Beyond the crazy ex-girlfriend: Drawing the contours of a radical vulnerability

Abstract

In this article, I reflect on the process of understanding and my strategies of reporting in the context of a three-year ethnographic study on non-monogamous sex and relationships in Belgium, which included interviews and participant observation in various dating sites and in support groups for people in consensual non-monogamous relationships. I draw the contours of what a research ethics that creates space for the researcher's embodied learning, and learning through sexual-intimate relationships in particular, might look like, centralizing the concept of vulnerability. An ethics of intersubjective vulnerability not only has the potential to constitute an epistemological position from which to conduct critical analyses that aims at producing multidimensional and embodied understanding of power relations, it also constitutes a space of political contestation and a position from which to start to envision alternative possibilities to the neoliberal values that have pervaded society.