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Abstract

Using an autoethnographic approach, I reflect on and unpack my journey towards my doctoral research on queer South Africans of Indian descent. I demonstrate how my decision to become an insider-researcher forced me to confront personal resistances towards turning the academic gaze upon myself. Although my journey towards intersectional LGBTQ+ research began with a yearning for epistemic visibility, prompted by a curious search for psychological literature about people like me, I now grapple with a flip side—doing the emotional labour of visibility and managing my vulnerabilities. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa's feminist theory of Borderlands, I (re)conceptualize these vulnerabilities as vulnerable advantages, that is, liminal spaces of heightened reflexivity that can ignite psychopolitical potential in scholar-activism. I discuss and theorize the productive possibilities of these emotionally complex spaces by drawing on four interconnected life experiences related to the epistemic, ethical, artistic, and activist dimensions of vulnerabilities. I consider the emotional labour embedded in researching insider communities, and my anxieties about traversing through these psychosocial conflicts. I argue that reflecting on one's own vulnerabilities can provide researchers with unique perspectives as scholar-activists. These vulnerable advantages exist because of—not in spite of —one's initial trepidations as valuable psychopolitical and decolonial resources.

Keywords

autoethnography borderlands ethics Indian identity LGBTQ+South Africa vulnerabilities

(Re)locating vulnerabilities

. . . it still bleeds

never realizing that to heal

there must be wounds

to repair there must be damage

for light there must be darkness

Gloria Anzaldúa (2002), Healing Wounds.

The etymology of “vulnerable” is derived from its Latin vulnus (“wound”), vulnerō (“I wound”), vulnerābilis (“wounding”), and vulnerare (“to wound”). This lexical rootedness as something injurious, hurtful, or hurting, emphasizes its meaning as an experience to be avoided. In thinking and writing about vulnerabilities—and I deliberately use the plural as a reminder of its multiple iterations and reincarnations—I want to uproot its linguistic origins that normatively construct it in a negative light. To “be” or “become” vulnerable can, at times, be agentively contested as productive, motivating, consciousness-raising, and—against its Latin origins—healing, as suggested in Anzaldúa's poem.

I am thinking of myself here, in this (re)formulation of vulnerabilities, as I reflect on my PhD journey. In South Africa, a PhD in Psychology is optional, because a master's degree, dissertation, and 1-year internship are the minimum requirements for licensure. As such, a doctoral study is usually pursued based on passionate interest in a topic. As a gay cisgender man currently in the midst of my doctoral research with and about gay men, my choice of topic came with trepidations and conflicts as I considered the implications of being an intimate insider to the communities being studied. Literature on research ethics mostly focuses on the imagined vulnerabilities of potential participants (van den Hoonaard, 2018). There is less focus on the researcher's vulnerabilities (e.g., Griffin, 2012; Rogers, 2021) and how they contour decisions about the spaces we choose to enter for doctoral work. As James and Platzer (1999, p. 80) noted:
How we design, carry out, implement and disseminate research reveals something of who we are and what our emotional and moral lives are. We would suggest that researchers should pay attention to and allow time to reflect upon those things that cause them discomfort and unease in the process of their research.

How have I navigated and disrupted a range of personal vulnerabilities leading up to this point in my professional life? How have I quilted together competing articulations of “my” nationality, religion, race, culture, spatial location, class, sexual orientation, gender, and professional identities?

“Vantage,” derived from Anglo-French (“profit”) or Old French avantage (“superiority” or “advantage”), immediately juxtaposes itself against conceptualizations of vulnerabilities as woundedness. Vantage points, as a common refrain to imply a better view, or an insider perspective, are not necessarily incompatible with literal notions of vulnerabilities, despite their oxymoronic historical meanings. I use the term vulnerable advantages as a motif to unsettle hegemonic meanings of vulnerabilities. In so doing, I draw theoretical inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa's queer, feminist work on Borderlands, which I bring to bear in my conceptualization of vulnerabilities as liminal spaces of heightened reflexivity with decolonial and psychopolitical potential for scholar-activism.

