How We Do the Work Is the Work: Building an Intersectional Queer Praxis for Critical Feminist Scholarship

Abstract

In this reflection (which is a revised version of a recent keynote address), I invite feminist social work scholars to consider what it might look like to build our scholarship through an intersectional queer praxis. I posit that as critical feminist scholars, it is important that we consider not only the topics we study but also how we do our work. Specifically, I propose an intersectional queer praxis that brings together key tenets of Slow scholarship with queer lived experiences and critical theoretical lens(es) that assert that queer is destabilizing of dominant ideologies and a challenge to normative ways of being. I discuss four interrelated dimensions of intersectional queer praxis that draw upon Slow scholarship and elements of queer life: (1) reimagining time; (2) centering relationships, community care, and collaboration; (3) embracing complexity and disrupting binaries; and (4) attention to embodiment and emotion. I argue that employing this kind of intersectional queer praxis challenges dominant approaches to academic knowledge production and carries with it new possibilities and creative imaginings for how we do our work. This talk is an invitation to think collectively, to reflect, and to raise questions for us as social work scholars as we continue to build a more robust practice of critical feminist scholarship.

I would like to start this discussion by taking a moment to acknowledge all of the losses we have collectively experienced over the past 24 + months. I want to recognize and hold all of the loss, complexity, and trauma of our world and our recent times—the Covid pandemic and all of its continued impacts, the killing of Black people by police and subsequent racial uprisings, anti-Asian racism, the state of the climate, the recent SCOTUS decision regarding Roe v. Wade … the list goes on. And, within these larger macro traumas, so many of us have also continued to carry personal losses, shifts, and changes. I invite us all to pause and breathe into that as the reality that we all have been living and working in.

I am an individual person standing in front of you today and a keynote means that my voice is given particular space and attention. The implication is that I am somehow an expert enough in something that I should be the one asked to talk about it in public. However, it feels critically important to me to name that while I am the one speaking, I do not believe that the ideas that I am sharing here have been individually generated. The concepts I am pulling together are a huge amalgamation of thoughts and questions that have developed for me through academic research, practice in the field, lived experiences, deep relationships, reflection, and teaching. There is no way to encompass all of the people who have influenced my thinking or shaped my ideas, but I do want to specifically name women of color feminists, queer activists of color, the domestic violence movement, critical feminist and radical social work scholars and practitioners, and my biological and chosen families as central in shaping my thinking about everything that I am sharing today. The ideas presented here are also deeply informed by an earlier collaboration with Dr. Stéphanie Wahab and Kelly Myers (2022).

When I was first invited to do this talk, I was honestly very hesitant to say yes for a number of reasons. In particular, as I thought about being in an LGBTQ Research Symposium I was struck by the fact that I was not really sure if I think of myself as a queer researcher per se. As I mulled this over, I realized that I have not really ever defined myself as a queer scholar. In our field of social work, the articulation of the communities you work in or the social issue you focus on becomes your research agenda and your identity as a scholar. Though I have often struggled with (and even pushed back against) this way of framing my scholarly interests, I have never actually conducted a research project that focuses on queer people. I’ve also never taught a class focused specifically on LGBTQ communities. As I have pondered this dilemma of whether or not I am a queer scholar, I have embraced the belief that as a queer South Asian person—as a queer woman of color living in diaspora—being my whole self in academia is queer and intersectional. Further, if we embrace the meaning of queer as going beyond gender and sexuality-based identities and look at it as troubling the “normal” or destabilizing the “taken for granted” (Browne & Nash, 2016), this is even more true of what my research trajectory has looked like and how I have approached my work.

Ultimately, I said yes to this invitation mostly because for me, being a queer, critical feminist scholar is not only about what communities or topics we study but is also about who we are and about interrogating the ways we do our scholarly work. As I think about the values, politics, and approaches that have shaped my own (non-traditional) research journey, I believe that when we are doing the work in ways that challenge, circumvent, trouble, destabilize, and resist neoliberal and normative assumptions of research, productivity, and knowledge we are doing queer scholarship. And, when we do this with an end goal of intersectional liberation—we are doing critical feminist work.

One of my dearest friends and colleagues reminded me recently that my favorite thing to do as a scholar and educator is to raise questions—so in this next bit of time together, I invite you to explore, think, ponder, and reflect with me. I am raising questions more than I am providing answers. As scholars who are committed to liberation and social change, I offer a space for us to collectively think about what it might mean to build a practice of critical feminist and intersectional queer scholarship in these times.

