Negotiating Utopia: An Affective,Autoethnographic Framework for Reflexivity

Abstract

For colonial domination, reflexive practices within qualitative methodologies encompass autoethnography and researchers using static identity categories to reflect how researchers’ social positions shape their practice and field site experiences. Yet, such approaches can maintain researchers’ position as the subjects doing colonial research rather than as researchers negotiating their positions as subject-object of research. Taking the case of a queer, trans, non-binary researcher who had to cisify themselves for an ethnography, this paper conducts an autoethnography in relation to gender conformity. The paper does so by bringing together ideas of relationality and subjectivity formation to consider faith embodiment. It offers negotiating utopia as a three-part affective, autoethnographic framework for analyzing researcher subjectivity formation, enabling researchers to account for the colonial roots of ethnography. Using the case of a trans, non-binary Sikh, negotiating utopia shows how they confronted a U.S. settler veil and developed a type of ethnographic double consciousness.

Keywords

emotions body and embodiment methodology sexualities theory Sikh studies trans sociology

Recent interventions in qualitative methodologies clarified how to produce rigorous, transparent, and flexible research practices for academic science. Scholars clarified qualitative coding procedures for interviews, made guides to manage a researcher’s anxiety when conducting qualitative projects, and outlined qualitative literacy frameworks for evaluating qualitative studies (Lareau 2021; Small and Calarco 2022). These interventions establish a baseline for scholars to engage in debate on appropriate practices for their work and describing what they experience, such as transmisogynist harassment (Hanson and Richards 2019; Schiffer 2022). These interventions are methodologically valuable for transparently producing academic knowledge, yet they collectively evade an ongoing methodological debate: the colonial nature of qualitative methodologies in U.S. research (Adjepong 2019; McKittrick 2021).

These types of interventions typically result from scholars doing reflexive analysis, which refers to a formalized reflective practice or set of frameworks that scholars use to understand what they have experienced in the field. Two typical methods include reflecting through one’s identity category and autoethnography. In the former, scholars use single or multiple identity categories to clarify how they believe their identity influenced their access to and interpretation of data (Henson 2020; Reyes 2020). Autoethnography encourages scholars to narratively write about uncomfortable moments by placing the self in context to deconstruct reality through different potential factors—dramatic description, native/outsider structures, and a critique of realism (Clough 2000; Reed-Danahay 1997; Vidal-Ortiz 2004:185). While scholars could combine or use such methods to challenge U.S. qualitative methodologies’ colonial nature (Collins 2009; Kennemore and Postero 2021; Robinson 2022), researchers have often not critically unpacked the category, treating it as static (Henson 2020). When scholars do this, they extend colonial power because researchers use such practices to redeem their own guilt (as dominators), enable researchers to empower themselves as speakers for the people they represent, and center whiteness through a narcissistic gaze and an assertion of legitimacy (Gani and Khan 2024).

Such limited engagement with colonialism limits the value of reflexivity. While abandoning qualitative methodologies could challenge colonial roots, ethnographers have also theorized their own colonial subject positions and the colonial object positions they project onto their participants. Researchers are the “subjects” of colonialism who use research practices to turn others, usually targets of colonialism, into objects through research (Tuck and Yang 2014). With this attention to the colonial gaze through research, researchers increasingly challenge the use of static identity categories in reflexivity (Reyes, Bogumil, and Welch 2024). While autoethnography can also be used to claim an authoritative position and not disrupt power (Clough 2000), there are various ways to practice it, and scholars have used it to rethink existing methodological practices (Kaur-Bring 2020; Vidal-Ortiz 2004).

Through attention to a methodological colonial gaze, scholars have offered creative alternatives. In the context of ethnography in postcolonial nations, researchers are space invaders who re-arrange social spaces with their presence rather than naïve researchers who have no effect on the social setting because U.S. ethnography is premised on a colonial and cisgender worldview (Adjepong 2019; Puwar 2004). Similarly, when unpacking the category of “trans” and “non-binary” and how they embody it when doing academic work, Brandon Andrew Robinson (2022:3) shows that trans and queer scholars and research produce new ways of understanding researchers, bodies, and methods. As scholars develop more nuanced understandings of how we research under cisnormativity and colonialism, more nuanced understandings are needed of how we are changed as researchers. By developing reflexivity to understand the colonial subject-object research relationship, researchers can engage the “messiness” of how colonial embodiment manifests in U.S. qualitative methodologies (Bell 2019; Matlon 2022; Meadow 2018; Moussawi 2021).

This paper provides a methodological intervention by using Queer and Trans Sociology (QTS) to relationally rethink reflexivity through researcher subjectivity formation (RSF; kehal, n.d.). Though both “relationality” and “qualitative methodologies” have pan-disciplinary meaning, I focus on sociology while drawing on related, ongoing debates in anthropology, and queer, trans, and cultural studies (Adjepong 2019; Bell 2019; Henson 2020; Kennemore and Postero 2021). I ask, who emerges from the field when researchers are implicated in their own embodied violence, such as queer and gender non-conforming researchers who must cisify—“closet”—themselves for safety or respectability? I take my 89 single-spaced pages of fieldnotes documenting my experiences as a trans, non-binary, Sikh with unshorn hair conducting an ethnography in elite U.S. academia as data. I conduct an autoethnographic trans theorization of reflexivity in three phases (Nicolazzo 2021), which I call negotiating utopia (NU). I bring together theories of affect with QTS’s focus on subjectivity formation to rethink how we practice reflexivity. By working through these phases of NU, I show how researchers can be attuned to self-formation without reinscribing themselves as the colonial subject conducting research. A focus on how a researcher understands their changing sense of self through reflexivity enables following how researchers negotiate their positions as research subjects-objects.

