Abstract
We are storytellers to our own lives. When we do sexuality research, which Irvine (2014) calls ‘dirty’ work, we are in the midst of creating a story. In this book chapter, I provide a snapshot of my story in respect of doing sexuality research. I have encountered numerous pitfalls, dilemmas and problems when doing such ‘dirty’ work, but here I only tell a few by drawing on the qualitatively derived research method tool known as autoethnography. It is a method that requires the writer to use hindsight in order to resurrect not only memories of pain, torture, and stigma but also of liberation and freedom. I mainly refer to the dark memories in this book chapter to raise awareness of them for other like-minded queer writers. I argue that it is possible to write from both our heads and hearts, rather than solely from the former because we are pressured from institutions to sustain sheer ‘objectivity’ when that may not always be possible to do given that human values always enter at the beginning and the end of research. Human values are present when we interview participants. In sexuality work, the process of interviewing participants is a creative space. Interviews, whether online or offline, are spaces where subjectivities are actively created and where emotions are involved and formed.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Emphasised femininity’ refers to the maintenance and reproduction of traditional gender roles. Connell (1987) argues that the concept is relationally constructed to hegemonic masculinity, ‘performed especially to men’ (p. 188).
- 2.
Sex workers often face the ‘whore stigma’, too, so this form of stigma transposed itself onto the female sex work researchers.
- 3.
Sarah Kingston’s sexuality research included the exploration of community attitudes regarding men who buy sex. She conducted interviews with business employees, residents, the police, and local authority officials in a large northern city (see Kingston 2014).
- 4.
Ken Plummer highlights that although the interview setting can be dangerous and highly eroticized, it can also be a space for liberation. For instance, some people were coming out in his interviews, and they were, for the very first time, articulating what it means to be gay for them. Thus, his interviews were changing some people’s lives. What he and his gay men respondents embodied were the ‘outsider’ and ‘deviant’ status of being gay; the interviews were spaces for their marginalized voices to speak and to be heard.
- 5.
Altork (1995) provides an interesting account of her subjectivities when she involves herself with masculine and sturdy fire fighters. She sarcastically critiques objectivity on the grounds that it weakens a writer’s work and their sense of self for humans are not devoid from human values and emotions. In addition, we use our bodies together with our minds and hearts to understand something, resulting in objectivity becoming impracticable or impossible (Altork 1995).
- 6.
Goffman (1968) develops the notion of ‘spoiled identity’ to indicate an identity that creates a person to experience stigma.
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Javaid, A. (2020). Doing the Unconventional, Doing ‘Dirty’ Work: The Stigmatization of Sexuality Work and Unforeseen Encounters with Love. In: Vanderheiden, E., Mayer, CH. (eds) Mistakes, Errors and Failures across Cultures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35574-6_6
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