Toward an Intersectional Queer Praxis

My vision is changing our how, more than clearly seeing our what.

—adrienne maree brown

Specifically, today, I want us to consider what it could look like to build our critical feminist scholarship in the spirit of queer praxis. I want to imagine possibilities for us as a critical feminist and queer scholars in which we embody our intersectional values and politics not just in the topics we study but in the way we do our work. I ask us to think about what it means to practice and to value the process of our scholarship as the work itself.

Some questions for consideration:

What if we saw being scholars as greater than the populations or issues we study but rather also understood that critical feminist scholarship is about building a queer praxis that reflects our theoretical, and political commitments and our lived lives?

What would it mean to approach our critical feminist and queer scholarship with a curiosity about practicing different ways of being/knowing/doing our work?

How can our approaches challenge oppressive norms of academic knowledge production?

Surge, a reproductive justice organization in Seattle, WA (https://www.surgereprojustice.org/) has embraced a 75/25 rule (while I personally learned this analysis from Surge, it has come to my attention that this idea was originally articulated by Aaron Dixon, former captain of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party): that we should be spending 75% of our time/energy to build the world we want to see and 25% of our energy on dismantling injustices in the world as it is. In academic terms, I think of this as spending 75% on imagining what could be, and 25% on critique. Thus, in this talk, I am not going to spend time analyzing the ways that research and academia are problematic institutions or discussing the specific challenges of being a critical feminist scholar in social work—I am going to assume we have awareness of this context and can engage with those issues elsewhere. (For more on some of the unique challenges that feminist scholars facing in social work, see for example: Alvarez and Lazzari [2016], Harrell et al. [2022], and Park et al. [2017]) Rather, today I will focus on thinking about what building different ways of being and knowing in our research and scholarship could look like from an intersectional queer perspective.

Building a Practice

I would like to put forward the idea of building a practice as an alternative to the assumptions of expertise that are so prevalent in academia. Practice, or the need to practice something, is a concept that we take for granted in many areas of life such as when learning a musical instrument or playing a sport, but rarely do we use this language about what we do in academia or in research. The assumption of expertise means that somehow having degrees, taking classes, or having a certain number of publications means you know something and that knowledge is understood as somehow fixed within us. However, we know that practicing something with regularity means we get better at it—so, what would it look and feel like to reframe our scholarly, intellectual, and political work as something that we practice?

In our field, we also talk about social work practice—which is the application of values, principles, and skills toward a certain end such as client change, helping people obtain services, or supporting social justice efforts. What is notable in this definition of practice is that it is rooted in values, based on action, and meant to achieve certain ends. For us as critical feminist scholars, the research, teaching, and service we do become a central part of what and how we practice.

Taking all of these ideas of practice together, then, means that practice can be seen as an act of doing something repeatedly or with some degree of regularity, rooting these actions in our beliefs and values, and centering our desired goals. I would suggest that our critical feminist and queer scholarship would be strengthened by grounding in this idea of practice and continuing to grow and stretch into new ways of being and doing in our work.

Practice is also a critical component of praxis. Praxis is centrally concerned with the relationship between our theory, values, beliefs, and our actions. It also integrates reflection as a critical component of continuing to refine and develop our actions and behaviors. A simple explanation is that praxis is a cycle of theory and intentional action that incorporates reflection to continually grow our theory and our practice toward social change (Freire, 1970). Build your theory, reflect, take action, reflect on the impacts of the action, and continue to refine as you go. For the purposes of our discussion here today, I offer these perspectives on praxis—both that praxis has transformative aims and also that praxis involves knowing, doing, and being (Freire, 1970; White, 2007).

Dimensions of Slow Scholarship + Queer Life as Queer Praxis

If we think about praxis as ways of knowing, doing, and being in our work, and our transformative aims are justice and liberation, I want to suggest that building an intersectional queer praxis for the critical feminist scholarship requires attention to how we do the work. We need to articulate what we value and believe about it and take into meaningful consideration our lived lives and experiences as queer people.

