Abstract
This article invites us to reconsider how we engage in ethical tensions and decision-making with the stories we are gifted as artist-researchers. Using a verbatim theater piece titled Out at School, we explore three moments of discomfort and growth that moved our collective approach toward a slow ethic of care. Within three ethical moments of dissonance, we investigate how to navigate a slow ethic of care in a project that is iterative and constantly shifting within and against our social and political world. By moving away from the desire for resolution, we argue for a process that understands the need to sit within ethical tensions as a way to commit to an ongoing slow ethic of care. We discuss our process, production, and performance as an invitation to critically reflect on ethical practices in research-based theater and reimagine ways to call in and move forward.
Keywords
In this article, we consider how we engaged in ethical tensions and decision-making with the stories we were gifted as artist-researchers. Using a verbatim theater piece titled Out at School (Goldstein et al., 2021), we explore three moments of discomfort and growth that moved our collective approach toward a slow ethic of care. Out at School is one of the ways we have been sharing the findings of LGBTQ Families Speak Out, a multiyear, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)–funded research project at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, under principal researcher Tara Goldstein. These moments of ethical tension include moving away from the impulse to use stories of trauma as a dramatic narrative tool; honoring the tensions we encounter in testimonies when faced with the temporality and social location of them; and sitting in the discomfort of performing and embodying gender expressions that differ from our own. This work draws on several theoretical frameworks to ground our stories from the field and define a slow ethic of care: ethical principles of working with LGBTQ families (Owis & Goldstein, 2021) care work (Lorde, 1988; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018) and slow scholarship (Hartman & Darab, 2012; Mountz et al., 2015). In reflecting on these ethical moments of dissonance, we investigate ways of navigating a slow ethic of care in a project that is iterative and constantly shifting within and against our social and political world. By moving away from the desire for resolution, we argue for a process that understands the need for returning and reopening decisions and processes, for sitting within ethical tensions as a way to commit to an ongoing slow ethic of care. We discuss here our process, production, and performance as an invitation to critically reflect on ethical practices in Research-based Theater (RbT) and to reimagine ways to call in and move forward. We begin with a brief history of our research project, LGBTQ Families Speak Out, and the accompanying research-based verbatim theater piece Out at School. We then position our understanding of a slow ethic of care before Pam, Jenny, and Bishop each share a moment from our creative process when we each sat with an ethical tension.
Verbatim Theater as a Form of RbT
Out at School is a 90-min, RbT production that includes a verbatim theater script, visual images, and original music based on interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) families 1 about their experiences in Ontario public schools. The play is part of a multiyear, government-funded research project titled LGBTQ Families Speak Out. Out at School draws on the established practice of verbatim theater by transcribing, editing, arranging, and recontextualizing the words of people interviewed for the project to create a performance script (Hammond & Stewart, 2008). It is this textual reliance on the verbatim words of our participants that makes this work both exciting and insightful while staying grounded in the experiences, expressions, and ideas of our research participants. The verbatim transcripts were arranged and recontextualized into a playscript that analyzed the experiences LGBTQ families face in schools and the work families do with teachers and principals to create safer and more supportive learning environments for their children.
Both artists and researchers are drawn to verbatim theater because it can create a space where voices, experiences, and testimonies from marginalized communities are heard. In the performance of these stories, public audiences of educators and students, who normally would not have encountered these testimonies, are able to bear witness to them, grappling with their emotions, privileges, and feelings of discomfort. This process is crucial, as it paves the way for these audiences to understand the nuances of being queer and trans and/or coming from an LGBTQ family hopefully creating pathways for activism and advocacy.
Verbatim theater is not without its challenges. As detailed in our personal reflections from the process, production, and performance of Out at School, we have faced many ethical challenges while working with verbatim theater. As we critically reflect and engage with a slow ethic of care using verbatim theater, we’ve been able to reimagine ways to act ethically in RbT.
