Vulnerable advantages: Re-searching my self while navigating queer identity, research ethics, and emotional labour

Abstract

Using an autoethnographic approach, I reflect on and unpack my journey towards my doctoral research on queer South Africans of Indian descent. I demonstrate how my decision to become an insider-researcher forced me to confront personal resistances towards turning the academic gaze upon myself. Although my journey towards intersectional LGBTQ+ research began with a yearning for epistemic visibility, prompted by a curious search for psychological literature about people like me, I now grapple with a flip side—doing the emotional labour of visibility and managing my vulnerabilities. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa's feminist theory of Borderlands, I (re)conceptualize these vulnerabilities as vulnerable advantages, that is, liminal spaces of heightened reflexivity that can ignite psychopolitical potential in scholar-activism. I discuss and theorize the productive possibilities of these emotionally complex spaces by drawing on four interconnected life experiences related to the epistemic, ethical, artistic, and activist dimensions of vulnerabilities. I consider the emotional labour embedded in researching insider communities, and my anxieties about traversing through these psychosocial conflicts. I argue that reflecting on one's own vulnerabilities can provide researchers with unique perspectives as scholar-activists. These vulnerable advantages exist because of—not in spite of —one's initial trepidations as valuable psychopolitical and decolonial resources.