What I am proposing is an intersectional queer praxis that draws on tenets of Slow scholarship. The slow scholarship is a movement in academia that is calling for us to slow down, and to push back against the pace and approach to research that is present in the white, heteropatriarchal, and neoliberal universities (see for example Mountz et al., 2015; Shahjahan, 2015; Ulmer, 2017). Instead of focusing on production and efficiency that are norms within neoliberal research industry, Slow scholarship invites us to examine the pace and values that undergird our work. In the queer praxis, I am proposing, I extend extant perspectives on Slow scholarship from a uniquely queer lens. I bring together key tenets of Slow scholarship with our lived experiences as LGBTQ people and our queer theoretical lens that understands queer as something that is counter-cultural, destabilizing of dominant ideologies, and fundamentally challenging normative ways of being. In this discussion, I will focus on four dimensions of an intersectional queer praxis that draws on both Slow scholarship and elements of queer life and theorizing: (1) reimagining time, (2) centering relationships, community care, and collaboration, (3) embracing complexity and disrupting binaries, and (4) attention to embodiment and emotion.

It is important to note that I see the intersectional queer praxis that I am discussing here as a part of a larger critical feminist project within social work. As such, it is an approach that has value for a range of critical feminist scholars with diverse experiences and positionalities. At the same time, however, the tenets that I am exploring here are deeply rooted in the collective lived experiences of queer and trans people and communities and should be honored as such.

Reimagining Time

Slowing Down

Current writing on Slow scholarship focuses primarily on slowing down as resistance/pushing back on the drive for productivity and efficiency within a fast-paced neoliberal university context (see for example Mountz et al., 2015; Shahjahan, 2015; Ulmer, 2017). Slowing down our pace then makes more time for the process, reflection, dialog, and relationships, which is also consistent with feminist and other critical epistemologies that emphasize collectivism and relationality as ways of knowing (Lawson, 2007; Mountz et al., 2015; Shahjahan, 2015). Slowing down also allows time for delays in the research process that may emerge due to personal needs, community dynamics, or other unexpected circumstances. Slowing down accounts for different ways of processing information, access needs, and natural paces of work among a team and also supports the well-being of academics and the valuing of different types of labor (Mountz et al., 2015).

Slowing down is an antidote to the sense of “urgency” that is often promoted in academic institutions and that has been noted by Tema Okun et al. (n.d.) as a characteristic of White Supremacy Culture. This urgency and relationship to time are also based on Western, dominant culture conceptualizations of time (see Smith, 2012). It is important to remember that this sense of urgency is socially constructed but also rewarded in our institutions and systems. Slowing down is an act of resistance to neoliberal norms and the false sense of urgency that has been institutionally created and allows for a regrounding in one's own priorities and values.

Slow scholarship attends not only to pace but also to the duration of a project. For example, one recent project that I worked on with a group of colleagues took us over five years as it grew iteratively and organically and in tandem with each of our capacities, lives, and needs. This project focused on how macro forces of professionalization, neoliberalism, and criminalization impact domestic violence advocacy training. adrienne maree brown (2017) in her principles of emergent strategy calls on us to “move at the speed of trust” (p. 42). Similar to the principles of Slow scholarship, in this formulation, there is space for iterating ideas and processes as well as attending to relationships and connections. How fast you can move on a project is determined by how much trust you have in yourself and others. In this project I mentioned, we had a highly collaborative five-person research team, and upon reflection on our process, we articulated that we moved at the speed of trust in the integrity of our ideas. Working with an ethos of slow scholarship in this project allowed for a more generative process, deeper engagement with ideas, better ability to navigate complexities in the research (both in regard to process and findings), greater respect for how our diverse institutional and social positionalities impacted our work, and stronger collaboration overall.

Similarly, I am now working on a small project with two other queer people—all of us at different stages of our academic trajectories. We started this project at the beginning of the pandemic as we were interested in exploring the published literature on queer and trans identity and experience and social work education. We have been in an incredibly slow process—building relationships with each other, navigating dynamics of institutional power and positionality and also iterating our ideas and process. We also had to slow down our pace because of the realities of institutional demands and pandemic circumstances. In this project, we started by acknowledging that we were not on a fixed timeline and that the study itself would be emergent and iterative given that it is a new area of work and methodology for some of us on the research team. It has required patience and flexibility from us all individually to hold this process as a team but also we are moving at the speed of trust in each other and in the integrity of our ideas. As a result, our process has allowed greater space for learning and mentorship, ability to grapple with tensions in a more meaningful way, and a sense of care for one another as whole people during a very difficult time period.

