Between an iPhone and a safe space: tracing desire in connective (auto)ethnographic research with LGBTQ youth

Abstract

Reflecting on data from a longitudinal connective ethnographic study exploring how six lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youths mobilized digital literacies to write against injustice, this article uses autoethnographic methods to trace desire as a co-constructed text in qualitative research. More specifically, it complicates how desire – the affective and at times seductive insistence of the body – is always already an interjection in how LGBTQ researchers develop qualitative constructs like the field, positionality, and reflexivity in research about LGBTQ children and youths. Desire, however, goes beyond being an affective marker. It, as the article asserts, is a concept to think with. Re-entering the data through reflective storytelling, the author contends that desire is an alert; an ethical compass that illuminates how power weaves throughout the research experience and becomes a relational encounter that works to humanize the act of research itself.