On Doing Go-Along Interviews: Toward Sensuous Analyses of Everyday Experiences

Going Along With Trans, Queer, and Non-Binary Youth

I selected the go-along as a method for my study of everyday experiences of TQNB youth because performing interviews alongside the young people in my study in-step with their routine movements and journeys afforded me the opportunity to keep the “everyday” as part of what was to be examined. Rather than talk with young people about their everyday experiences in locations that meant nothing to them, the go-alongs required that the interview—and therefore the research process, itself—takes place within the times and spaces that youths’ “everyday” life was occurring. This meant that the thing I was seeking to examine would be brought in step with research process and become part of what was to be examined and not just an idea or concept that participants and I would discuss in the abstract. Using go-along allowed for analyses of young people’s movements through “different spatial contexts that provide insight into a broad variety of opportunities for space-usage and participation” (Flick et al., 2019, p. 802). By using go-alongs, the everydayness of youth’s actions, movements, and experiences came into view in ways that they would not have if a more traditional interview would have been used. In short, the go-alongs are “an ethnographic research tool that brings to the foreground some of the transcendent and reflexive aspects of lived experience as grounded in place” (Kusenbach, 2003, p. 456). Using go-alongs allowed me, as I will explain further below, to account not just for how one participant, Foxxy, talked about the stares from passersby they routinely felt moving through the city as a non-binary person. Instead, being by Foxxy’s side as they made these comments while walking side-by-side into a subway station allowed me to process what Foxxy was saying as I witnessed fellow commuters look at Foxxy seemingly to indicate that something about their initial gendered reading of Foxxy’s body necessitated a closer look. Likewise, the narrative of a go-along with Scarlet when she took me to the gym with her demonstrates how I accounted for my body during the research process. While I had anticipated doing the go-alongs would take me to places and locations I had not been before nor was familiar with, what became very obvious during this early go-along as Scarlet and I stretched, lifted weights, and moved together through her gym routine was how the physicality and embodiment of the go-alongs would feel for me. Accounting for how going-along with the youth made me feel was necessary because my affective responses to moving and being with them impacted, for instance, the types of questions I would ask, how and when I noticed youths’ reactions to their environs, and how I analyzed the ways they moved through this world. During my workout with Scarlet I was forced to grapple with how to exercise a similar attentiveness to the ways my body affected that which transpired during other go-alongs—even the ones that did cause me to break a sweat—and what that might show about the experience of “youth.”

I offer these two moments—one with Scarlet at the gym and one with Foxxy entering a subway station—where go-alongs with participants elucidated particular aspects of youths’ lives and how to research them that other methods would not capture. They show how the process of doing research itself is as much a “finding” as what might be analyzed about the “data” afterward. As Spinney (2015) argues, “[a] key point then is the way that go-alongs in their different forms assist recollection by connecting participants and researchers with the materialities of doing” (p. 236). In re-presenting how things were done during the go-alongs, the narratives that follow are offered in a manner that mimics how one walks down a city sidewalk—or how one “does” their movements through city spaces. Rather than attempting to elucidate complete or full pictures of the youth in my study, the depictions of the go-alongs are written as if the reader encounters each young person in their own movements through the city. The narratives are meant to mimic the act of encountering passersby as one walks down a city street and through urban spaces. For instance, when turning around a corner, one then starts to “make sense” of the people on the sidewalk who come into view. Likewise, as each narrative starts the reader is tasked with considering how the young people in the narrative “come into view” through the writing. During the first narrative, the reader meets Scarlet during a go-along at her gym where my moving (and working out) alongside her prompts theorizing about researcher positionality and the power dynamics inherent in doing research with young people. The second describes a go-along with Foxxy where the environment around us—namely the speculative gazes of passersby—becomes both part of what Foxxy is discussing and then part of the experience of doing the go-along when collective weight of the gazes forces Foxxy to stop talking and, nearly, stop the go-along. This pair of narratives work to produce writing about go-alongs that “venture[s] out into the lives from which they emerge” (Stewart, 2016, p. 96) to sense better and to get a better sense of youths’ everyday experiences.