The healing wounds of the Borderlands

Gloria Anzaldúa's (1987) work is grounded in her lived experiences as a Chicana, lesbian woman growing up in Texas, US, on a border edging Mexico. Through her transformative engagement with the cultural, spiritual, psychosocial, and linguistic challenges of having to traverse the competing demands of her Mexican and Anglo-American identities, she theorizes life at the border as more than a physical place; it is “living in a state of psychic unrest … always a path/state to something else” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 95). Her development of borderlands theory “applies to any kind of social, economic, sexual, and political dislocation [to] help us understand and theorize the experiences of individuals who are exposed to contradictory social systems” (Cantú & Hurtado, 2012, p. 7). The border is a metaphor for crossings, trespasses, dualities, hybridities, diversities, and fluidities. A Borderland perspective ushers in a complex, existential theory of intersectional liminality, contoured by a psychopolitical reckoning with racism, homophobia, sexism, and ethnocentrism. As Keating (2009, p. 319) notes, “these B/borderlands—in both their geographical and metaphoric meanings—represent intensely painful yet also potentially transformational spaces where opposites converge, conflict, and transform.”

To embrace the border is to embrace vulnerabilities. More so, it is to trust that such an embrace can be a paradoxical resistance to oppression, a decolonial enactment, a creative pursuit that leads one into the productive wounding I term vulnerable advantages. This conceptualization rejects a deficit-oriented view of vulnerabilities often taken by research ethics committees (RECs). Most RECs have a tendency towards simplistic and negative assumptions of what vulnerability may mean for particular groups of people recruited as research participants, such as “the LGBTQ+ community”—a phrase that often homogenizes and simplifies a complex configuration of intersectional lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) communities and individuals whose lived experiences of vulnerability, if any at all, vastly differ. As Juritzen et al. (2011) argue, RECs are embedded in the power dynamics of knowledge construction, and also have the power to do harm by their overreliance on the discourse of the researcher as “dangerous,” and of potential participants as “vulnerable.” I concur with van den Hoonaard (2018), who critiques the “protectionist attitude” of “a creaking ethics regime” (p. 311) that has given a top–down “misplaced attention to vulnerability” (p. 309), arguing instead for a focus on resilience as a “counter concept” to vulnerability (p. 309).

To contest these simplistic notions of vulnerabilities, I narrate, remember, and unpack my journey towards my current doctoral research on queer South Africans of Indian descent. I argue that embracing and processing vulnerabilities—from the intrapsychic to the structural—can be a reflexive space for growth, gratitude, and resilience. I demonstrate how my eventual decision to choose a doctoral study that would both “out me” and centralize me as a queer insider researcher was not easy, and emerged after a series of serendipitous events over several years. These moments forced me to confront my own anxieties and resistances towards turning the (my?) academic gaze upon a community I am intimately a part of, and the implications of so doing. Kakali Bhattacharya (2015, p. 497) foregrounds the healing potentials of reckoning with one's vulnerabilities “as a catalyst to connect fragments” that ultimately connects self-transformation with social justice goals. She writes intimately about how the liminality of the “de/colonization project” can unfold as a form of internal self-healing and personal transformation:
It requires, finally, making peace with the pain to understand our own suffering and transformation. Such “home work” is critically necessary before any “field work” can be accomplished for any social justice agenda; without it, we will only feed and amplify our pain, defeating our transformative desires. (Bhattacharya, 2015, p. 496)

In terms of method, this article also locates itself on these Borderlands, a space-between. An autoethnography means stepping outside the parameters of a disembodied academic presentation, choosing to firmly recentre one's subjectivity. Boylorn and Orbe (2014, p. 19) note that a critical autoethnographic method has three aspirations: “to understand the lived experience of real people in context, to examine social conditions and uncover oppressive power arrangements, and to fuse theory and action to challenge processes of domination.” Situated in the transgressive cracks between memory and theory, I centre my lived experiences as a queer scholar-activist in this “blurred genre … refusing categorization” (Holman Jones, 2005, p. 765). Autoethnographic writing, as process and product, is a Borderland itself, and can be a political enactment of working within and through one's vulnerabilities to deepen a decolonial, social justice, queer, and feminist agenda (Chandrashekar, 2018; Chawla & Atay, 2018; Chawla & Rodriguez, 2008; Gutierrez-Perez, 2017; LeMaster et al., 2019; Padilla, 2019).

I organize this article into four interconnected sections that converge with a brief reflection on the queer politics of emotional labour. Here, I define “queer politics” to mean the power dynamics embedded in understanding and navigating LGBTQ+ identities and research. Drawing on American sociologist Arlie Hochschild's influential work on emotional labour (Hochschild, 2012), I use it to refer to the ongoing awareness, use, control, and management of a range of personal feelings (emotions) within the context of formal work (labour), such as being a researcher and a psychologist.