Related to brown's concept of moving at the speed of trust, the current moment and the times we have been living in also have necessitated a slowing down. The past few years have been full of disruptions—collective trauma, loss, and various levels of change and upheaval. Institutions that we are a part of have been continuing business as usual for the most part, demonstrating the primacy of capitalism and the corporate nature of the University. However, the need at this time has been to slow down—to allow for processing, rest, and reflection and also to be able to respond in a meaningful way to the crises that are continuously unfolding. During this time, I have seen slowing down and resting as an act of resistance and also necessary to be able to sustain the work.

In his blog, Bayo Akomolafe, notes an African proverb that says: “The times are urgent; let us slow down.” He goes on to name that in our constant state of rushing, we often lose sight of the abundance of resources that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises (Akomolafe, n.d.). We rush into our familiar patterns, reactions, and responses. Slowing down allows us to deliberate and generate new ideas to respond to our given context. I would further assert that the call to slow down gives us the opportunity to practice new ways of being and doing in relation to our political commitments and the urgency of our times.

Queer Time

The last piece I want to offer in regard to reimagining time is the idea of queer time and the ways that as queer people, we already have varied and often non-normative relationships to time. Queer theorists have talked about the concept of queer time—and specifically the ways that queer time and space develop in opposition to normative life markers such as marriage or even identity development. Our queer lives have the potential to disrupt time-normativity, even sometimes from young age. Halberstam (2005) writes that queerness allows for alternative relations to time and space and that queerness itself is “an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules” and that queer “refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time” (p. 4). Jaffe (2018) expands on this by noting that queer times are inflected by “time-warping experiences as diverse as coming out, gender transitions, and generation-defining tragedies such as the AIDS epidemic. That is, queerness is constituted by its difference from conventional imperatives of time.”

In addition to these notions of queer time, if we think more specifically about the realities facing queer and trans people of color, particularly Black and Latina trans women, and queer and trans youth, many of us face the deep feeling that we are destined for premature death or that we may not live the length of the typical lifespan. How does this then impact how we think about time?

I would offer that queer time is generative, relational, multidimensional rather than linear and chronological. To consider queer time as part of how we reimagine time has the potential to impact our scholarship and our praxis.

In the spirit of slowing down and building reflection on how we do our work, I would like to invite a pause to consider some of the ideas presented thus far. I invite you to do a brief free write on the questions I’ve posed here or anything that is coming up for you in our time together so far. I suggest you give yourself at least a few minutes but feel free to take as much time as you want or need.

What would it feel like to slow down in the context of the neoliberal and white supremacist University that insists on productivity and a sense of urgency?

What might this look like in your own practice given the current moment and experiences of the past few years?

Centering Relationships, Community Care, and Collaboration

The next dimension of queer praxis is centering relationships, community care, and collaboration. I will speak less about this dimension because I think it is relatively self-explanatory, however, it is still critical to name it as it is in direct opposition, again, to the individualism that is deeply embedded in the white, heteropatriarchal neoliberal norms of the University context that most of us are working in. As part of a queer praxis, I propose we honor what Leibowitz and Bozalek (2018) have called a Relational Ontology—the idea that people and entities come into being through relationships.

The work on Slow scholarship calls on us to slow down in order to build deep, trusting relationships and to create space for dialog. Mountz et al. (2015) have also specifically posited that Slow scholarship is important as part of a larger feminist ethic of care. Emergent discussions on pedagogy and the context of COVID have also emphasized the importance of care and relationality (Mehrotra, 2021; Hess et al., 2022; Yellow Horse & Nakagawa, 2020). Lane (2018) also highlights a politicized ethic of care undergirded by Black feminist principles and it is importance to community care and relationships in an educational setting.

As feminist scholars, we build, sustain, and value so many different kinds of relationships—collaborators, colleagues, students, research participants, communities, organizations, etc.—striving for power-sharing, reciprocity, and co-creation of knowledge takes time and intentional practice. For those of us who do community-based research, we also know that building meaningful relationships with community partners takes time and trust-building which can be in tension with University timelines, funding calendars, institutional expectations, or even views of what constitutes research (Kramer et al., 2021). The queer praxis I’m proposing necessitates intentional attention to relationships and care as central to our political and intellectual endeavors. I concur with Richardson (2022) whose research demonstrates that “good care can and does occur despite deleterious system-level factors” (p. 118) and that a commitment to care is an important form of resistance to neoliberal forces.