On the Mat With Scarlet

Scarlet comes out of the women’s locker room where she has just locked up her bag and leads me past rows of treadmills, workout bikes, and weight machines to the mat-covered stretching area on the other side of the gym. Generic pump-up pop music drones from the industrial speakers in the ceiling above, as a sparse collection of people occupy various pieces of equipment throughout the windowless basement level gym. While this is Scarlet’s first go-along (and only the third one of the study), she and I already have an established rapport prior to her joining the study so the conversation flows easily as we move through the maze of machines during the early moments of the go-along. As we settle on the stretching mat, Scarlet asks if I go to a gym and then proceeds laughs out loud when I joke about being too frugal to get a gym membership since I am only in New York temporarily doing research. Her laughter infects me, and I find myself chuckling a bit as I follow her stretching lead, mimicking her body’s movements as we move to lay down, side-by-side on the mat. We shift into nonchalantly talking about what she usually does at the gym and I start to notice how good the stretching feels after my earlier run over the Williamsburg Bridge. As Scarlet and I lay there on our backs with our arms wrapped around our legs pulling them into our chests, I notice the conversation has stopped. It strikes me that I should fill the silence with a question, but I come up blank, unable to think of a single thing to ask in this moment as my arms hug tighter around my legs as my anxiety about the silence grows. A tinge of panic creeps up my spine, and I cannot believe only moments into the go-along that I seem to have run out of questions to ask. My mind races as I lay there facing the ceiling, my knees hovering close to my face, still unable to produce a single thing to say to Scarlet. It hits me, as we lay in these positions, that I never envisioned doing an interview in this contorted, physical position. Finding myself (quite literally) flat on my back is, for some reason, preventing me from speaking.

What I had not prepared for in planning this study was what doing the research would feel like and how my body would sense the physical actions of the go-alongs. Moving with young people through various places and activities includes placing critical attention on how embodying this process actually feels and how the embodied acts of doing the research feel as well. For me, as a cis-man with White-skinned privilege and the ways my body is read, such attention must include reflection on how certain systems and networks of power might affect TQG youth of color in ways that I do not experience myself. To navigate interlocking systems encountered by queer, non-binary, and trans youth of color, I turn to Brockenbrough’s (2015) advice that extending a “[queer of colour] critique to educational research provides a new opportunity for collective discussions on the affordances and limitations of varied modes of knowledge production for scholarly analyses on [queer, trans, and non-binary youth] of color” (p. 39). For this project, this includes how I approach the experiences of my participants—who are predominately trans and non-binary, of color, and homeless or transitionally housed—through lenses that concurrently examine ways youth describe their lives as raced, gendered, sexual, and classed subjects, especially because I occupy multiple positions of privilege. Given the mobile nature of the project—which includes moving with youth through various spaces and, I am learning in this moment on my back with Scarlet, literally and figuratively contorting my body to move alongside them—this consideration is especially important in thinking through how my researcher positionality plays out discursively and materially as we move through various streets and neighborhoods of New York City and robust, diverging groups of people we encounter along the way. How we are encountered as a pair, moving down the sidewalk, sitting on the subway, or laying flat on our backs as we stretch at the gym, has to be filtered through the lenses of the various neighborhoods we pass through, the demographics of those people around us, and the contexts of the activities in which we are engaged. At times, it could be argued the presence of my (generally) normative, masculine-presenting, White body stands to offer the participants a respite from the surveillance they receive from police, transit workers, store clerks, and passersby; my sitting beside participants as they pass time on park benches, in computer labs, or at public libraries, offers them an hour or so of time when an official would be less likely to ask them to move along because my body is one that is most often allowed to take up space in public settings without interruption from authorities. The point, however, is not to try to pinpoint exactly how our bodies are read and perceived in tandem, but to account for how place and the people inhabiting and constructing the places the go-alongs pass through affect how participants are able to move with me by their side.