In one phase, researchers theorize RSF via affect theory to understand self-formation during research activities under cisnormativity and racial and colonial capitalism. RSF is the process by which a researcher becomes aware that they are an invader in a social space and their invasion is affecting their senses of self. I use my fieldwork negotiations around gender, sexuality, and faith conformity rather than identity categories.¹ Researchers also illuminate how academic practice creates an enhanced consciousness of one’s colonial and gender non-normativity through experiences of temporality (Du Bois [1903] 2007; Falcón 2008; Lynne 2021). This enhanced consciousness is the result of a researcher continuing their self-formation process and confronting the strategies they took around gender conformity to invade a social space. I show how my enhanced consciousness, upon seeing what I was becoming, led me to conceive of the future as a place for respite from the colonial present. Finally, researchers analyze how U.S. academic practice enables assimilation to the settler veil through gender conformity—or following queer theory, assimilation as “a politics of following the straight line” (Ahmed 2006:567). I show that researchers can assimilate through academic practice when they confront the settler veil.

For an academic paper, I wrote these phases sequentially: a concept (RSF), what that concept produces (consciousness), and why that product can matter (colonial assimilation). But that does not mean this was the order the analysis was done, should be done, or was experienced. Different scholars with different studies will differentially theorize these phases finding different phenomena. I use “phases,” rather than steps or stages, to not limit NU to a progressive sequence of analysis. For instance, as I felt myself changing while in the field, I did not immediately connect this to an enhanced consciousness and assimilation until analysis; in contrast, researchers who enter the field after completing a study may have an enhanced consciousness and confront different form of assimilation. What unites a NU analysis is a focus on RSF through affect, showing how researchers make sense of their changing self, and how U.S. settler colonialism informs this subjectivity development.

My framework is “utopian” based on José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) theorization of queer utopias. With an attention to queerness through emotions, researchers can try to locate themselves in time as they feel dislocated in space. Rather than focusing on the loss of self, I approach queerness as “the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” because queerness is “a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond. . . the present” (Muñoz 2009:1). Theorizing from the experience of loss, rejection, and time, I show that how a researcher affectively understands their changing sense of self enables them to negotiate the colonial roots around ethnographic gender conformity, thereby their positions as a subject-object of research.

Reflexivity, Affect, and Colonialism

Reflexivity

Ethnographers produce ethnographies, but what of the reverse—who emerges from the field? Researchers have used debates on community-engaged research and ethics to discuss the “dual role” of ethnographers as participant/observer or participant/critic of cultures they seek to join (Bell 2019; Kennemore and Postero 2021). In these debates, researcher use reflexivity to explore how their own presence influences data gathering and interpretation, interviewing, identifying which concepts and phenomena matter, and the research project itself (Meadow 2013, 2018; Robinson 2022). The focus is on the researcher as the subject conducting science and their experiences, with reflexivity revealing how the researcher’s conclusions and interpretations are partial.

In addition to recognizing how they may have (not) had limited access, researchers can use reflexivity to identify how they are changed as people as a result of their study (Hanson and Richards 2019). Scholars can use identity categories to highlight how research requires exposing themselves to some harm. Researchers have identified the experience of an embodied cost for female researchers who conform to patriarchal expectations of being objects of desire to create rapport with male research objects. An “embodied cost” is “what we as researchers sometimes lose or give up in the process” (Hoang 2015:193) because some researchers “are so deeply embodied that they forever transform the researcher conducting them” (Hoang 2015:22). In such an ethnography where researchers embody femininity and/or womanhood as the subjects conducting research, researchers become the objects of desire/research for men by negotiating hyperattention and enacting daily symbolic violence to their senses of self (Hoang 2018).

Though a focus on embodied cost is critical for understanding misogynist harm, the notion of embodied cost focuses on what the researcher feels is lost. Researchers may feel loss, and possibly experience a different set of negotiations with patriarchal norms. Further, the notion of cost can also re-inscribe one’s position as the subject conducting colonial research who was harmed by the research objects, meanwhile leaving the norms of ethnography unnamed. In trans men’s experiences who transitioned at work—akin to how a trans ethnographer may alter their presentation to do research—their experiences with gender conformity were not exclusively described as a cost. Due to their prior experiences of being treated as women at work, they internalized a consciousness of being outsiders relative to the workplace’s gender schemas advantaging men; this enabled them to maintain a critical view of how dis/advantage is distributed (Schilt 2006). With respect to researchers’ self-presentations in the field, their mutable embodiments of gender and sexuality are what enable the “research objects” to use the researcher’s body as “a tabula rasa for the gendered fantasies of others” (Meadow 2013:476). Consequently, as a relational cost, a researcher’s fieldwork experiences include the researcher making their own bodies the grounds for their fantasies of their own futures (Hughes 2018; Moussawi 2021). Thus, reflexivity via embodiment identifies how researchers can become objects of research, but can limit exploring how gendered experiences are moments of relationally experiencing patriarchal gender systems (Matlon 2022).

In lieu of embodiment, researchers can use identity categories to parse apart their field experiences. Rather than static categories, researchers use relational approaches to consider how their positionality—social position as researchers and individuals embedded within overlapping social structures—influence their site experiences. Researchers can approach their identity as an “ethnographic toolkit” of multiple positionalities to use when researchers conceptualize their subjectivities as identity categories formed in relation to multiple entwined, historical processes. These kits has tools, such as visible markers of identity and invisible access to social capital, and researchers can strategically use the cultures to which they do/do not have access due to their identities to establish rapport, ask questions, and gather data (Reyes 2020).