Epistemic vulnerabilities: In search of self

To acknowledge the privilege and entitlement of being the author, queer (auto)ethnographers must write reflexively and critically about identities, histories, and cultures. We owe it to our various interconnected communities (Gutierrez-Perez, 2017, p. 152).

In 2014, I began searching for academic articles on the experiences of LGBTQ+ South Africans of Indian descent—a group with which I identify, and I was curious to know how “I” was being portrayed in the literature. I entered a range of keywords into search engines but reached dead ends. I found an emerging body of empirical work on South African LGBTQ+ psychology (e.g., Lubbe-De Beer & Marnell, 2013); a separate canon of sociohistorical research on Indians in South Africa (e.g., Dhupelia-Mesthrie, 2000); and parallel work on sexuality, gender, and race (e.g., Shefer & Ratele, 2011). There was a dearth of research on the intersecting identities of being gay and South African and of Indian descent. Surely, I was not asking for too much, I thought. This was not an obscure combination of characteristics—such as being left-handed and vegetarian and a clinical psychologist (another combination with which I also identify, but surely do not expect any research on, nor should there be!). It was a singularly disorienting experience to discover that my “life” and the identity markers that shape my worldview were never considered worthy of academic attention. I was staring straight into an epistemic gap, that is, a void or disconnect between one's lived realities and their representation in formal research outputs. How did this come to be? Was I on the receiving end of what Charles Mills (1997) termed epistemologies of ignorance, or what Miranda Fricker (2007) called a hermeneutic hotspot?

Whatever the reason, “I” was missing in the regimes of knowledge production. We, LGBTQ+ South Africans of Indian descent, mostly faded into the background of larger samples (Naidoo & Mabaso, 2014), were “seen” from the one-dimensional perspective of religious identity (Bonthuys & Erlank, 2012), or were written up as a curious case study (Chan Sam, 1995). Two unpublished postgraduate studies with small samples did foreground some qualitative experiences (Dave, 2011; Moonsammy, 2009).

I presented my findings at the 20th National Congress of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA) (Pillay, 2014). I highlighted the lack of intersectionality in LGBTQ+ research in the post-apartheid research agenda—an issue that has been raised previously (Graziano, 2004)—and the confusing conflation of “racial” and “religious” identities in some research.

This congress in September 2014 was particularly special because it coincided with the official launch of both the PsySSA Sexuality and Gender Division (SGD) and the Pan-African Psychology Union (PAPU), opening up the possibilities of intercontinental collaborations, pertinent in a vulnerable geopolitical context wherein sexual and gender diversity remains taboo and/or criminalized. It was also our 20th year of democracy, a bittersweet celebration for queer South Africans who have (theoretically) enjoyed unprecedented legal protections since 1994, but suffer unrelenting hate crimes, prejudice, and discrimination (Human Rights Watch, 2011; Other Foundation, 2016). That is the paradox of queer embodiment in post-1994 South Africa.

Within psychology, however, it was encouraging to see the development of a SGD, whose outgoing chairperson—a gay man—was also then elected President of PsySSA at that congress (and whom I would much later choose as my PhD supervisor). The SGD was mostly, but not exclusively, composed of LGBTQ+ people, and grew into a “safe space” in itself, where professional and personal identities fluidly coexisted, decreasing the emotional labour queer researchers do in heteronormative spaces, such as disciplinary conferences (Henderson, 2015; Horne, 2020).

Following my presentation, I was unexpectedly asked to join a US-funded initiative of the SGD, called the PsySSA African LGBTI+ Human Rights Project. It had published a pioneering position statement on sexual and gender diversity (Psychological Society of South Africa [PsySSA], 2013) to provide psychology professionals with an affirmative framework to challenge patriarchy and heteronormativity. It was hoped that psychology professionals would “assist in the transformation of unjust sexual and gender systems” (Victor et al., 2014, p. 292). The next stage, which I had been invited to, was to extend this position statement into a comprehensive set of practice guidelines.

Despite being gay and despite my anger at the epistemic gaps in LGBTQ+ research, I was reluctant to join this project, finding myself on a borderland between vulnerability and opportunity. A pragmatic reason was that I wanted to align my emerging research identity towards improving health systems, arising from my job “on the ground” at a public hospital (Pillay et al., 2018). However, at an affective level, I felt a jarring discomfort at endorsing the idea that psychologists needed “special” guidelines to engage with queer people. Surely, the universal dictums of empathy, respect, and positive regard should suffice.