Acknowledging my positionings and reflecting on the attendant privileges of how my presence is read by other passersby while moving alongside the participants involves methods and analysis that are, in of themselves, mobile. Furthermore, to better appreciate the complex, intersectional forces (Cohen, 1997) affecting young peoples’ lives, such analysis does not stop after a single viewing. Recognizing, beyond the difference in identity between my participants and myself, vast disparities exist between the ways in which we inhabit the world, namely relationships to/with police, public space, the ability to access stores, education and schools, government agencies, medical institutions, and so on. Such distance between how the world appears to work for someone with my body and privilege and how it operates for others must be taken into account in my research practices. Therefore, I am committed to looking for movement in the times and spaces when the flow of knowledge is thought to have ceased by examining how the normative logics of Whiteness, cisnormativity, and heteronormativity construct knowledge as “a decomposed by-product of something that has already happened to us” (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 1). In this study, analyzing my movements alongside those of the youth are methodological moves toward taking into account how the asking of questions from my positionality, and within the various social settings we were located, affects how and why the participants say what they say while also accounting for how their movements, silences, and other nonverbal communications express certain types of information about their daily experiences. Placing my body, positionality, and privilege under examination offers a necessary reminder of the ways the constructions of my identities are part of the systems of knowledge production that this project intends to critique and interrupt, especially given the youth in the study and the theories I draw on to do this work.

Given the differential of power dynamics imbued within traditional approaches to researcher/researched relationship, I work to disengage from “the researcher being perceived as a knowing subject, [and instead work] from a relational perspective, [where] the researcher is one who becomes in the process of inquiring alongside another” (O’Donoghue, 2013, p. 403, emphasis added). While the study explores everyday experiences as they happen, I concurrently acknowledge that my presence alongside youth during their daily journeys instantly makes them anything but “everyday.” This conceit, however, does not make this a futile exercise. Rather, acknowledging the research process as one about social production as much as it is about discovery (and production) of social worlds allows for this study to explore what might be learned about youths’ lives through lenses that appreciate knowledge and knowledge production about youth bodies and lives as always and already contingent, contextual, and in flux. This shift from conventional approaches to doing research insists on pushing back against research data as something to be mined from participants or as something waiting to be valiantly discovered by researchers. As such, my interest lies in the ways knowledge about young people is on the move, suggesting then the necessity for my methodology, and also my methods, to be similarly mobile. Focusing this investigation on the participants’ abilities to be mobile, to move, and to experience their everyday practices is “an attempt to identify the characteristics of urban space that creates the fields and vortexes that determine the rhythm and tempo of urban life” (Shortwell & Brown, 2014, p. 4). The goal, however, is not only to listen for and experience the rhythm and tempo but also to ask what the rhythm and tempo of the everyday does to the experiences of the lives of trans, queer, and non-binary youth.

Following this symphonic metaphor, listening for the rhythm and tempo of youths’ lives involves attending to the harmony, melody, and syncopation of their routines, as well as the elements that might be deemed offbeat, atonal, and off-key. This moment on the mat with Scarlet provokes a constant thinking and rethinking of what I am seeing and hearing from the young people as we move together, meaning that I remain interested in moments that perhaps seem like a distraction from or are in the way of some “fact” or “truth” about youths’ experiences, which instead might indicate some facet about the way youth are able or unable to move through the world. Given the intimate nature of the go-alongs—that they bring me in close proximity with youth’s bodies and routines—what can be gleaned about youth that self-select into a project involving me being with them in various places and why others might choose not to take part? How do the noises of and movements around and through the city during the go-along interrupt or shift the flow or topic of conversation? How are some participants using the research project to their own benefit when they refuse to adhere to the meager requirements I had for the go-alongs? Reflecting upon these quandaries involves multiple listenings from different material and discursive viewpoints. Taking note of when youth seek to cross a street, where in the subway car they choose to sit, and which path they use to get from point to point are all clues about how they see and interpret the world, which reminds me to let their movements lead and for me to follow suit. I take up the concept of moving alongside, both methodologically and in terms of methods for doing research with youth, to hopefully provoke “new understandings of the ways in which we think, look, listen, perceive and relate to others, and our surroundings, [thereby] facilitating new opportunities for the creation of a new form of political civility through listening, encounter and dialogue” (Ramsden, 2014, p. 226). Moreover, it facilitates new ways to encounter trans, non-binary, and queer youth, including queer, trans, and non-binary youth of color, in the research process.