Though this approach enables researchers to engage multiple, non-static identity categories, this form of reflexivity provides three areas for continued exploration. First, people’s and group’s histories are framed as “cultures” from which researchers as participants/observers can strategically access as tools (Gani and Khan 2024; Kennemore and Postero 2021). While this showcases how researchers’ identities influence the knowledge production process, it relies on the researcher’s assumptions about what identity categories are most salient and what they meant to others. Second, much like embodied costs, researchers’ self-formation processes can be individualized as cultural tools rather than understood as something relationally experienced. If one is not unpacking their identity category, this approach will not necessarily reveal how the researcher chose which cultural tools to use and why some tools were successful or failures. Finally, scholars caution that when researchers invoke one category, scholars can tend toward self-stereotyping, essentializing, or creating new essentialized ones (Robertson 2002). As a result, static, identity-based reflexivity can continue rather than resolve a colonial division between the research subject-object. This is because the reflexive focus is on the researcher’s identity as opposed to the use, reception, and change of that identity. When a scholar uses a static frame for reflexivity, scholars evade analyzing themself as a researcher negotiating their subjectivity development as a subject-object in colonial research (Matlon 2022; Robinson 2022).

Instead, scholars can use RSF vis-à-vis autoethnography to reflexively consider the research encounter in numerous ways. For instance, researchers could consider how their practice and access to becoming knowledge producers is bound in a colonial legacy “by who gets to be an ethnographer [in the first place] and the particular assumptions brought with them into the field” (Henson 2020:3) since colonizers used ethnographers for colonial governance practices. More specifically with respect to identity labels, subjectivity formation can reveal how said identities are themselves colonial because researcher subjectivities are formed in local activities, with others, and in relation to historic structures (Vidal-Ortiz 2004). Thus, through reflexivity with static categories, researchers using categories to name themselves rather than the conformity demanded by ethnography is akin to using the colonizer’s tongue to name one’s own experiences so that the colonizer can understand the colonized’s speech and then appropriate it as their own (hooks 1989). By conceptualizing reflexivity without categories as the sole frame, harm and healing in the field are relationally (and differentially) experienced in research activities, and this can change the researcher.

Affect

Alternative approaches relationally question the subject-object division premised in identity-based reflexivity through emotions. Invading ethnography engages racialized gender and sexual subjectivity in relation to colonialism in U.S. urban sociology. Invading ethnography draws on ethnography still being rooted in colonial expansion to name the researcher as an alien invader to a setting through affect theory (Puwar 2004). Invading ethnography “interrogates how privileges associated with a perception of heterosexuality and conformity to binary gender allow the researcher to ‘fit’ into normative spaces” to explore “how the researcher disrupts or reproduces a social space” (Adjepong 2019:29). Following how emotions mediate this experience in one’s body, the researcher’s body may accumulate cost, but emotions draw attention to what makes that cost possible: a colonial settling process. Space invaders can consider how their embodiments of conformity manifest as emotions and what this experience reveals about how a social space and practice is organized (Moussawi 2021).

A key aspect of incorporating insights from QTS on gender conformity is reconsidering how gender is analyzed. For example, “sociology still reifies gender identity as the personal property of an individuated actor” (Crawley et al. 2021:138). QTS uses emotions to highlight how people mediate gendered experiences because people exist within an affective economy (Meadow 2018). Emotions surface individual and collective bodies because emotions “create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds” (Ahmed 2004:117). As a result, emotions connect the psychic and social and the individual and collective (Ahmed 2004:119). An affective reflexivity is about how researchers feel and following that feeling as a source of information about how the researcher does their job (Dodworth 2018; Meadow 2018).

Specifically applying this lens to the interview experience, transgender and queer researchers navigate how emotions redraw the boundaries between field site and “home” and how interviewees presume their gender identity. Specifically, gay researchers have argued that “bad feelings” from being in the field can be felt “after” the field, such as when reflecting, analyzing, or writing, blurring academic divisions of field/non-field and researcher/researched (Moussawi 2021:80). Similarly, emotions can challenge the essentialism of identity categories. When discussing the passage (and repeal) of an anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination city ordinance, Cayce C.Hughes (2018) knew that interviewees shared their thoughts “to someone they read as a white, straight man, not someone whose civil rights would be protected by the very ordinance they decried” (p. 112). In recognizing how this made them feel in the moment and afterwards, Hughes identified how gender conformity differentially protected them in ways (Schilt 2006), and provided them access to knowledge that they would not receive otherwise. NU explores these developmental experiences affectively.

Data and Analysis Plan

My data are 89 pages of field notes written while I was conducting a study in North Carolina (academic fall 2018) and California (academic winter/spring 2019). The fieldnotes represented my experiences with interviews and of entering new campus spaces as a technical “outsider” to the place/space and a cultural “insider” as a doctoral candidate at an elite U.S. university. I chose my topic—how equity initiatives are used in elite U.S. faculty hiring—because I was interested in why elite universities remained demographically and epistemically White and colonial. I saw hiring as a site of social, cultural closure. Two universities were selected in each state as comparable elite pairs of public-private universities for two reasons: (1) to question how the legal, state-level prohibition to consider race in hiring could affect decision-making (at the time, California outlawed such consideration); (2) to question whether the different colonial histories of these states and universities manifested differently in elite cultures. While Carolina’s universities emerged during settler colonization in the British colonies, California’s universities emerged during U.S. imperialism and settler colonization of the western continent and Caribbean nations (Rocha Beardall 2021). My fieldnotes archived my experiences of inhabiting gender conformity while at these four elite universities. I had no prior access to these universities, aside from having attended one as an undergraduate (Berkeley) and having graduated from similarly elite U.S. universities.