LGBTQ Families Speak Out & Out at School
The LGBTQ Families Speak Out project grew over 8 years of work and it was through this ongoing and emergent focus on process that the team (as artist-researchers) learned to value and use slowness and care in our ethical decision-making. We share the timeline below in hopes that it will provide insights into the journey that is necessary within creative research work and to share how we began to understand our ethical principles within and through many years of learning, research, and creation:
What do LGBTQ families say about their experiences in public schools after the passing of the Ontario Safe School Act (2012)? How are LGBTQ families working with teachers and principals to create safer and more supportive learning environments for their children?
Theoretical Framework: A Slow Ethic of Care
In the lead up to our performance of Out at School for the 2019 Toronto Pride Festival, we realized we had a number of unspoken ethical principles guiding our work that had been building over the years. The research team had many hard and sometimes heated conversations as we navigated the tensions inherent in slow, ethical work. Tara and Bishop (2021) have written about the ethical principles that emerged from our work in detail. These principles are values that we champion in our work. They differ from institutional ethics and reflect a personal sense of ethics that we recognize and reinforce in the writing, producing, and performance of Out at School to help us sit with and move through ethical tensions in ways that are slow and caring. These principles are the following:
Centring stories of resilience, resistance, allyship, advocacy, and activism.
Centring stories of intersectional identities and experiences.
Centring practices that demonstrate a stance of care.
Committing to a practice of identity-conscious casting.
Committing to a variety of practices of confidentiality and anonymity.
Committing to a process of intentional learning and doing.
Committing to a slow process of researching.
Committing to a process of transparency.
When we look back on the past 8 years of this project, a slow ethic of care was embedded into the very fabric of our work together. We have come to define a slow ethic of care as an intentional process in which we sit with moments of discomfort and re/act slowly to dilemmas to make ethical decisions in our work by centring care work. Owis & Goldstein (2019) write that care work and slow scholarship are dependent on one another to fully and ethically sustain the relationships we have with LGBTQ families.
Principles of Care
Building on Bishop and Tara’s (2021) principle of care and Bishop’s current research (Owis, 2021, 2022a, 2022b), we draw from critical feminist scholars who write about care ethics in psychology and education (Gilligan, 1982; Lorde, 1988; Noddings, 1984, 2013; Tronto, 1993). It is important to note that we credit the theorizing of care work and labor to women of color (hooks, 2000; Lorde, 1988; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981). Women of color (specifically Black and Indigenous trans women) are the leaders and frontline activists in queer and trans communities who engage in solidarity work across lines of difference to sustain and care for one another (Tronto, 1993). We note this because in the academy, an understanding of care work is deeply gendered, racialized, and sexualized (Owis & Goldstein, 2021) and is rooted in cis-heteronormative ideals of the family that come from White, Eurocentered, colonial gender systems (Lugones, 2007, as cited in Malatino, 2020). For this reason, we position care work, which has traditionally been conceptualized in the context of cisgender women giving care (Tronto, 1993) as a form of care that exists in queer and trans communities outside of familial structures.
Within this existing structure, care work often neglects the needs and contributions of disabled queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (QTBIPOC). For this reason, care work as it is conceptualized by other QTBIPOC activists and educators centers on disability justice that is a movement and network of interlocking communities of care (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). These communities center “sick and disabled people of colour, queer and trans disabled folks of colour and everyone who is marginalized in mainstream disability organizing” (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018, p. 22). Care work, then, as a branch of disability justice, positions QTBIPOC disabled people as experts in creating networks of community care (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018) in a social system that does not guarantee ethical care and treatment for everyone.