In addition, the movements with young people incite interactions with the various facets that comprise the city: people, buildings, vehicles, monuments, businesses, outside spaces, fauna, and countless others. Being mobile in the city, as other parts of the city are mobile around them, permits various perspectives about how the participants encounter and make sense of the worlds around them; moreover, I witness reactions to the youth from other people we pass, which offers me insight into how the world makes sense of the youth themselves. Given that I am especially concerned with the stagnation of the construction of youth subjectivities and the role that research and researchers often play in this erasure of the ebb and flow of meaning-making processes, vital to this study is this methodological frame that simultaneously accounts for the ways youth navigate through the minefield of knowledge systems, especially those controlling race, gender, sexuality, and economics.

The desire to engage with these everyday moments means that there are material and affective consequences affecting the flow and feeling of the research itself. In this moment on the mat with Scarlet, I realize that I have to release the residual notions of researcher “propriety,” that I have to stop worrying about what would make me be perceived as a “good” researcher (even when laying down with my legs up in the air) and allow myself to follow along with the young people on their journey. To prevent some unforeseen error, I feel that I have to maintain some undefined level of researcher boundaries and professionalism. In this moment, however, I recognize the yoke around my neck is self-induced and that I have already proved, many times over, that my commitments and intentions were reciprocal and ethical. While there is always a continual amount of self-reflection one can and should to do check-in along the way, it took me lying here on a mat with my legs above my head to realize I was holding myself back. I had to be able to twist my body, physically and metaphorically, as we move about the city in ways I could not always anticipate beforehand and to recognize that being able to do so would make for more open relationships with the young people.

I let go of the tight squeeze around my legs when I realize that Scarlet has already sat up and is starting to move to another part of the gym. Settling at a chest press machine, Scarlet has taken the lead in the conversation, once more. Before starting a set, she asks me if I think the boys are cuter in New York or Vancouver, the two places she knows I have recently lived. Amused by her grilling of my love life, I confess that I find guys in New York often to be more coiffed and put together than those in Vancouver, adding, “. . . everyone in New York has a look, you know?” Replacing the machine to its resting position, she chimes in, “Yeah, slightly depressed and hungry!” We laugh, again, as we switch spots, and I sit down at the machine. Looking at the weight she used, I first think to leave it be, even though it would not provide me with much of challenge to lift. Feeling emboldened from my horizontal epiphany on the mat, I decide to move the pin down more than a couple weight levels. Instantly clocking my bravado with the weights, Scarlet guffaws, “Oh, okay, now we are just getting disrespectful . . . you’re gonna be like Popeye doing that!” Not to be outdone, I chide back, “If this is gonna be my one time at the gym in months, I might as well make it worth it!” Engaging my arms, chest, and back muscles, I push the handles forward. A smile crawls across my face as I exhale and look over at Scarlet, who is still chuckling quietly to herself, waiting for me to finish my set so she can have another go.