I systematic outreached to participants through my university email with my name. First, I chose three departments that existed at all four campuses (one from social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities), emailed all departmental professors, and snowball sampled based on recommendations. I believed elite professors would be more likely to respond to me if I used my university-affiliated email address, stressed my naiveté as a doctoral candidate, emphasized my openness to understanding unheard elite professors, removed my pronouns from email signatures, allowed myself to be misgendered when professors spoke of me, and stated my desire for an in-person meeting in the near-future. I did so because audit studies show that professors gave access 26 percent more often to emails coded as being from White men than those coded to be women and/or from a non-White background (African American, Hispanic, Indian, or Chinese), but this racist-sexist temporal effect is supposedly limited if the meeting was requested for the near-future (Milkman, Akinola, and Chugh 2012). Thus, while racism and patriarchy structured temporal access, I tried to counteract it with my eliteness, recorded in my field notes:

Navigating that has been wild in this dynamic. . . I get yeses, presumably because some do read me as male, lose some because talking to a person of color about diversity is scary. (09/2018)

Under NU, the coding process is the “regulatory dimension” of my job. I was studying my workplace experiences and I thought of coding as a way to go further into the organization of academic power because coding is how I transformed “actuality” into data (Smith 2005:193). Coding can be a form of colonial ordering of social life—using the colonizer’s tongue—when done for generalization, leading scholars to consider coding as relational (Reyes et al. 2024). To resist coding for generalization, I followed the contradictory emotions I named in the fieldnotes. I used affect theory to probe inwards regarding subjectivity formation: to which signs was I drawn to, to which sign did I stick, and to which could I not unstick (Ahmed 2004)? I identified which emotions I experienced with respect to gender conformity and analyzed them in relation to one another to enhance rather than clarify the messiness. Through flexibly coding emotions as themes, I paid attention to emergent narratives (queer futurity) and how they were articulated and what insights were being generated. Rather than a generalized experience, this analysis highlighted three sets of signs/cycles to which I stuck that were the basis of this paper’s theorizing: leaving-returning (rootlessness), losing-regaining (comfort, language, futurity, presentation), and suppression-expression (conformity, colonialism, queerness, religiousness). In following what emotions brought my focus to, my analysis illuminates that to “make things queer is certainly to disturb the order of things” within the researcher (Ahmed 2006:565). While I was still organizing “actuality” and transforming it in ways that are legible to sociology, I did not use my coding to prescribe actions (e.g., gender conformity should make one feel these three sets of signs) or consider the most repetitive themes as the most significant. Instead, my coding identified “the terms under which what people do becomes institutionally accountable”—people will not experience what I experienced, but they will negotiate different kinds of conformity to become a researcher (Adjepong 2019; Smith 2005:113).

Negotiating Utopia

I follow Z. Nicolazzo’s (2021) autoethnographic approach to trans theorization, beginning with affective grounding (before), then wandering with gender in three phases (NU). I extend anti-colonial queer and trans critiques that have challenged essentialist identity to the case of U.S. settler colonialism in the United States. U.S. Settler colonialism is “a persistent social and political formation in which newcomers/colonizers/settlers” take a place, claim it for themselves, and ensure that the Indigenous peoples there no longer exist (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013:12). This colonization, in addition to the implementation of slavery in the British colonies, was possible because colonizers created and used identity-as-category to organize lands and peoples and because professors legitimated such domination (Glenn 2015; Wilder 2013).

In identifying the terms of my RSF autoethnographically, I name what made me aware of being a social invader in a space: forms of gender conformity (Adjepong 2019:29). Through RSF, I track negotiations of feeling constricted or freed to embody an indigenous faith practice—Sikhi—by adorning myself with a dastaar and embodying my own gendered-sexualized-Sikh aesthetic. This does not mean Sikhs claim an indigenous identity; it names the existence of a set of faith traditions and places them in relation to colonizing southern Asia.

Phase 1—RSF

Within the United States, sociologists have limitedly explored Sikh subjectivity from the lens of gendered and sexual embodiment and academic practice (Behl 2010; Kaur 2020; Kaur Singh 2017; Kaur-Bring 2020). Jasbir Puar’s (2017) conception of Sikh subjectivity from assemblage theory remains hegemonic. I follow affect theory and Du Boisian sociology and not assemblage theory given that my critique of identity-as-category relied on the history of these categories’ use in racial and colonial capitalism.² I theorize my RSF under racial and colonial capitalism, enabled through my reliance on affect, which values the “exterior exchanges” between people and institutions (Nicolazzo 2021).

As I prepared for arriving to interviews or campus daily, I would not alter some of my embodiments (beard, dastaar [Sikh turban], kara [steel bangle], voice, and skin color). Yet, I transformed myself through my “mutable” embodiments, such as with my nails, the color of my dastaar, and mannerisms. The day before I went to my first field site, I took a picture of my manicured nails with purple polish and posted a picture on a private, Instagram account made as a digital extension of my fieldnotes. Preparing to cut my nails and remove my polish, I captioned, “yayyyy to having to actively reign in femininity for the next six weeks for interviews. Sometimes being able to stick out like a sore thumb in a white town isn’t so fun” (09/2018). A non-researcher friend commented, “Keep the nails! I don’t want you to change for anyone I am very emotional about this for some reason I will leave you in peace to decide what is right for you and your work.” While another friend, who was a U.S. PhD student, clarified for how much I was going to change and responded, “whew.”

This process of researchers embedding themselves in field sites necessarily has a queer effect for gender and sexually minoritized scholars because, under racial and colonial capitalism, embedding may require disavowing who one is. For instance, with the metaphorical (heteronormative) family/society table, the table becomes wonky when queer bodies join. Joining the table springs from a desire to become “a part of the family and becoming like the family,” yet this process of becoming requires queer bodies to experience the place of rejection to be in family (Ahmed 2006:568). It is because queer bodies “are out of place in certain family gatherings, which is what produces, in the first place, a queer effect”; those who are comfortable at the table are able to inhabit and experience a form of (homo)normativity (Ahmed 2006:568). My “unrooting” of my self from body and home likened the structural and sensual experience of “rootlessness” for an ethnographer. The qualitative experience of “rootlessness” and altering self-presentations is then a queer effect. Rather than the academic table of established methodologies becoming wonky, I become wonky, as a researcher and (trans, non-binary, Sikh) person, in attempting to assimilate.