Upon reflection, I realize now that my initial reluctance to conceptualize LGBTQIA+¹ people as a vulnerable group was linked to fears about how we have been historically “vulnerablized” as queer people. Would guidelines inadvertently stigmatize, essentialize, repathologize, and ghettoize LGBTQIA+ people as enduringly vulnerable (Drescher, 2015)? Psychology and psychiatry have complicit histories of pathologizing LGBTQ+ people, especially during the apartheid era (Pillay et al., 2019). This was accomplished in many ways, such as formulating queer people as mentally ill, conducting research to “confirm” pathological perspectives, and using psychotherapy as a vehicle to forcibly change people's sexual orientation or gender identity (Pillay et al., 2019).

I churned my discomfort into self-reflexive writing, resulting in a media article wherein I problematized and then responded to the need for specialized psychological guidelines for LGBTQIA+ people, anticipating similar critiques that colleagues might voice (Pillay, 2018). I came to realize that guidelines fill epistemic gaps that enable bad practices to go unchecked, such as transphobia, sexual orientation change efforts, misinformation, or wilful ignorance that results in people like myself being excluded in research. Acknowledging our vulnerabilities as diverse, intersectional, queer communities did not have to erase our strength, resilience, and fortitude in surviving and thriving in such contexts of minority stress (Gutierrez-Perez, 2017; Lorde, 1984).

If we are to fill these epistemic gaps ourselves, they require an honest reckoning with where and how we locate ourselves within this work. Indeed, it implies working through these Borderlands, grappling with the vulnerable advantages that an emotionally conflicted position provides, to emerge with a fresh perspective. I worked through my concerns academically and affectively. With the added enthusiasm of the core team, I was swayed on board, and we had our first meeting in Cape Town in February 2015.

Ethical vulnerabilities: In search of safety

Immersed in and invigorated by working on the guidelines, in early 2017, I began addressing the research gap I initially identified, and led an exploratory online survey to collect data about the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ South Africans of Indian descent.

A difficult aspect of sharing the online survey hyperlink with LGBTQ+ friends and acquaintances, and nudging them to participate, was convincing them that this would be completely anonymous and that responses will not be traced back to them. In essence, I was inviting (and convincing) them to be vulnerable. It would be remiss of myself to downplay the doubts and uncertainties that trouble queer people when we are asked to share a part of ourselves that we have kept a closely guarded secret for an excruciatingly long part of our lives; or, in some instances, continue to keep hidden. As researchers, we remained sensitive to our positions of power while acutely aware of the fears potential participants may have had of being inadvertently “outed.” We therefore deployed and promised “anonymity” in the informed consent form, to alleviate vulnerabilities and decrease the emotional labour of potential participation:
We understand that not everybody has “come out,” or some people are very discreet, so protecting your identity is very important to us. This is a national survey, which includes people from across many cities. Therefore, this entire study is online and completely confidential and anonymous. We do not want your name or personal contact information, and will have no way of linking your answers to who you are.

In hindsight, I am sceptical of whether assurances of anonymity diminish the trepidation that accompanies perceived vulnerabilities. Even if sharing anonymously through an online survey is cathartic, reflexive, or insightful—as qualitative research methods often claim to be when we probe people's innermost thoughts, feelings, histories, and insecurities— surely vulnerabilities are inevitably (and creatively?) embedded in the reflexive process of deciding what and how to share. Vulnerabilities, as emotional resources, can meaningfully and substantively add value to the data, enriching the stories being shared with political texture. Indeed, this is an example of vulnerable advantages.

Yet, vulnerabilities are often constructed as “risky” in the bureaucratic discourse of research ethics committees and its mitigation or minimization of imagined harm (van den Hoonaard, 2018). We included a standard disclaimer in the informed consent form about potential risks to participants, whom we constructed a priori as a vulnerable population. This technocratic conceptualization of vulnerabilities as a thing to be managed ignored the resilience of participants.

Naively, we stated that anonymity mitigates vulnerability (“there is no risk to your identity because this is completely anonymous”), and conceptualized being gay as a vulnerability. In this disclaimer, we are speaking to an imagined sample of closeted participants, who may be suspicious or anxious about filling out personal information on an anonymous survey. Ironically, therefore, promises of anonymity may exacerbate feelings of vulnerability, as potential participants doubt the authenticity of a survey and/or its intentions. In a sociocultural context in which digital information can be breached and leaked, people are spied on through computer technology, online scams dupe unsuspecting citizens, and bugs and viruses attack our devices, clicking a hyperlink is a neither straightforward nor innocuous activity. The trustworthiness of the survey is therefore paramount to mitigating participants’ vulnerabilities. We therefore added all the researchers’ phone numbers and institutional email addresses for participants to verify the authenticity of the survey.