As queer people and critical feminists, we have deep histories of collective care and centering relationships. Many of us also come from racialized and cultural communities that are highly relational, collectivist, and oriented toward interconnectedness. As queer people, we have always had expansive ways of conceptualizing kinship. In fact, our actual survival has often been inextricably linked to being able to find reflection, safety, validation, and even get material needs met by community, chosen family, and peer and friendship networks (see for example Nicolazzo et al., 2017; Prasad, 2020; Ritholtz & Buxton, 2021). We also have meaningful queer histories of mutual aid and community care—this has been made visible in the pandemic but has always been a part of queer culture and survivance. Queer people with disabilities have done amazing work around access intimacy and building interdependent community care networks; community spaces have been central to the safety and empowerment of queer and trans youth; and, for most of us, our queer communities are where we go first and are central to our well-being in the context of homophobia, transphobia, racism, and other forms of oppression. Taking care of one another is part of our communities’ culture, practice and legacy. We know from queer life that our healing and liberation are connected to being in community. Doing our work in ways that are counter-cultural or queer in the context of academia also necessitates community and collective care. We need to build support and collective power to resist the dominant norms and the forces of individualism that are so present in that environment.

I would like to invite you to reflect on the following questions—either via a free write or in any other way that is meaningful to you. To foster the deepening of relationships and collaborations, I also encourage you to utilize these prompts with others:

In your current practice, how do you center relationships and collaboration? What does this look like? How does it impact your work?

What is something you could do to strengthen your practices of community care and relationships in your scholarly work?

Embracing Complexity and Disrupting Binaries

Another component of the queer praxis that I am suggesting is embracing complexity and disrupting binaries. Many western and positivist epistemologies rely on binaries, fixed categories, and ideas of objectivity and neutrality. In contrast, Slow scholarship embraces complexity, facilitates the disruption of binary thinking, and encourages a deliberate, thoughtful exploration of liminal spaces—in service of new and liberatory knowledge (Wahab et al., 2022). Slow scholarship sees knowledge production as holistic and entangled, messy and complicated (Payne & Wattchow, 2009 as referenced in Leibowitz & Bozalek, 2018).

Embracing an intersectional queer praxis opens up possibilities of employing different epistemologies and paradigms to celebrate complexity and move away from binaries. There are many dichotomies in mainstream research paradigms and, while these can be useful and necessary depending on your political or scholarly project, as critical feminist scholars we are well-positioned to embrace the messiness of what intersectional and liberatory research actually often looks and feels like. In social work, several scholars have specifically challenged binary thinking in regard to understanding issues of resistance; they have offered alternative frameworks and epistemologies for holding greater complexity, such as seeing resistance as multi-modal, dynamic, and enacted in diverse ways (Wahab et al., 2021; Strier & Bershtling, 2016; Vilches & Pulkingham, 2022). In queer and trans communities we have also already been revolutionary in disrupting the gender binary in our bodies, identities, and lives. Many queer activists and scholars have called for not only a disruption of the gender binary but also an embracing of a whole galaxy of gender which is complex in ways we can barely imagine. Could we possibly think in terms of galaxies of ideas in our research processes? What could open up if we did?

For many of us who are queer and/or people of color who do work in our own communities, we are often disrupting binaries in the research process in regard to insider/outsider status or even researcher/participant. For example, in my dissertation research with South Asian women, though I was the researcher I was also part of the community that I was doing research with—technically I was eligible for my own study. As a methodological experiment, I had a friend interview me using the interview guide that I used with my participants. I did this in part to explore reflexivity in a different way and, also, to see how it felt to participate in the interview. Doing this exercise was an act of explicitly disrupting the researcher/participant binary. At the same time in this study, I experienced the complexity of doing research within a cultural community that I am a part of. While on one level there was some degree of shared identity and experience as South Asian women, there were also significant intersectional differences between me and participants in terms of age, sexual orientation, generation, class, and other social positionalities. In each interview and during the research as a whole, I was consistently navigating the terrain of insider and outsider—not as fixed, but as constantly fluid and dynamic aspects of the research experience. Holding this complexity was part of the labor of doing this research. Moving away from a binary conceptualization of researcher/participant and insider/outsider was critical to negotiating my role and dynamics of power, as well as my analytic process and emotional relationship to the research I was doing.