To reign myself in more, I chose to not wear painted nails, eyeliner, and clothing that would make me comfortable and chose what I thought could ensure basic levels of safety and comfort from interviewees. I played through scenarios of entering a professor’s office through different forms of expression prior to and after most interviews. I considered how entering with my usual presentation—someone with a male-assumed body, nails painted, eyeliner and kara on, full beard, dastaar-adorned, brown skin, vocal affect, glasses and jewelry, and binary-expansive professional attire—might make professors uncomfortable when I asked questions related to racism, misogyny, and diversity. While surveys indicate professors’ liberal openness, trans researchers note that cisgender people feel anxious around trans researchers who are clocked, or identified as trans (Schiffer 2022). Normal me would have been clocked. I would not usually care, but for work, I felt I had to. I wore a solid, single colored crewneck t-shirt (black, red, blue, gray, or green), black jeans (looser usual), black thigh-high boots or loafers, round glasses, lightly colored in eyebrows, only a black dastaar, and a silver kara to my interviews and campus (lest I be outed!). I performed this gender conformity as an attempt to build rapport by not making the interview/campus table wonky, a cycle of suppression-expression.

In addition to having my sense of self feel like it was slipping away from me in the present (“actively reign in”), I also experienced rootlessness as a spatial displacement. This rootlessness came through emotions around leaving-returning. Only a month after I began my fieldwork, I realized, “For better or for worse. I think I’m feeling a lot of that rootless-ness.” Not only did this feeling describe my experiences at one of my field sites, but it also later provided a connective thread across how I began to perceive arriving at my future sites, since I felt this rootlessness in anticipation: “Especially prematurely for next semester [of research].”

Negotiating what was im/mutable in my present triggered a greater temporal concern around feeling placed. It is a colonial negotiation because the expectations that researchers should conform to binary notions of gender in the field rest upon existing methodological norms, the abandonment of these Sikh embodiments, and a presumption that a singular researcher body exists for sociological comparisons (Moussawi 2021). This would have been daily loss and suppression with me not adorning myself with my dastaar, not wearing a kara, and me not keeping my hair. Yet, as these examples indicate, any such standard of full gender conformity as “man” would be a settler colonial transformation and embodiment of gender and sexual normativity (Mandair 2009; Rifkin 2011). A month in, I felt the burden of my conformity:

I’m left with an overwhelming sense of me being able to pass [as cis], though I don’t think I pass as straight. Not for a moment. And I think that colors a lot of how I’m being perceived. I’m a brown person who reads a straight but then becomes queer to them because of my voice. The affect. It reveals me, prevents me from hiding. . . And it reminds of what [Jewish male professor] said about how he’d [and colleagues] feel more comfortable by my [demographic] “difference” than he did by how I [may have] positioned myself [intellectually and politically]. There is no winning. The default of comfort is truly a white subjectivity’s experience and that is how we approach, not only ethnography, but reflexivity. (09/2018)

Had I fully conformed, there would have been a colonial cost to fit the mold of a “non-Sikh,” brown, male researcher (Gill 2022). As a result, whether alternatives existed, I chose to suppress myself and conform with cisheteronormative ideas of gender to express a changed version of myself.

In addition to adopting binary gender conformity, my gender-sexuality-faith negotiations were also negotiations with colonial representations of Sikhs. For example, some White male professors would remark on my dastaar as reason for justifying “Western” norms and systems and resisting efforts of equity-based change because both he and I could sit in the same room with different religious belief systems. One scholar was a researcher of global violence and was familiar with “turbans.” Yet, it was unclear if I was being made into a non-Western subject in his presence (a south Asian immigrant), or if I was being assimilated under the benevolence of Western norms in his presence (a now-Westerner with non-Western values) (Puar 2017). This experience necessitated a colonial formulation and classification of certain practices as secular/religious and traditional/modern. Yet this was not my experience. As a non-Christian on campus, my gender and faith presentation brought attention to the unnamed colonial Christianity foundational to U.S. settler colonialism (Rifkin 2011). While I altered my mannerisms and voice to (attempt to) communicate a cisheteronormativity, I felt as if I suppressed parts of my Sikh-researcher subjectivity to express parts of my Sikh-researcher subjectivity (Kaur and kehal 2022). This suppression-expression negotiation is precisely a (settler) colonial negotiation prompted in academic practice for Sikh researchers who queer spaces as “visual” Sikhs and wonkify themselves to conform with binary gender expectations as U.S. academic researchers. What I felt was a paternalistic tolerance of non-Christian religious practice, or U.S. settler colonialism through the modality of the interviewee’s U.S.-based racism. I decided not to challenge this point because I believed it may make the interviewee uncomfortable to answer future questions.

With attention to RSF, ethnography requires a queering of the researcher. Through my daily adaptations to comfort my interviewees, I explicitly transformed myself as an object of research (Hoang 2018). By understanding queerness as a type of experiential wonkiness, a queer researcher’s subjectivity is further “queered” when they enter a field site. A researcher’s “queering” of a space (as space invader) when they arrive is contingent on which histories of meanings the interviewee ascribes onto them and which ones the researcher presumes their interviewees ascribes onto them. Yet, when researchers alter themselves in ways that disrupt their own gendered ways of embodiment, they initiate a queering of themselves—we invade ourselves. My conception of my Sikh-researcher subjectivity, through RSF analysis, is as a dastaar-adorned Sikh who is constantly embodying their gender and sexuality with their faith, while moving as a space invader who queers the space they enter and themselves when embodying colonial gender.

