic knowledge production. But exiting would have denied the ways Bianca, Jaye, and Caia spoke back to incarceration, research, and racism—institutions prone to casting them and other incarcerated women as victims. In exiting, I would have lost an opportunity to note that my collaborators and I came together as not only researcher and researched but also free and imprisoned, criminalized and legitimized, Black and white. The erotic laid the grounds for connection, empathy, recognition, and betrayal in institutions and interactions marked by persistent yearnings, vulnerabilities, and victimizations.

PAR is one moment in a long feminist and queer history of scrutinizing the terms of knowledge production. How can we interrogate inequalities and hardships without reproducing them in our research? Though well-intentioned, these interrogations also reflect a “progress narrative” (Wiegman 2012) central to feminist scholarship: the pursuit of a conceptual apparatus that will ensure the strength of our analysis. The progress narrative compels many discussions of PAR methods and social research, raising certain questions about the account I offer here. How frank should ethnographers be in their accounts and analyses of erotic experiences? How can researchers best respond to flirtation from participants? How might researchers better anticipate erotic exchanges in the field?

I want to resist these questions. We cannot count on a “better method” to bring us closer to inclusiveness, accuracy, or ease. Instead, the pursuit and critique of that elusive possibility signal our membership in a queer feminist community (Fields 2013). Rather than pursue a method that calms the tensions inherent to queer feminist research, I ask: How can researchers keep those tensions alive as signs of the promise of reimagining the possibilities in queer research? Research practices central to participatory models hold the potential to disrupt disenfranchising practices of learning even as they require us to navigate risk, betrayal, desire, and violence—all our erotic longings. I thus conclude with some tentative responses heeding the advice proposed by queer, feminist, and critical race theorist Robyn Wiegman. Even as I offer these provocations, I want to resist the urge to turn an attention to the erotic in research into a shiny new method that could tame the unruliness and unpredictability the erotic introduces.

The erotic is a relation made in the research encounter, and it leaves its trace across the data. Empirical researchers—and perhaps PAR scholars in particular—have a responsibility to read the field notes, interview transcripts, and analytic memos we produce for insight into participants’ lives and the collaborative exchanges in which we come to these insights. A queer feminist PAR recognizes that any effort to democratize inquiry carries the traces of the racialized, gendered, sexualized desires brought to and generated in the encounter. So too do the understandings our inquiries yield.

The erotic demands the attention of PAR and of queer feminist researchers. Collaboration, knowledge production, and the making and unmaking of relations are visceral experiences, wrought through desires for connections, alternatives, and understandings. PAR incites participation in all of the structural and ideological conditions that collaborators and researchers inhabit: democratizing, oppressive, bridging, and severing. The erotic demands that we feel and understand those conditions through our PAR and queer feminist research methods.

The erotic lurks in the “silences” (Brim and Ghaziani 2016, 17) lingering in our research accounts. The traces of the erotic will not always be immediately apparent, even to queer feminist researchers with a commitment to exploring the erotic. Researchers’ accounts may slide past these moments, focusing instead on interactions more easily discerned and described. Our reading practices will have to vary according to the conventions of documentation: Are we relying on transcription? Recalled accounts? Queer feminist researchers, PAR and otherwise, will read data archives as products of social interaction, warranting the same interrogation we commit to the other products of our settings.

Finally, the erotic surprises, disrupts, and generates possibilities both welcome and terrible. Silences in data are not problems to be solved with more accurate field notes or transcripts. PAR calls collaborators into a dynamic and generative process of inquiry in which understandings and selves are made and unmade, desires are met and unmet. The task for queer, feminist, participatory research is to greet the arrival of the erotic with curiosity and openness, so that we might become better readers of the worlds and lives we study and inhabit. Noticing how the erotic made its way through my encounters with collaborators pointed my analysis toward the imprint that social inequalities left on desires for connection, insight, affirmation, and relief. Even as our wants feel singular, an analysis of our erotic entanglements in the research setting sends us out in the world of grim statistics and diminished life chances for evidence of how those brute realities come to affect, however contingently, what we want for ourselves and others. The erotic bridges what may seem like disparate worlds, allowing moments of shared desires; but those desires, and so research, are marked by the intersecting personal and social histories of love, loss, discrimination, violence, and intimacy. PAR highlights the promise and limits of democratic inquiry and the surprise and demands of participation. The queer feminist turn in PAR—indeed in empiricism broadly—would see these erotic entanglements as simultaneously the grounds of teaching and learning, a path to understanding, and their potential undoing.

Acknowledgments

My deepest thanks go to the incarcerated women-of-color co-researchers and the many team members who contributed to this project, including Isela Ford, Elena Flores, Allyse Gray, Kathleen Hentz Beach, Margaret Rhee, Catherine White, Lanice Avery, Valerie Francisco, Kate Monico Klein, L. Lemercier, and Christina Monroe. I benefited from presenting earlier versions of this article at the 2014 meeting of the American Sociological Association, University of Minnesota Sociology Department Workshop Series, and York University Qualitative Research and Resource Centre. I thank Darius Bost, Jen Gilbert, Amy Gottlieb, Didi Khayatt, Jonathan Silin, Judith Taylor, Anna Wilson, anonymous WSQ reviewers, and editors Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim for incisive suggestions and critique. Thanks also to Tina Fetner and Sarah Sobieraj for their writing support and inspiration.

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