As queer and trans people of color, we also live in the complicated spaces of intersectional positionalities in our personal and professional lives. Our social locations and our lives are often a dance that requires navigating many kinds of complexity in terms of identity, community, belonging, oppression, and liberation. Thus, in our intersectional queer praxis as scholars, embracing complexity requires us to continue to deepen our practice and stay intentional about how we are engaging with intersectionality theorizing. Intersectionality must go beyond being a buzzword or just having a few people of color in a study sample. For a queer praxis to truly engage with intersectionality in a meaningful way, in line with other scholars, I suggest that we need to consider:

Responsible and thoughtful engagement with the roots of intersectional theorizing, specifically the work of US Black feminists and other WOC activists and academics such as Kimberle Crenshaw, the Combahee River Collective, and others who have developed these concepts based on lived experience and deep praxis.

Increased clarity about how we are engaging with power, structural oppression, and social inequity when using intersectionality, including pushing back around diluted discourses of intersectionality that utilize it as a synonym for diversity/DEI or reduce intersectionality to being only about multiple identities on an individual level.

How to grow and apply theories, measures, and methods that can help us to understand the texture and depth of individual and collective experiences. Engaging with intersectional queer perspectives such as queer of color critique, queer diaspora, indigenous queer studies, transnational queer perspectives, and disability justice which are still relatively sparse in social work and has the potential to help us to grow more complex and multidimensional critical feminist and queer scholarship. Further, I would suggest that employing more diverse methodologies such as arts-based methods, narrative methods, visual methods, body mapping, and other creative methodologies may lend themselves to new and innovative intersectional queer research.

I would like to offer another brief pause to process and play with these ideas. To practice thinking about complexity and methodology, I invite you to engage your reflection in the form of a haiku. First, first free write a few sentences on the following prompt:

• What comes up for you when you think about embracing complexity and disrupting binaries in your own scholarly practice?

• Then, write a haiku poem based on your free written sentences (five syllables/seven syllables/five syllables).

Reflect on what it feels like to write your thoughts in a different form. What do you notice?

Attention to Embodiment and Emotion

In this last dimension of queer praxis, I want to lift up the importance of embodiment and emotion as part of our critical feminist scholarship. Related to Slow scholarship, Shahjahan (2015) argues that white/western, linear notions of time in the academy are part of a colonial project that perpetuates a mind/body binary and separation. This binary fundamentally reifies parts of the body that are linked to “productivity” such as heads, eyes, mouth, and ears as the body becomes a vessel meant to help us be productive and efficient. Our bodies are central to how we experience the world. As such, bringing awareness to our bodies helps us acknowledge different ways of knowing through sensory and embodied experiences while resisting the idea that knowledge is only generated in the mind. Connecting to our bodies provides us with a different way of thinking through both theory and experience. In a social work context, Mensinga and Pyles (2021) caution against a disembodied practice and instead posit that embodiment is critical to understanding stories that are often ignored and to furthering social justice goals. In addition, embodiment has the potential to help us to conceptualize and enact empathy in more robust ways (van Rhyn et al., 2021).

Embodiment

Nancy Krieger, public health scholar who has written extensively about the concept of embodiment also offers that the body tells stories (2005). Specifically, she writes that the concept of embodiment furthers three claims: (1) Bodies tell stories about and cannot be studied separately from the conditions of our existence; (2) Bodies tell stories that often but not always match people's stated accounts; (3) Bodies tell stories that people cannot or will not tell either because they are unable, forbidden or choose not to tell (Krieger, 2005). Indigenous scholars have as also offered important wisdom and scholarship about how bodies tell community-specific stories of individual and collective experiences including historical trauma (see for example Fernandez et al., 2021; Walters et al., 2011). In addition, critical disability scholars can offer a deeper understanding of the epistemology of embodiment and the potential to know in and through the body in different ways (Flynn, 2021).

As queer people, we often have complicated relationships with our bodies and embodiment. This is even more true for those who are queer women, BIPOC, fat, trans, living with disabilities, aging—our embodiment can feel dangerous, euphoric, dissonant, and thrilling at different times and in different spaces. In the queer praxis that I am suggesting, I assume that our queer and trans bodies that exist in relationship to other identities and contexts, tell stories and, ultimately, can inform our work in important ways.

In addition to embodiment making visible different ways of knowing and telling stories, attention to the body is also needed in queer praxis because of the ways our queer and gendered bodies occupy space in physical environments. The existence of our raced, gendered, sexualized bodies in the institutions we inhabit can be radical, disruptive, and even dangerous acts. In my first job out of grad school, I spent two years in a very culturally homogenous environment. As a fat, queer, middle-aged, South Asian femme, navigating embodiment in this physical environment, the classroom, and even in the larger community was a constant source of stress and questions for me. I know that many of my students had literally never seen anyone who looked like me before. On the best days, it felt like just physically existing in this context was an act of resistance; and, on the worst day, it felt unsafe to be in my body. The existence of my body in that space felt transgressive. There is no question that my body held wisdom and information and told a story that was important in that time and place.