Foxxy and the Shoes of Many Colors

Foxxy is sitting just inside the entrance to the college building, where we have met for their four previous go-alongs. Foxxy sits at a table with a woman, their bodies in close enough proximity that I first assume they are acquaintances. It is not until a few minutes into the go-along that it becomes clear that Foxxy is just borrowing this stranger’s cell phone charger. It appears that either the length of the cord prevents Foxxy from moving more than a foot away from the woman, or Foxxy is unable to move any further away because they are intermittently checking their phone as it charges. As I sit with the pair at the table, I register the woman’s terse body language indicates that perhaps acquiescing to Foxxy’s request is pushing her to the limit of what she is willing to offer a stranger. She seems to be slowly reconsidering the social graces which compelled her to allow Foxxy to borrow her charger as she darts her eyes in Foxxy’s direction every time they reach for their phone and into what the woman perceives to be her own personal space.

This is not the first time I have taken note of Foxxy’s understanding of “personal space” in their movements through the city. During their first go-along months earlier, after swiping into a subway station, Foxxy walked directly toward the only wooden subway bench on the platform. The bench had four cordoned-off spaces to sit and was occupied by two women in the first and third spaces, the second woman having placed two large bags next to her on the fourth space. Foxxy elected to sit down in the remaining open seat between the two women and continued to talk to me as I stood in front of them. The women, while not a part of the conversation, were shoulder-to-shoulder with Foxxy, and could clearly hear everything we said. This did not appear to phase Foxxy as they did not lower their voice nor veer away from the subject matter we had been discussing before Foxxy made these two women part of the go-along by sitting in between them.

While Foxxy’s desire to sit might come out of a physical need to be seated, it is striking (in both the situation on the platform and today at the table) that Foxxy takes up space near strangers (at least women) in ways that slightly push social decorum. At least, Foxxy’s determinations of where to place their body in relation to others is striking to me, as it is much closer than I, as a cis-man, would choose to stand near women in public whom I do not know. It is almost as if Foxxy is trying to blend into other feminine presenting people around them; that is, if Foxxy is close enough to women in public spaces, then Foxxy might get read as being “one of the girls” and avoid being perceived as someone who is performing gender in ways that are too often policed by people Foxxy encounters in their everyday life. Perhaps, too, Foxxy feels safer with feminine presenting people, or in trying to take up space in proximity to female bodies Foxxy is attempting to show to these women that Foxxy, themself, is not someone to fear. It might also be a result of the ways Foxxy was socialized as a child as someone who was allowed to take up space in public without thinking about the repercussions. Given that Foxxy is often perceived as doing gender “incorrectly”—that is, someone whose gender presentation and identity make them a constant target of scrutiny by those who Foxxy passes by and takes up space alongside in their everyday movements through the city—the negotiation of where to stand or sit on a subway platform or determination of one’s sense of “personal space” is fraught with gendered expectations and assumptions.

At the table, Foxxy is eating a matzah sandwich with lox and cream cheese, the last of their leftover stash from Passover the month before. Through bites, they mention their recent efforts to get a legal name change. There is an excitement in their voice about completing this process, that doing so would help them feel more like themself; that changing their name will help alleviate their self-described “gender dysphoria” they have long experienced; that the name will offer even just a nominal relief to the experience of living in-between in this highly gender-binaried world. This leads them to reflect about feeling uncomfortable as a kid, that they knew they liked “girly” things and did not mesh well with the Orthodox Jewish students in their schools, where they felt additionally outcast being of Middle Eastern descent in a community of people who primarily hailed from Eastern Europe. “I went to a school where by 4th grade boys were split from girls, and all day I had to be with boys. And I always felt like not one of the boys. I always knew I was different,” Foxxy explains. Because of the sex-segregated classes at the Yeshiva school they attended, Foxxy found subversive ways to express their gender despite having to wear the mandated “boys” uniform:

I would wear chapstick as a form of lipstick ‘cause I wasn’t allowed to wear lipstick. I would wear clear nail polish, sparkly on my feet and clear on my [finger]nails ‘cause I’m not allowed to wear nail polish . . . I had to wear this very masculine clothing, and I hated it.