In keeping with scholars who have written about the ethics of care, our understanding of care work is one that is political and as a form of resistance (Ahmed, 2014; Lorde, 1988; Malatino, 2020; Owis & Goldstein, 2021; Tronto, 1993). Feminist scholars have regularly indicated that we cannot understand care work without positioning it within a political context that takes into account “institutionalized structures of power in inequity. . . that perpetuates forms of racial, gender, and class exploitation while, at the same time, veiling their operation” (Tronto, 1993, p. 110). In making visible the systemic power dynamics operating within care work, we can better understand the importance of enacting an ethic of care when working with LGBTQ families, especially the families who exist at multiple and simultaneous intersections of oppression. Other scholars have also noted that understanding self-care and community care is “an act of political warfare” (Lorde, 1988, p. 130). Self- and community care are often dismissed as neoliberalism (Ahmed, 2014) when in reality self- and community care are a way of resisting harmful and unethical systems that ask you to disappear.
These collective ideas about care work indicate the need for a queered, transgressive form of care work, one that radically reorganizes our community and centers healing and justice (Malatino, 2020). Family and cultural ideas of the family have depended on cis-heteronormative definitions as the center of care (Malatino, 2020), whereas a queer and trans concept of care might involve the use of care webs (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) describes care webs as webs of care between other queer and trans people of color.
Care webs are networks that provide pathways to all forms of care without shame or judgment and take into account the realities of gendered, raced, and classed dynamics that are embedded within our medical and educational systems (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). Because care work is so poorly remunerated (Malatino, 2020) and difficult to access given the barriers for queer and trans communities, there has been a rise of grassroots movements and care collectives that resemble care webs: mutual aid funds, caremongering, providing support such as food sharing, rides, medication, and advice for QTBIPOC people (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). In recognizing this work, we collectively shift our understanding of care work to a queered and transgressive model: one that continues to develop an ethic of care that ensures survival (Malatino, 2020), enhances joy (Noddings, 2013), and paves the way for queer thrival (Greteman, 2016).
Slow Scholarship
Part of enacting a queer ethic of care involves moving slowly and sitting in moments of tension and discomfort. As an intentional practice, slow scholarship (Mountz et al., 2015) is a pathway to neoliberal resistance in academia: a way to resist the desire to rush and produce a final product and instead support a collective, reciprocal, and meaningful research process. Owis and Goldstein (2021) note that in their project, “slowing down the creation of articles, grant proposals, data and presentations” helped them “build reciprocal and meaningful relationships with [their] families” (p. 160). Slow scholarship and sitting in productive tension are rarely talked about in academia (Hartman & Darab, 2012; Martell, 2014; Mountz et al., 2015) likely because of the rapid publication demands of the capitalist society we live in and the expectation that as academics we are experts.
Next, we explore and enact our ideas of slow care as artist-researchers by reflectively writing about an ethical dilemma and moment of tension three of us—Pam, Bishop, Jenny—faced in writing, producing, and performing Out at School.
Queer Lives Are a Gift to Our Communities: Scriptwriting Through a Slow Ethic of Care
(Pam Baer)
Writing Out at School was a process of creation that took place over many years. Each summer, we came together in small and large groups to work with the interview transcripts from the LGBTQ Families Speak Out project and turn them into monologues. What began as a number of powerful, isolated monologues evolved into a collection of stories that spoke to one another, layering, juxtaposing, and facilitating dialogue about the many experiences of LGBTQ families in Ontario public schools. Having performed for both our participants and public audiences over the years, we learned to be mindful of who was receiving these stories. The narratives we were choosing to put out into the world were connected to real people, real children whose stories of trauma, strength, and hope were being put on stage, often through the perspectives of their parents. This led us to think about authorship, specifically, whose story was it to tell? We continued to ask ourselves what we were hoping to accomplish by putting these stories on stage. As a theater artist, I had to sit with the tension of these questions because my artistic impulse was to stage the dramatic—after all, conflict propels a narrative forward and it is conflict that guides us as playwrights, actors, and artists. While my formal theater training has taught me that drama needs conflict, in the case of Out at School it became clear that sharing the trauma of young people for the sake of a dramatic moment was unnecessary and potentially harmful. Learning to center our young participants (even when their story was told by a parent) and to honor their stories as part of an evolving journey was a lesson learned over many different incarnations of the script.
