Affects, Bodies and Desire: ‘Queering’ Methods and Methodologies to Research Queer Migration

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the main methodological issues raised by a research project we carried out between 2012 and 2013 about Italian queer 'creative' migration in Berlin, focusing on the tensions among mobility/movement, desire, bodies, affects and fieldwork. Following an increasing international debate on the topic, the contribution discusses the (im)possibility to develop a queer method or methodology. We stress how 'queering' methodologies and methods is not an ontological position pre-assumed when conducting research with queer-identified subjects, but is a process of dismantling taken-for-granted, stable, monolithic categories and identities. In order to do so, the paper discusses positionalities, situated knowledge and the different interactions --with both human and non-human actors --shaping the field. Through analysing body performances in the terms introduced by Taylor, 'a politics of becoming' emerges as a way to consider the relation between sexualities and spaces. The 'objects' of our research, that is, queer migrants, can thus be reframed following Braidotti's conceptualisation of the 'nomadic subject' and Deleuze and Guattari's 'desiring machines'. Since they are shaped by affects, personal trajectories are exceptional and unique, composing new territorial materialities.

Artistic Practices and the Redistribution of the Sensible in Largo do Chiado: Attention, Corporeal Isles, Visceral Politics

“…My observations and the use of my body during these observations therefore intended to generate ‘emphatic understanding’ as a means to understand the sensations and behavior of other individuals (Longhurst et al . ; Spinney ; Di Feliciantonio & Gadelha ; Catungal ). The information on the sections ‘Largo do Chiado and dancers’ and ‘Largo do Chiado and musicians’ originates from this research phase.…”

(Un)Ethical Boundaries: Critical Reflections on What We Are (Not) Supposed to Do

“…Please bear in mind that the fieldwork experience the speaker referred to involved participant observation in people's everyday lives for a sustained period of time. Given my engagement with feminist and queer geographies and research methods (Di Feliciantonio 2014Di Feliciantonio and Gadelha 2017), I asked them how to keep such rigid boundaries and when and where these boundaries exactly end-Is the last day of fieldwork a final farewell? Their reply was that you need to remind your research participants, every day, that what you are doing is work, you are not their friend.…”

“…In one of the milestone papers on the topic, Katz (1994, 72) argued that she was "always, everywhere in 'the field'" and that her position as a woman and an ethnographer was constituted of "spaces of betweenness." The fieldwork cannot be bounded geographically or temporarily; it cuts across different times and different scales (Nast 1994;Di Feliciantonio and Gadelha 2017).…”

A life course approach to the field and fieldwork

“…Feminist scholars were among the first to recognise that researchers, the field and fieldwork are subjective entities filled with power dynamics (Rose ; England ; Gilbert ; Katz ; Kobayashi ; Nast ). Amid continuing debates over the role of fieldwork in human geography research, scholars have begun to consider the implications of emotions for these power dynamics (for example, see Laliberté and Schurr ; Di Feliciantonio and Gadelha ; Caretta and Jokinen ). Many of these contributions presuppose, however, that fieldwork is a distinct phase of research that progresses relatively independently of the life trajectories of those involved in it.…”