Such actions allowed Foxxy to go through the motions of expressing their gender in affirming ways without receiving the backlash they knew would follow if they wore a painted lip or nail. While these actions did not produce visible results, there seemed to be something about completing these so-called feminine rituals that assisted Foxxy in feeling true to themself and their inner desires. Even when Foxxy could not outwardly express their gender, they coped by developing methods to express themself in ways only they could recognize.

Foxxy mentions having a great affinity Beyoncé’s character in Austin Powers: Goldmember, Foxxy Cleopatra (the obvious inspiration behind their choice of pseudonym), and her signature salutation from the movie—“I’m Foxxy Cleopatra, and I’m a whooooole lot of woman!” Foxxy used to repeat this mantra at school in front of the boys in their class, claiming their relationship to womanhood and femininity while wearing a dark men’s suit and keepah—a rounded head covering for Jewish men. While this did not endear them to their classmates, such a connection to women in the media and popular culture allowed them a chance to feel feminine and, even if just momentarily, provided relief from feeling that their body was the ultimate hindrance from their desired gender expression:

I always was able to express a lot of my femininity . . . and feel comfortable with my body when I see certain women that I connect with. Whether it’s through television, media or music, art, or women I am around physically, like my mom. I feel more at peace with my identity.

Foxxy’s body being read a “male” (and their feeling that this reading was inevitable) had always and continues to be a hurdle to feeling comfortable with their gender identity. For Foxxy, the experience of expressing their gender in a self-affirming way is one that they believe will always bring about potentially negative reactions from others: “. . . there is always an internal conflict that because my body is different, it separates me.” Throughout the previous go-alongs, Foxxy discussed that there were days when this threat was something they knew they had the skills and wherewithal to deal with, yet there were others when they woke up instantly feeling that they did not have it in them to put on make-up or withstand the comments or looks they would get if they left the house wearing a skirt and heels:

It’s really confusing, and it’s a lot of anxiety. Because I wake up, and it changes within minutes of how I feel comfortable . . . I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be more male, more female. More this, more that . . . sometimes, I wonder, do I not want to put make-up on because its, because I’m scared, I’m uncomfortable, or I just don’t want to? I think it’s a mix.

On these more reclusive days, Foxxy simultaneously feels that being dissuaded from presenting in a feminine manner is an insult to themselves and the greater community of trans and non-binary people; they are letting themself and others down when they give into fear.

Noting the time, Foxxy unplugs their phone from the borrowed charger, thanks the woman for letting them use it, and we start to move through the lobby of the building toward the door. Once standing, Foxxy’s outfit comes into full view for the first time. They are wearing a blue kerchief over their short dark hair—they previously explained this is their personal homage to Middle Eastern Orthodox Jewish women in their life who don simple pieces of fabric in fidelity to their faith in place of the wigs often worn by Orthodox women in Europe and North America. Scanning down, they sport a vivid purple jean jacket covering a black blouse. Pink polish covers the nails on only their left hand. A shiny silver tiered skirt hugs their hips before ending just above the knee, with each horizontal, sparkling panel glimmering more than the last. Black tights protrude from under the skirt to cover the rest of their legs, and in place of their usual black boots is a pair of show-stopping, multi-colored ankle boots with a solid wooden heel of at least 4 inches. Walking out of the lobby through the small courtyard to the entrance of the subway station, their heels make a significant clank when they meet the concrete, marking their presence with each subsequent step. With the extra inches, Foxxy is now taller than me for the first time. This has an instant effect on me, as if I have to adjust what it means for me to walk alongside them. In those first steps through the lobby and out onto the New York City streets, I instantly read their outfit as more “clockable,” as making them more susceptible to surveillance, discipline, or castigation about their gender presentation from the people we were about to meet. My instant reaction is to think about how their added height makes their body even more apparent, a thought that admittedly centers myself and ignores Foxxy’s years of navigating their life through normative gendered expectations and assumptions.