Phase 2—Regaining a Consciousness

Still dressed in my fieldwork presentation, I walked into my bedroom after finishing my first round of field work in Fall 2018. I felt accomplished. I exhaled. North Carolina was the site for a national debate over transgender rights and a major battlefield regarding immigrant deportations. I came back from the field with an imprint of field work being “good,” because nothing “terrible” had happened. All I had done was closet myself for a few months—like when I was younger—why would my sense of self be different? As I walked into my room and began unpacking, packages caught my eye. Before leaving, I had begun crafting a gender-affirming wardrobe because my two prior birthdays were marked with their own experiences of transphobia related to clothing in public spaces. I had forgotten about the packages:

As I was putting away the clothes I had with me in NC, I saw the boxes and the wrapped clothing from that shopping, and I almost burst into tears looking at what I had bought myself. I had been feeling very nervous and scared about re-owning myself when I came back because the world seems to be getting bleaker, but then I saw these clothes and all of a sudden, the voice from my past, the one that was struggling through a pain, spoke to me and said, “not today. not in this life bitch.” (10/2018)

While I did feel loss—reflecting something I gave up for the ethnography—I regained a consciousness—a desire that queerness was meant to resolve in the future. The “voice from my past” indicated a temporal dislocation responding to spatial dislocation:

I reminded myself of who I am from the past, reminded myself of the future I imagined for myself from the past. And that this is the future I want. That is the future I will work to make possible. Especially since it felt so impossible for others to live. It feels like so many people would want to live this type of freedom, and here I have it. So I have to use it for something to do something, for something. (10/2018)

The voice-in-the-present acknowledged my experiences and recognized that my emotions were not inexperience, but were data (Meadow 2018:158).

In arriving to these clothes and home, my sense of “rootedness” being out of the field challenged how I had felt “rootless” in the field (Moussawi 2021). Before leaving, I had imagined my job as gathering data, revising my assumptions, and returning back to who I was. When I returned, I revised my assumptions! I returned “changed,” but did not experience this change as a cost. Instead, I experienced an enhanced consciousness: a growing awareness that my sense of self was changing, resulting from my invasion and how I used gender conformity to invade social spaces. Arriving home, I regained a paused future. I had enhanced consciousness around how conformity in academic practice was altering my subjectivity in the field. Experiencing the wonkiness/self-invasion, I questioned the importance of conformity to be an academic.

When I returned home, I returned to a version of myself that past-me had planned to be but realized would not come into existence because the first round of fieldwork changed how I related to universities. The negotiation over suppressing and losing my gendered and sexualized faith expression had, upon returning home, led to regaining my imagined future and expressing my queerness and faith in that future, outside conformity and colonialism. As a result of (badly) attempting to perform cisheteronormativity for my ethnography (Halberstam 2011), I experienced my queerness slip into the future. While writing about an experience of driving through a side road in North Carolina,

it really hit me that [finding inclusion in this institution] will not happen in my lifetime. I KNEW this, but I’m talking about feeling it in my core. It is very reminiscent of how I felt about my queerness and gender. (09/2018)

Despite experiencing this rootlessness, the exclusion expressed a calm because I found both joy and pain through the enhanced consciousness (Muñoz 2009). Through Sikhi, this experience can be described as glimpsing sehaj and anand in my negotiations of dubidhaa: negotiating an existential illusion or dilemma between material conflict of worldly and otherworldly belonging. Through sehaj, a gradual and continuous effort to remove one’s ego to resonate with one’s existential core, a Sikh moves closer to anand, a state of spiritual bliss and consciousness, wherein such dubidhaa is not experienced.

I regained this suppressed queerness when I took a trip away from one site in North Carolina to another in California. I noted, “Even if I wasn’t presenting my whole self, I brought my whole self with me. And that was powerful for me. So powerful, I started stumbling on my words and couldn’t form sentences in a coherent way” (09/2018). I realized that the ability to express was a loss I experienced. My conformity denied a right that I had fought to gain. In leaving one field site, I regained a language and sense of being:

words and phrases coming together, with the filling of meaning happening in my head. Because that’s where the meaning behind my questions and conversations [about my experiences] have been hidden as of late . . . They haven’t found home while I’m out here in the field. And it was only when I was placed in a context where my whole self is unquestioned, that I could finally see the extent to which I was withholding. (09/2018)

Though I reflected in my fieldnotes, I was limited in having open discussions. As a result, my developmental changes—meanings, thoughts, and feelings around queerness—remained locked because I absorbed all the wonkiness. On one sole occasion, a queer friend visited me and I noted that queer expression included what I was allowed to speak into existence: “In the types of statements I can make comfortably around other people. . . Not only in the sense of ‘dirty jokes,’ but in the comradery that exists within that queerness.” (09/2018). Amidst my self-presentation negotiations, I felt caught between the different versions of myself that past-me envisioned; with my friend, I regained a futurity, remembering what it felt to be queer.

I also realized I had another round of research and planned on enacting a similar conformity to ensure that the research design was consistent and not biased. While I recognized a need for me “to do something, for something” on account of the gender-related freedoms I had as a U.S.-based researcher with citizenship, I also planned to suppress that freedom for the sake of academic science. Even as a I attempted to distance myself from a queerness-in-the-present, I simultaneously experienced my actual, queer self as going beyond my reach (Ahmed 2006:566). I was not the person I was before I had left for fieldwork so “returning” to a past-me was not on my trajectory because realizations in the field changed my relationship to myself and the academy. I was arriving to a changing version of myself.

Rather than accumulating a cost as a response to performing binary gender conformity, I developed an enhanced consciousness to continuously use the future as a place to imagine safety and freedom. Temporality was a way to negotiate the suppressions and losses I enacted on myself and those expected of me through gender conformity. Next, as I negotiated rootlessness—leaving sites and losing and suppressing myself—I asked where did I root myself—find comfort—in the field?