Of course, some people may eagerly choose to participate but go on to experience a genuine sense of regret, discomfort, sadness, anger, or trauma when answering potentially triggering questions about their lived experiences, exacerbating their emotional risk. They would be left to self-soothe alone in whatever space they were typing their responses, with the options of continuing, exiting, or leaving and returning later. We anticipated that the survey might bring up feelings of distress—further determinatively constructing our sample as vulnerable for the purposes of the REC—and so included resources for psychological help in the informed consent form and at the end of the survey, not mentioning the internal resources that our sample could draw from (van den Hoonaard, 2018).

Expectedly, we received “ethical clearance” from the university, satisfying the “procedural ethics,” but left to grapple with “ethics in practice” (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004, p. 261). Seventy people completed the survey, with surprising diversity in terms of geographic location, religious identity, age, and sexual orientation. It is difficult to know if any participants were triggered by the survey and experienced distress. Nobody expressed such in the final open-ended question of the survey, where we invited any general comments. On the contrary, the survey seemed to be a welcome intervention for LGBTQ+ people, some of whom directly emailed me afterwards, thanking us for conducting such a study and volunteering themselves to be interviewed individually if needed. The length, depth, and quality of the responses shared on the survey pointed to a cathartic experience of people wanting to share their story (Pillay, 2023).

The emotionally infused interface between a potential participant and an online survey is a Borderland, cyber and psychological, where a queer person must decide to share a part of themselves and trust that their information will remain safe and respected. These Borderlands can be ethical vulnerabilities located between exclusion and inclusion, that is, it is a space in which the subaltern must decide to speak up or remain silent, and surveys must decide whether to create enabling conditions for such voice or to continue silencing the subaltern. These choices contain agency and even in that indecisive in-betweenness, there is unspoken personal reflexivity with profound political implications for who is rendered visible in research and who is not.

Artistic vulnerabilities: In search of space

Serendipitously, in August 2017, 3 months after launching the survey, I stumbled across an event at an art gallery near my home. It was entitled Re-membering: Memory, Intimacy, Archive. It showcased works by South African artists Reshma Chhiba, Sharlene Khan, and Jordache A. Ellapen from their projects titled “Kali” (2008) and “The Two Talking Yonis” (2013); “When the Moon Waxes Red” (2016); and “Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy” (2016/2017), respectively. It was a risqué experience for me, because it was the first time I attended a public exhibition foregrounding Indian (homo)sexualities. All artists used their own bodies “in a postcolonial masquerading in order to trouble stereotypes of ‘Indianness’ in South Africa by focusing on the intersectionalities between class, gender, ethnicity, nationalism and homoeroticism” (KwaZulu-Natal Society for Arts [KZNSA], 2017). This was a brave example of a vulnerable advantage, whereby one productively pursues the emotional labour of using one's own body as a site of public exposure. Ellapen's work, in particular, used family photo albums to provoke fantasies, wonderings, and yearnings about the “missing” queer relatives in family narratives—perhaps an unmarried aunt or uncle, (re/dis)locating them into a borderland space of fantasy. His work responded to “the near absence of ‘Indian’ queer subjects” in contemporary visual archives, in order to deconstruct and reimagine masculinity and sexuality “and the entanglements of history, memory, race, desire, and pleasure in the very constitution of racial categories in South Africa” (KZNSA, 2017).

This kind of performative and artistic work “that speaks to intersectional, decolonial, feminist and queer goals is increasingly operating across and between the divides of activism, art and scholarship in current South African contexts” (Shefer, 2019, p. 422). This experience prompted me to write a reflective article for The Post, a national newspaper for South African Indian communities:
As I stood in the gallery, feeling slightly awkward, it was a “good” awkwardness, because we, the viewers, are left to interpret the meaning of these curious, erotic and disruptive photos … I smiled at the thought of being present at a public event that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. We have come a long way! (Pillay, 2017)