It was Foxxy, themself, who had been the first participant to articulate during the recruitment phase of this study that my being with them stood to make their daily movement safer, that they believed my social privilege would have some transitive effect if we moved together through the city. Today, I wonder if Foxxy’s outfit might outweigh my presence and, as a result, these first few steps together feel like the start of a whole new journey with Foxxy. In what is supposed to be our last go-along, a seeming conclusion to our time together, all of a sudden, these multi-colored heels are changing everything. I realize that their added height brings up a lingering notion of researcher-as-protector that I have been carrying with me. Despite my determination to acknowledge and work through my privilege, my own understanding of my White-skinned, masculine-of-center presenting cis-male body has led me to cling to the notion, however subconsciously, that I can “protect” my participants. In these first moments up and about with Foxxy in their multi-colored heels, I instantly shift from the researcher stance of watching things from the laidback perspective I have settled into as the study progressed to all of a sudden having my shoulders back, eyes and ears open for anything or anyone who might try to come at Foxxy.

Upon entering the subway station, both the click of the wooden heels and the timbre of Foxxy’s voice grows more concentrated, moving down the stairs into the enclosed underground, one step at a time. After a few moments, it quickly becomes clear that the heels also have an impact for Foxxy, themself. Making the descent down the final staircase onto the platform level, Foxxy is midway through a story about when they bought the shoes at Buffalo Exchange when they pause momentarily mid-sentence and glance over their shoulder at the people around them as the voice of the prerecorded subway announcer drones softly in the background. It seems clear Foxxy has begun to sense some sort of threat from an imperceptible location as they made their way down into the station, that there was something or someone in Foxxy’s vicinity that was judging their body. Returning to a forward glance, Foxxy starts back with the story, though their speech pattern shifts, slowing in cadence in contrast to their speedier speaking pace moments earlier. Each word they speak now spreads out further away from the last, making it hard to see that they are connected into sentences. They take a few more steps and then cease speaking once again. The confined space of the train platform seems to add to the intensity of attention on their body. There are fewer things to look at, less air to breathe, and no places for Foxxy to hide. During a powerful, silent moment, their facial expression changes as they look around pointedly and with growing concern, at the other people waiting for the train. Then, Foxxy starts a new train of thought with a much-hushed tone of voice:

You see just walking down [the stairs of the subway] in the city where there are so many eyes gets me so paranoid, realizing I’m different, internalizing I shouldn’t be dressing this way. I’m never going to be a cis-woman. Who am I kidding? It becomes a panic attack. To just walk, down a block! Especially Grand Central [Station]. I take the 6 Train everyday and you see all the businessmen in their suits and women. And you realize you’re in the middle and you’re confused and you’re like . . .

Foxxy’s sentence trails off here, as they appear to be unable to complete the thought upon which they have stumbled. Unable to put to words what happens to them when they reach this point of confusion and distress. The “what happens” when they reach this level of fatigue with dealing with reactions to their gender expression is, literally, beyond explanation; beyond expression. Or perhaps, in this moment Foxxy did not want to go to that place to acknowledge their fear. Rather than finish that fretful thought, they wait a beat and continue: “. . . yeah so, and I was at the sale . . .,” quickly shifting the conversation back to the story at Buffalo Exchange when they purchased the shoes a few weeks earlier.

Foxxy’s inability to voice that “beyond” moment suggests a queered orientation to living and being. Queer, in this sense, “is being summoned to labor as the moment when bodies, non-normative sexuality/genders, and force materialize the im/possibility of subjectivity” (Stanely, 2011, p. 3). Foxxy exhibits an ontology that, while maybe not vocalized or fully understood, showcases the fact that there is something too much about their life within the bounds of the ways society is normatively constructed; that reconciliation of Foxxy’s gendered traumas might not be a possible goal. Rather than asking how life might “get better” for Foxxy, the important question becomes, if

we start here with an understanding that escape is not possible and that against the dreams of liberal democracy there may be no outside to violence, how might we also articulate a kind of near life that feels in the hollow space of ontological capture that life might still be lived, otherwise? (Stanely, 2011, p. 15)

Foxxy’s experience of walking into the station and having the sensation that all eyes in the cramped vicinity shifted to their body is not a spectacular moment. This is an all too common one. It is part of their daily routine and seemingly impossible to avoid, so much so that it necessitates the change of subject back to how they bought the shoes and away from what the shoes are doing and the effect they have on their experience of standing on the subway platform.