Phase 3—Assimilating to the U.S. Settler Veil

One “effect” of cisifying myself was prompting me to identify how my comfort was embedded in a history of colonial domination given the sites I was studying. This prompted me to reflect on my time at my “home” university, and brought renewed attention to my time in Carolina and how I established myself. After returning from my North Carolina sites, I realized a part of my relationship to my home institution in stark terms:

Being at [Uni] after experiencing UNC and Duke reminds me of the comfort I had created here over the years, and how that was lacking while I was over there. It really underscores how hard it is to feel “part of the community.” (10/2018)

At first, I thought I felt the loss of my established community because I left for work; yet, I gained a different understanding when I returned. My ethnographic experiences “really made me think about the hierarchy of inclusion . . . I know I’ve never felt included within my own [university home networks], but there was a sense of ‘not not belonging’ while I’m at [Uni]” (09/2018). Thus, even the “placedness” or comfort I experienced at my home university was grounded in a temporal problem: my ability to no longer conform did not translate into belonging after field work because my negotiations of self/home had changed my sense of belonging.

Through gaining access to an enhanced consciousness on compulsive gender conformity in academia, I had to ask, if I felt “rootless” upon leaving this comfort, to what had I become “rooted?” The community I relied on to create comfort at my home university lead me to be more critical of belonging on campuses. We collectively expressed how time, resources, and life experiences constructed some comfort for me in predominantly White-serving, settler institutions, particularly given elite universities’ specific histories of wealth accumulation from using slavery, enacting indigenous dispossession and ethnic-cleansing, and philanthropy (Grande 2018; Wilder 2013). Quite literally because my University and my four sites of study have explicit, acknowledged colonial histories of Indigenous removal and chattel enslavement. By arriving changed and wishing to no longer suppress myself, my desire to be rooted in the academy indicated that there is always some level of belonging on the periphery if one is willing to negotiate some of their existence to express colonialism.

When in my California sites, I continued reflecting on my constructed comfort, seeing it as colonialism:

feeling less out of place simply means that I blend in more now as one of the token folks of color on [Stanford’s] campus probably. For example, I am actively trying to assimilate [as cisheteronormative], so in a sense, feeling less out of place simply means that I feel that I’ve sufficiently assimilated to what it would be like to be a version of me here on campus. (01/2019)

Yet, assimilation did not mean inclusion or respect of gender diversity, as out-of-placeness/assimilation brought its own trials. I noted, “I don’t like it particularly. This version of me remains antsy, not happy, and constantly confused.” The confusion reached such a level that I reached out to a friend who had spent their undergraduate years at Stanford, and they shared, “you have to have a bit of ignorance in order to enjoy [that] place fully” because it is “Disneyland” (01/2019). To be ignorant, I rooted my energies on following my interview script, regularly taking detailed field notes, and being a consistent interviewer to give me a sense of placedness. My ethnography became a stabilizing source of normalcy as I increasingly, internally, and ironically questioned how it was that the objects I interviewed convinced themselves that their context and behavior was “normal” (Rifkin 2013), even though I was doing the same as I made myself wonky.

As I followed my RSF, I saw the demand for ethnographic embeddedness (placedness) as tied to a demand for assimilation for researchers of particular backgrounds. For instance, “Not only have I known how to experience a full week of my queerness being suffocated, but I’ve had constant reminders of how ‘easily’ I could navigate the academy” if I were to fully assimilate (09/2018). Regarding “suffocation,” queerness and emotions worked in tandem. In suppressing a particular part of myself to embody ethnographic comfort, my academic practice continued to transform my subjectivity into a series of transactions (leaving-arriving, losing-regaining, suppression-expression). These transactions brought attention to a push-and-pull of emotions: pain made me enforce a denial of self, and the existence of this pain then provided insight into its causes and solutions (Halberstam 2011). My emotions aided in identifying why I sought placedness for comfort in a settler institution and illuminated how being implicated could be named and addressed. While in the field, I compared my time in and outside the field, reflecting how I exist as a queer object in academic spaces even as the subject who conducts research:

I embody it. I practice it. I refuse to let it be silenced. By my mere existence and voice. But in these spaces, I do not get to claim such presence. I have to reserve myself. Quiet myself. Hurt myself. (09/2018)

Joy is not juxtaposed as an opposite to pain; rather, they are intimately connected due to my ethnography and U.S. colonial histories of gender and sexual suppression.

After reading Vivek Shreya’s I’m Afraid of Men in the field, I reflected on joy and pain:

There is a love in queerness. And my distance from it as of late because of this [field work] really made itself clear as I read Shreya’s book. . .The joy I find in my whole self. I am my whole self at all time[s], but my whole self does not get to speak at all times. . . Because right now, I am silencing me. And there is nothing quite as painful as having a hand on your throat, and that hand being your own. After all the time I’ve spent to free my throat from my hand, [I] now see it being placed there again—in the name of my work. (09/2018)

In rejecting pain as defining my experience, my slipping-away queerness came into sharper focus. I experienced my queerness as elsewhere, not immediately accessible in the ways I was accustomed to expressing it visually. As I reminded and cautioned myself, the person I missed was “still here. . . [and] valid regardless” (09/2018). Thus, queerness was in the future and on the horizon, and gender conformity in the present was a site of continuous affective, negotiations of a relational self.