Here is a short excerpt from an early script: We had a bit of a negative experience. . . he eventually let her leave but said, “Don’t tell anybody.” She’s never used a boy bathroom since.
This is from one of our first interviews in 2015, where we met a family with a young trans daughter. In the first monologue written about this family, we included a story of transphobia and assault that occurred in a school bathroom when this child was in Grade 1. The story was shared by her parents to explain the challenges she was facing at school. The story, which I have omitted with an ellipsis above, offered a profound and important insight into the very real violence that is being perpetrated in our schools against trans children. At our first public performance, this young person was sitting in the second row of the audience. As the story came across the lips of our actors, there was an immediate recognition from our team that we needed to adjust our ethical principles in relation to how these stories were being shared publicly. Her story had been shared with us freely; the transcripts and videos of the interview had been reviewed and approved by her parents, “the participants” in our study. Technically, we had met our ethical commitments to the University and our research protocols. But the manifestation of ethics in practice, and the discomfort of watching a child witness a re-telling of her own assault, required us to sit with the tension of performing trauma and to adjust the ways in which we were sharing stories about children.
While we quickly edited that monologue, our research team had many conversations over the next few years as we tried to determine whose stories we could share on our website and in our script. A slow ethic of care meant that we did not have a singular answer to these questions. Instead, we sat with the tension and we thought deeply about each story and each participant. We made space to question the benefits and the costs of including or not including different stories. As we continued to craft our performance script, we worked with the guiding theme that “queer lives are a gift to our communities.” We wanted this sentiment to be infused in every artistic decision we made. We weren’t erasing homophobia, transphobia, and cis-heteronormativity by centering stories of hope. Instead, we made artistic decisions that would center hope and envision a world we wanted to live in (Greteman, 2016; Muñoz, 2009) without continuing to perpetuate violence.
Presenting Testimony in Context
(Jenny Salisbury)
During the development years of Out at School, our research team performed parts of the play at academic conferences, classroom visits, and community festivals. I often read the monologue titled “So Far, So Good” by the character Mary.
This was a monologue written during our first summer writing session in 2016 when our interview pool was small and we were still finding the themes and structure of the play. I remember being very moved and interested in Mary’s interview. Mary is a queer parent and art teacher who works in the public Catholic school board. Rather than living closeted, she was able to connect her faith, her queerness, and her teaching, under the umbrella of love and acceptance. These themes resonated with me because of my own advocacy for LGBTQ rights and marriage equality in Christian circles, and my own belief that religious and queer identities can exist together without contradiction or trauma.
To create the monologue, Pam, Tara, and I took the 17 pages of transcript and edited it down to a one-page monologue, which focused on the advocacy work that Mary and her partner had to do on behalf of their daughter with each new classroom, school, and teacher. Therefore, much of Mary’s theology, politics, and reflection were edited out, to focus on the labor her family undertook to make their daughter’s life better at school. The monologue still reads as one of hope and positivity, with Mary demonstrating that queer families exist in the Catholic school board and that this family’s experience has largely been one of acceptance and love.
Excerpt from Scene 7
MARY
My daughter is enrolled in Grade 7 in a Catholic Arts High school. I have to say, um, it’s been fantastic. It’s always just been very positive. I, I can’t think of a single instance where, where it wasn’t. . . So we thought, “Okay, well, here we are pioneers, we will have to do a little extra to make sure we educate them” and it was never a huge amount of trouble. . . So, we just, you know, it’s in those kind of quiet ways that we just, we just want to keep pushing the envelope.