After shifting back to the story at Buffalo Exchange, the air in the station begins to breeze past our faces with growing speed, signaling the imminent arrival of an approaching train. Foxxy is offered a moment of relief from talking as it becomes impossible to converse over the screeching of the subway as it pulls up the tracks alongside the platform. The train slows to a halt and the doors open, letting out a spurt of cool, air-conditioned air onto our faces. Without speaking, Foxxy steps onto the train, me following suit, and the doors ding closed behind us. The train pulls out the station, and Foxxy starts to meander through the car. I watch them and their multi-colored heels slip through the crowd of passengers looking for an empty seat.

Going-Along Through the Silence

What connects these narratives, I suggest, is the ways they pivot around moments where the action of the go-alongs forced a halt in the conversations. First, how the positioning of my body on the mat with Scarlet stifled my line of questioning and, second, how Foxxy’s experience of sensing the gazes of people around them as they entered the subway station interrupted their usually verbose and rolling conversational style. In both the conversations, the act of doing the go-along interrupted the flow of the discussion—which, through typical methodological frames, might seem to indicate a problem with method, research protocol, or researcher positionality. As qualitative interviews are most often evaluated by what was said during them, silence between participants and researcher is often is a sign that an interview is going poorly or that nothing is being expressed (Mazzei, 2007). Instead, the vitality of these moments where the affective elements of the movements become part of the go-along, part of what needs to be examined after the interview is finished, center on unpacking why the sensations seemingly got “in the way” of the conversations between the participants and myself. Approaching “data” from a different perspective, the feelings that build up inside the actors in a research process—whether participant or researcher—coalesce into objects that necessitate examination rather than having these moments be interpreted as impediments to seeing or understanding the “real” data that was spoken into a tape recorder to be transcribed and analyzed later. Rather, methodological framings should show

attentiveness to the small dramas formed by fragments of speech, or the expressive force of sounds and vocalizations that aren’t words, but that make up so much of our regularized communication and everyday associations, and on which we are dependent for non-verbal forms of togetherness, sympathy, or frustration. (Lorimer, 2015, p. 186)

Especially in a study about “everyday” life of trans, queer, and non-binary youth, such a lens allows a focusing of analytical and critical attention on the moments of daily experiences that might easily avoid attention by certain forms of qualitative inquiry, or which are frequently misread by society.

This pair of narratives where the actions of the go-alongs paused the conversation might, through other lenses, be considered unproductive moments during the research event. That is, if the “success” of the go-alongs are only measured and analyzed by what was said, then these two moments might easily be skipped over when silence is considered to be a lack of data or to imply a dearth of meaning. However, I argue for theoretical understandings of and methodological approaches to silence that “trouble the notion of voice as an indicator of authenticity, immediacy, or narrative authority in qualitative inquiry” (MacLure et al., 2010, p. 498). Especially as the actions leading up to the silence are ones saturated with discursive and affective power dynamics, it is generative and illuminating to work backward to explore the factors that silenced the flow of conversation. Such a queered reading of the experiences of trans, queer, and non-binary youth people shows how a “queer literacy is the recognition of this inventory of symbols and signs—inscribed on bodies and disclosed by what is not said by [young people]” (Cruz, 2008, p. 68). Go-alongs, when utilized and analyzed in ways that include such sensuous literacies, show how the act doing of research can offer insight into the qualitative research process alongside the “data” that comes from the spoken word.