Discussion

The NU analysis provides an alternative to using (static) identity categories for reflexivity. NU uses RSF as an affective avenue to narrate and analyze researchers’ experiences, while challenging the colonial division of subject-object in reflexive qualitative methodologies. I show how productive it can be for U.S.-based qualitative researchers to conceptualize themselves as space invaders and attend to the consequential self-formation processes. By considering how I was not only a non-White researcher only seeking to build rapport with predominantly White interviewees, for instance, I saw how I used gender conformity to “invade” new campuses and invade my own sense of self (Adjepong 2019:41). While interviewees were comfortable enough to share their thoughts with me, I could only cosplay cisnormativity so much to avoid becoming an object, as two professors’ comments about their comfort around me revealed. NU specifically unearths qualitative methodologies’ colonial roots. In placing these analyses within Du Boisian understandings of racial and colonial capitalism, my analyses identified an enhanced consciousness as part of my developmental experiences, extending existing Du Boisian insights on double consciousnesses (Falcón 2008; Lynne 2021). A Du Boisian double consciousness identifies the experiences of Black Americans developing their senses of self and coming up against the veil, realizing how White, colonial Americans pathologically perceived them. More recently, scholars have considered how colonialism formed transnational relations that people have to locally negotiate to develop their senses of self. Sylvanna M. Falcón (2008) and Alyssa Lynne (2021) extend double consciousness into “mestiza” and “paired” double consciousness, respectively, to follow how cisnormative and neocolonial oppression operate to gender and sexualize lived experiences. For Falcón, this extension gave particularity to self-formation under gendered racism while for Lynne, this extension named the two veils (between kathoey and dominant cisgender worlds, and between kathoey and dominant transgender worlds) that produced two types of consciousness that kathoey pair together for self-formation processes. In my case, my self-formation under the settler veil emphasized needing to use gender conformity to form a distinct researcher subjectivity, only to realize I was always a space invader. By doing reflexive analyses through RSF, NU externalizes the heterogenous experiences of differentially coming in contact with “veils” as dominator and dominated across contexts.

At its core, my data represented experiences of gender dysphoria, which was initiated by my choice to cisify myself, and confronting a projected, cisgender-heterosexual image of myself that I did not recognize. Through the confrontation, I developed a “second sight” to contend with my constant dehumanization while gaining a consciousness that could neutralize “the mirroring effects of the veil” (Itzigsohn and Brown 2015:236). NU is a means of narrating and illuminating this process for those who experience it during aspects of academic life requiring conformity. My data suggests that when qualitative researchers change/queer themselves to gain access to knowledge for research, they are assimilating into the settler veil, or accepting the veil’s projections of self. They queer themselves into settler normativity for an unknown period of time.

The analysis illuminates how a researcher’s negotiations of practicing gender conformity corresponds to a willingness to be entangled with, or stuck to, settler colonialism. For example, with attention to the settling process of settler colonialism, scholars can consider how their academic experiences of U.S. anti-Black racism as structure are tied to settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and heteropaternalism. This stuckness also helps to think about the (real/imagined) perception of “cowboy ethnographers,” or ethnographers who exploit their study participants and research for their “own professional or narcissistic end” (Contreras 2012:26). If one were concerned that they practiced this, using NU would delineate the ways that the scholar is stuck to the research enterprise and what actions they took in order to have research products for their career (i.e., gender conformity), revealing where they exploited participants. NU can be used to reveal ethical conundrums to reconcile.

The analysis offered considers how affect mediates what academic practices do to researchers. A queer and trans academic researcher “invading” LGBTQIA+ centers for research could use NU to analyze how they experienced that site, which would be different from mine. When I enter such spaces, my faith is immediately discussed because others often perceive me as an accessible site for which to negotiate their own faith-queer-trans experiences. In considering why faith becomes a primary marker of difference by which others perceive me, I could use NU to relationally consider the role of colonial and anti-Black Christianity in producing my experiences at that center.

Conclusion

As scholars develop nuanced understandings of knowledge production under cisnormativity and colonialism, these approaches enable researchers to narrate how they are changing as researchers. This paper’s intervention is striving for a future horizon in which colonial science does not operate (McKittrick 2021). This paper presents gender conformity in U.S. academic practice as a relational process by which researchers experience U.S. settler colonialism. In investigating who emerges from the field, the paper reframes the implications of “fitting in” with the U.S. academy. For instance, gender conformity negotiations are commonplace: graduate trainees working with advisors, preparing for the job talk, teaching/learning in the classroom, or professional development seminars. NU enables scholars to push deeper into the nexus of U.S. academic power and, if they choose, reassess the governing norms of quality to which they conform as maintaining settler colonialism (Tuck and Yang 2014). For instance, I was able to see which aspects of my presentation I deemed as (non)negotiable to change—as tools—in order to fit into the field only by affectively deconstructing the experiences I associated with different identity categories and how cisheteronormativity manifested for me.

I used NU to show how the researcher subjectivity I was building aligned with racial and colonial colonialism. NU simultaneously can be used to form researcher subjectivities that disrupt racial and colonial colonialism. When using NU, researchers identify the mundane decisions that assimilate them to the settler veil and what this feels like. Consequently, these mundane decisions are the sites for disruption. Making your interviewee feel comfortable—particularly when studying power up—is a recommended practice because you can extract more knowledge from their network. But, if racism or colonialism makes them uncomfortable, and derails the interview or study, this is productive failure; as a queer child fails to assimilate to the family table, this researcher would fail to assimilate to the academic family that is comfortable with racism or colonialism (Halberstam 2011). To fully understand the effects of academic practices on researchers, greater attention on the emotions that guide sense of worth and value in the U.S. academy can chart routes for academic science that is not colonial science.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

prabhdeep singh kehal

Notes

Author Biography

prabhdeep singh kehal is the founder and manager of the Sikh LGBTQIA+ Oral History Project. They are the author of Hirable: How Professors Justify Aristocratic Inclusion (under contract with Duke University Press) and received their PhD from Brown University. Their current research explores how gender and sexually marginalized people of faith use storytelling practices to imagine liberatory futures within the US-American Sikh diaspora.

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