End of excerpt
Over the years of reading and performing this monologue in different settings, the way I thought of the monologue changed. I started to be angry with the perspective of being a “pioneer,” and “pushing the envelope,” as though queer lives were something still thought of as new, or unexpected. This was often performed just before Kate Reid performed her song “Pushing the Envelope,” I heard the longing and anger in Kate’s lyric, “One day we won’t need to be pushing the envelope, we won’t be represented by permission slips home” (Reid in Goldstein et al., 2021, p. 64). I, as an advocate, became dissatisfied with the monologue, desiring bigger goals of radical acceptance and celebration. And I felt/heard that judgment creeping into my voice while performing Mary’s words—words that, when put in the context of her original interview, were beautiful and life giving. Being queer and present in a Catholic school requires a tremendous amount of grace and strength and I knew that stance was ebbing out of my performance.
My performances of this monologue began to remind me of a Brechtian performance, where I, as the performer, had a different politic and opinion to that of the character I was portraying, and that contrasting opinion was clear to the audience. I also knew I could play it that way successfully, and that if I did so, my frustration would resonate with some members of our audiences.
However, because of our ethical principle to center stories of resilience, resistance, allyship, advocacy, and activism, I knew such a critical performance of Mary’s words ran against the principles of our work. Our research was intended to honor the stories entrusted to us. Also, even if Mary never saw my critical, frustrated performance, such a performance would be in bad faith, using her words differently than she intended.
I knew the original context of the words and I was in a research team that knew the original context. We worked to celebrate and amplify the experiences of LGBTQ families in schools. So, I chose to keep my personal feelings and Brechtian actor training out of the monologue and instead recommitted to performing the best of what Mary’s words offered the overall project, therefore honoring Mary and her specific truths and experience.
If Mary were to be interviewed by our team today, 5 years from that original interview, with the same questions and research goals, I imagine that she would use different words to articulate her experiences. LGBTQ lives are a moving, fluid, and iterative space; language changes and evolves to better reflect and articulate that experience. However, interviews, testimonies, and verbatim theater scripts record only one moment in time. It is by acknowledging the original context, focusing on our principles, and creating time to reflect on the process and work that we are able to name and work through these ethical tensions.
Listening and Embodying Gender: Performance and a Slow Ethic of Care
(Bishop Owis)
I was asked to play Karleen Pendleton-Jimenez, a parent and a professor at Trent University for the Pride 2019 performance of Out at School. My role on the LGBTQ Families Speak Out research team is as a researcher. Unlike Pam and Jenny, as well as other members of our team, I was not an artist-researcher in this project. Thus, my initial response to playing Karleen was to watch her interviews, learn how she talked, and emulate her energy. Most of these tasks felt approachable for me except for my ability to emulate and embody her butch, dyke, masculine energy, and expression.
My own gender and gender expression is something that has continued to evolve. At the time of our Out at School performances, I understood my gender expression to be more feminine and what some might label as femme or high-femme. I could pass and was read as straight, my body took up space as a fat person, and I identified at the time as a cisgender woman of color. Realizing and recognizing these things, in contrast to the role I was asked to play, made me anxious. I wanted to be able to honor Karleen’s story and her gender expression felt like a key part of that.
My initial instinct in playing Karleen was that I would need to dress differently. I would likely have to buy a different outfit for the performances, one I didn’t own and would likely never wear again. Despite this being my initial reaction, it felt wrong. Looking back, I can see how my own internal conflict with my gender expression and identity had been activated, a deeply sown fear of being read as a fat butch woman that might threaten my understanding of my own gender and gender expression. I can also see that I had very specific ideas of what it meant to be more masculine as a woman that focused heavily on appearance, tropes, and stereotypes even as a queer researcher. Despite my attempts to break binaries, boxes, and labels, I was ultimately held captive by a collective and societal understanding of gender norms and cisnormativity. The idea of showing up as a fat woman of color in jeans and a button up shirt, without makeup, to a performance made me feel nauseous at the time. It didn’t fit with the palatable, feminine version of myself that I had carefully curated over the years. It felt like I was playing out a very normative idea of what it means to be butch woman in the world and one that I couldn’t know for sure that Karleen would agree with.