In the spirit of attending to embodiment, I’d like to offer a grounding exercise.

If you’d like to join, I will invite you to get into a comfortable position. Notice where your body is making contact with a surface—this might be your seat on a chair, your feet on the ground—and come into your breath. Just notice what is going on w/your breath—you don‘t need to change it, but just pay attention—is it shallow, deep, fast, slow? Now I invite you to intentionally deepen your breath and take 3 deep cleansing breaths. Before opening your eyes, I want you to tune in to what is going on with your body—how does your body feel? What do you need? Is there something you can do to support your body right now? Whenever you feel ready, you can slowly open your eyes. As you come back into the room, take another 30 seconds to do something for your body—whatever you may need—a stretch break, drinking some water, or whatever else your body may be asking for.

Emotion and Grief

Slow scholarship also invites us to make space for the affective realities we are facing as part of the research process, including making space for emotion. Similar to embodiment opening up different ways of knowing, I concur with Widdowfield (2000) that “emotions have an important bearing on both how and what we know” (p. 199). Feminist scholars and activists have also called for less of a split between intellect and emotion. Though the queer praxis I am proposing calls on us to make room for all emotions in the research process, for the purposes of our conversation today, I will focus on grief as an emotion. Of course, we have all been living this as the past several years have been filled with various forms and levels of acute grief. In addition to personal level losses, we have been in the collective, macro-level grief of all of the things going on in our times, including pandemic-related losses of all kinds, ongoing colonization, anti-Black racism, anti-Asian violence, anti-trans, and queer legislation and ideologies, climate crises, and patriarchal and right-wing attacks on reproductive justice. At the same time, as queer people, we have specific forms and textures of individual and collective grief that we carry with us. We have the historical grief of losing a generation to AIDs, the collective grief of seeing the ongoing violence against trans women of color, the pain of the suicidality of queer and trans youth, the grief of losing families, cultures, and communities because of our gender and/or sexuality. There is no question that grief and loss are a form of queer affect that we inherit and inhabit. Prasad (2020) writes powerfully about queer grief and kinship:

I hold in folds of my particular grief, space for those whose traumatic breaks from family are far more violent than mine …. Because as queer people, we know loss as an inevitable part of becoming queer …. We hold each other in relation not because we know the detailed contours of each other's pain, but because we see in them an interstitial quality that mirrors our own. Perhaps that is why, when we face loss and grief, our chosen family can grieve with us without having had the same attachments or traumas. I share with my queer family, forms of grief that remain veiled; ….I think of queer grief as a response not just to death, but also to the violence of relational endings.

In the midst of my own grief a few weeks ago of processing a queer friend who passed away, losing an aunt and uncle in India to COVID, and navigating family homophobia in real time—a trusted senior colleague of mine gave me the wise advice to think about what it would mean to write/teach/speak/work from this place of grief. I have sat with this often, this question of how to harness grief, queer diasporic grief, in the space of the neoliberal, white supremacist, a heteropatriarchal institution that has so little space and time for it. And yet I am also reminded that queer artists, poets, filmmakers, and cultural workers have always theorized, embodied, and created about our affective lives as queer people. Queer ancestor Audre Lorde explicitly saw emotion as part of our political and intellectual project as a queer feminist; she famously stated that “feeling are our most genuine path to knowledge.”

How can we make space for queer grief as a dimension of our queer scholarly praxis?

How can emotion impact our work in creative, generative, and fruitful ways?

Emotional Labor

In regard to emotion, I also want to lift up the need to understand and account for emotional labor as part of the research process (see also Mehrotra, 2014). I would suggest that emotional labor in our research process may include emotional regulation/management in various research settings, holding and processing participants’ experiences or difficult content, and navigating dynamics of power and positionality in the research context. Emotional labor can also be heightened in circumstances where we have a personal connection to the subject being studied, which often we do as queer scholars. Seeing emotional labor as part of the research labor that we do necessitates that we make meaningful space for it.

Gutierrez-Perez (2020) in his writing on the Pulse massacre shares a beautiful example of queer praxis in action:

After I completed the first two essays, one for a special issue on queer autoethnography and the other for a special forum on the massacre at Pulse nightclub, I could not handle the emotional and spiritual labor alone anymore. It had gotten to the point where I was crying every time I sat down to work on that third and final essay. It was in that moment that I reached out to a colleague of mine for help, and he agreed to take up the labor of first author and together we finished that labor of love and care together. In this work, we danced with the shadows of grief, anger, and violence by interrogating and vulnerably sharing the back-and-forth text messages sent to each other in the days and weeks after forty-nine people were mowed down in an act of violence and hate. (pp. 1–2)

What is so striking about this example is that it embodies various elements of the queer praxis I have laid out in this discussion. The first is the presence of emotion and the acknowledgment of the deep grief that was felt while writing about the Pulse massacre as a queer Latinx person. Also, emotional and spiritual labor are acknowledged as part of the scholarly work that the author is doing. The author also centers on relationship and community care as he reaches out to a colleague for help and together they navigate collective queer grief and their scholarly project.

Pleasure in the Work

Lastly, I want to also talk about an intersectional queer praxis as one that embodies joy and pleasure as part of the emotional experience of our work. Slow scholarship invites us to savor the aspects of the work that are joyful, generative, and rewarding and therefore has the potential to (re)connect us with our satisfaction in the work beyond the production pressures often put onto us in higher education. I can honestly say for myself that the pressures and culture of academia have often made me feel very disconnected from the pleasure of the work. However, I believe that reclaiming pleasure and joy as part of our scholarly efforts is critical to it being nourishing, transformative, and sustainable.

adrienne maree brown (2019) posits that pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation truly pleasurable experiences and that it is the work we do to reclaim our whole selves from the impacts and limitations of oppression. For us in queer communities and as critical feminist scholars, this is necessary for our survival as people and as scholars. Taking up the kind of queer scholarly praxis that I am proposing makes space for and insists on joy and pleasure as part of our work.

Honan et al. (2015) write:

There are moments, cracks and fissures, tiny spaces where we produce pleasure, when desire is released from the restricted codes of the academy, when the transformative production of desire moves us beyond and away. While these moments may be small, an analysis of the assemblages that produce these moments can provide some illustration of ways to bring about change, to move beyond, to create anew, a different and productive way of being and becoming academic. (p. 52)

As queer people and critical feminists we have claimed and reclaimed pleasure and joy as resistance in our lives and in the world. It is my hope that we can also do this in our scholarly work and move into different ways of “being and becoming academic.”

We Move in the Direction of the Questions That We Ask

In the dimensions of queer praxis that I have been exploring here I have focused on how we do our work. And yet, we also always have to ground in the why. Why are we doing the work that we do? What is the vision of liberation we are moving toward? Responding to the traumas and the complex problems of today's world as critical feminist scholars requires us to ground in our purpose, to practice, to create and to reimagine. To truly understand intersectionality as it is embodied in lived lives requires us to go further in our work, and to keep refining our theory, our methodologies, and our praxis.

In a recent podcast, Prentis Hemphill, a Black queer somatics practitioner reflecting on emerging from the pandemic asks “what do we build up in this moment?” They go on to say “this moment of disorganization, of discomforts, of breakthroughs and breakdowns gives us an opportunity to be more precise in our practice” (Hemphill, 2021). So for us as scholars I would ask: How can we be more precise in the way that we practice our critical feminist scholarship?

I also want to name that much of what I have discussed here is our scholarly practices and the way we work on the individual and community level. I have not offered specific strategies for structural change or, specifically, how to directly change the oppressive conditions of academia or the whole research enterprise. adrienne maree brown (2017) asserts that how we are on the small scale is how we are on the larger scale. In accordance with this, I would suggest that the way we do our work on smaller levels and within our own spheres of influence has the potential of opening up space for larger-scale change. Employing the queer praxis I am describing challenges the business-as-usual of academic knowledge production and, as such, carries with it new possibilities and creative imaginings for larger structural change.

As I said at the beginning of this talk, this time together was an invitation to think collectively, to reflect, and to raise questions. I hope you are leaving with more questions or unformed thoughts than definitive answers. I believe that we move in the direction of the questions that we ask, and what we pay attention to grows. As such, today was an opening to begin to consider a queer praxis that can help us to build a more robust practice of critical feminist scholarship. If our ultimate goal is joy, healing, and liberation, we have to pause and consider if we are asking ourselves and our communities the right questions to move us in this direction. It is my hope that our questions, our praxis, and our attention to how we do the work can support us to live and work our way into more liberatory futures.