This tension sat with me, as I met my new cast mates, among them a Black transgender man. I feel indebted to him because he gave me language about gender expression and identity that moved me personally but also pushed my thinking academically and as a performer. He validated my hesitations with performing in what would feel like a visually stereotypical aesthetic of a masculine of center/butch person. He agreed that it would feel inauthentic and, in fact, reiterate the very binaries and boxes we’re trying to challenge in performing Out at School. I said I wanted to still dress like me and that I wasn’t ready to see myself in more masculine clothing, but I wanted to do Karleen’s story justice. He said, being butch, being masculine, being whatever you are. . . it’s not an appearance. . . it’s not an act. The way you dress, the way you look, that’s for you, not someone else. Being butch, being masculine, it’s an energy, it’s something you embody. And everyone has it. It’s in you, don’t run away from it.
This moment, of slow, deep work on both my own gender expression and performing as someone who, at the time, had a different gender expression from myself, was both healing and informative as a researcher and performer. I feel grateful for that conversation; it helped me learn how to listen to the hesitation in my body and ask myself why I was in crisis because of the gender expression of the person I was asked to perform. This moment of tension and of growth made me realize that I am genderqueer, and although this realization came a full year after our performance of Out at School, the power of un/learning at my own pace with the help and care from those in my community cannot be overstated. When we move slowly in the world with care, as academics, as researchers, as performers, and as artists, we activate a sense of introspection that can create spaces to understand our work more ethically and carefully. After all, how can you make individual and systemic changes if you do not care deeply about the people and communities that are affected?
Discussion
The stories we have shared have many similarities and collectively depict the internal crises that we feel when we encounter tension and discomfort in our bodies as researchers. In this discussion, we turn to Bishop’s work on the practice of an ethic of care (Owis, 2021, 2022a, 2022b) first mentioned in the articulation of the theoretical framework that underlies our three reflections. The process we engaged in when faced with these dilemmas is ultimately what allowed us to enact a slow ethic of care.
Pam’s story of wanting to challenge singular narratives about LGBTQ youth and families, and her desire to not re-traumatize, reminds us of the importance of patience and moving slowly through ethical tensions. Knowing that each member of the research team came with different perspectives and understanding of what could, should, and couldn’t be included in the Out at School script meant that our sense of ethics was entangled in what Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) would call a care web. As our research team operated as a care web, it followed that decisions about the various directions the script for Out at School took before it reached the current version were made with input by everyone in our research community. These moments also reinforced the need to move slowly when using verbatim theater in RbT as the project was iterative and evolved dramatically over the years. Allowing for space and slow decision-making to occur without the rush of production or performance was crucial to our process. It is important to note that as a research collective, we were only able to do this under the guidance and leadership of Tara Goldstein (our Principal Investigator and fourth author), funding from external bodies (SSHRC) and our positions as researchers in a powerful institution. Contextually, these supports made it possible for us to move slowly in our research process and make space for our learning to grow and shift.
Bishop’s ethical tension also reinforces Piepzna-Samarasinha’s (2018) concept of care webs. The crisis they faced when asked to perform as someone with a different gender expression from them at the time was mitigated by the support they had in the cast. Here, we can see care webs and community support at work. Because care webs are conceptualized as spaces where queer and trans people of color come together to support one another (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018), Bishop was able to benefit from the countless queer and trans women of color (Anzaluda, 1989; hooks, 2000; Lorde, 1988) who have written, fought for, and enacted care webs in their communities to sustain one another. In relying on the support of another trans, Black cast member to move through a difficult moment in facing a gender crisis, Bishop was supported and cared for outside of the White, Eurocentric familial way (Tronto, 1993) that care work is typically understood. This comfort and care reinforces that the work we performed as part of Out at School remains political: that caring for ourselves and one another as a cast and as a community is “an act of political warfare” (Lorde, 1988, p. 130) and a way to resist the demands of academia and stressors of performance. Bishop’s moment of tension also indicates the ways in which verbatim theater as both a practice and a methodology asks you to show up more honestly and vulnerably to your work as a researcher and performer. Bishop was asked to embody a gender expression that, at the time, brought up fears about exploring their gender identity. While the words in verbatim theater are taken directly from interviews, how the monologues are presented together (Pam’s story) in what context (Jenny’s story) and by who (Bishop’s story) is up for interpretation. In Bishop’s case, verbatim theater allowed them to come into the role of Karleen by making space for their own gender anxiety to be honored while also engaging in a slow, caring process of un/learning gender norms. In many ways, verbatim theater enabled Bishop to be able to hold the tensions of not being ready to address their gender identity, with the performance of Karleen in ways that felt personally ethical and honored both Karleen’s and Bishop’s experiences.
Jenny’s story also reminds us of the importance of holding the testimonies we’ve been gifted with care. Mary’s interview and monologue were conducted toward the beginning of the LGBTQ Families Speak Out research project and it was important to keep this timeframe in mind when her experiences were placed next to more current stories from other families. Similar to Pam’s experience of curating monologues for Out at School, Jenny faced a dilemma in wanting to honor Mary’s story about pushing the envelope in Catholic schools while knowing that in the time since Mary had shared her story, more radical demands of equity and justice for queer and trans youth and families had occurred. Due to the length of this project as well as the fluidity and dynamic nature of the testimonies we were engaging with, our own ideas of ethics, care, and what voices and experiences should be told shifted as well. This shift was also taking place during a time when our research team was grappling with a social-political movement of centering BIPOC testimonies that demanded more radical and systemic forms of justice in schools, which led us to start documenting our ethical principles and practices (Owis & Goldstein, 2021). For our team, it was important to have difficult conversations about where our activism started at the outset of this project (mainly White lesbian and gay movements) and recognize how those activist narratives excluded BIPOC, disabled, poor and neurodivergent communities, and make an intentional shift to mirror and layer Mary’s interview and monologue with the demands and voices of our racialized queer and trans families. This movement enacts what Lorde (1988) calls for: “an act of political warfare” (p. 130) that pushes for community care. In these ways, we not only acted intentionally and slowly (Mountz et al., 2015) throughout our process; we used the care web (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018) we had built within our research team over the years by talking through difficult conversations about race and gender over time—ultimately finding a way to honor Mary’s story with care.
When we consider care webs when thinking about the possibilities of enacting a slow ethic of care with LGBTQ families, it challenges the same neoliberal expectation that asks us to be individually self-sufficient and successful (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018) rather than enacting a slow ethic of care to create community thriving. Doing this can potentially create moments to make caring decisions that are more aligned with a sense of personal ethics and research politics.
The stories we share here illuminate the ethical tensions we faced when working with LGBTQ families. They point us toward a framework in qualitative research and RbT that centers slow care work as a political form of resistance in the academy and RbT, one that challenges the invisibility of care work as deeply gendered, classed, and racialized, and encourages researchers to sit in moments of tension and discomfort as a way to engender intentional ethical practices.
Conclusion
The call for a queer and trans slow ethic of care in RbT comes from a place of human interdependence: that we require the care of others (Malatino, 2020; Tronto, 1993). This dependence and entanglement of care also exists within research dynamics, although it is often undocumented in the research process (Toombs et al., 2017). Qualitative research that engages with humans involves care work by and for many, from both researchers, participants, and learners (Toombs et al., 2017). Our work with LGBTQ families and the stories we have shared illustrate the need to understand care work as an orientation toward research, one that exists in queer and trans communities outside of White, Eurocentered, colonial gender systems (Lugones, 2007, as cited in Malatino, 2020).
With this in mind, creating a queer and trans slow ethic of care that understands the messiness and dependence of care webs is one way to begin mitigating the harm and violence perpetuated against queer and trans communities in research contexts and make more ethical and caring decisions.
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.