Invigorated by feeling “seen,” I wondered whether any of my ancestors—the indentured labourers of Natal's sugar cane plantations between 1860 and 1914—were lesbian or gay or bisexual or transgender. Without a language or a space for such expression (what Fricker, 2007 might call a “hermeneutical injustice”), what form would those identities have taken, if any? I wished that this exhibition travelled to the spaces that truly needed to see it: the historically Indian suburbs in KwaZulu-Natal, such as Chatsworth and Phoenix in Durban, or Northdale in Pietermaritzburg, the place where I was born and grew up. Transgressive art rarely makes its way to these locations, (re)producing cultural voids that are entangled with bourgeoise notions of where “fine” art is to be found. It felt easy—too easy—to attend this exhibition in the leafy suburb of Glenwood, predominantly White and middle class, known for being “gay-friendly.” In fact, there are no art galleries in “my” original home community of Northdale, itself an unfortunate artefact of apartheid-era spatial planning, a lingering colonial vulnerability. Would this exhibition have troubled or destabilized the cultural sensibilities of these communities, culture bearers of heteronormativity? In other words, how and why are the dominant values of “Indianness” entangled with the hegemony of heteronormativity, as evidenced by the near absence of queer people in “official” hegemonic histories of Indians in South Africa (e.g., Desai & Vahed, 2019; Dhupelia-Mesthrie, 2000). What are the unspoken discursive codes silently enforcing who belongs and who does not? Would Ellapen's exhibition render the community vulnerable, or does the community's vulnerability render the exhibition untenable? Can we queer these cultural sensibilities and dominant values? Pather and Boulle (as cited in Shefer, 2019, p. 11) note:
Artists trouble our worldviews and test our ability to function without familiar coordinates, chipping away at false certainties. The effects are often disorienting, but vital, it would seem, if we intend to do more than dream of a fair, critical and robust society from the safe remove of intractable ideological standpoints.

Professor Betty Govinden, who recited a poem at the opening of the exhibition, wrote early on in our democracy about the “autobiographical impulse” that “freedom” catalysed amongst South Africans of Indian descent (2008, p. 14). Suppressed stories were being shared. A hermeneutic hotspot (Fricker, 2007) was evolving into a space of emotional engagement. Indeed, both this exhibition and our online survey were testament to this. Perhaps those photographs influenced my later choice of a photovoice method to collect data for my doctoral research.

Activist vulnerabilities: In search of solutions

Meanwhile, my involvement with PsySSA's African LGBTI+ Human Rights Project was deepening. We (“The Flaming Faggots,” a story for another article!) published the Practice Guidelines for Psychology Professionals Working with Sexually- and Gender-Diverse People, which was ratified and endorsed by the PsySSA council in September 2017 (PsySSA, 2017). This was an unprecedent document for South African psychology, which was stepping up to provide organized leadership in the area of sexual and gender diversity (Nel, 2014) in order to undo its historic, heterosexist harms against queer people (Pillay et al., 2019).

These advances were aligned to a transnational discourse to identify competencies for psychologists working with diversity and intersectionality by the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS), and global efforts by psychology organizations to develop LGBTQ-affirmative policies. My initial reluctance was replaced by a firm appreciation of the myriad issues that needed scholar-activism to advance a queer-focused agenda. Indeed, this was a special moment: our guidelines were the first in South Africa and the African continent more broadly.

This marked somewhat of a turning point in my own professional identity. A successful intersectoral public launch of the guidelines took place in Johannesburg in April 2018, and I was interviewed on television the following morning. This was my first live TV interview specifically about LGBTQ+ issues, despite my long history of media engagement on other social issues. I then personally organized a second launch in Durban. I was soon lead-author of a LGBTQ+ paper (Pillay et al., 2019)—another first for me in this field—that was published in a special edition of American Psychologist: “Fifty Years Since Stonewall: The Science and Politics of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity.” Our paper critiqued the “standard” heteronormative histories written about South African psychology, as we examined neglected political, social, and institutional factors that enabled the eventual development of LGBTQ+ affirmative psychologies in post-1994 South Africa.

Yet, it felt impossible to fully enjoy these victories while my surrounding geopolitical context was actively rendering queer people vulnerable to state-sponsored homophobia. In 2017, 33 of 54 African countries still criminalized consensual same-sex sexual activity, with lengthy prison sentences and the death penalty in some nations. There was a revitalization of antigay colonial-era laws. Despite having the most progressive legal protections in Africa, if not the world, South Africa failed to exert diplomatic influence in the continent to protect LGBTQ+ people, and was equally failing in its ability to safeguard its own queer communities from violence. Just 2 months before we launched our guidelines, the Hate Crimes Working Group (HCWG), a South African civil society initiative, launched a report showing that after xenophobia, hate crimes against LGBTQ+ and gender nonconforming people were highest (Mitchell & Nel, 2017).

This was, in so many ways, where “the rubber hit the road” in terms of scholar-activism and my own reckoning with the discursive resistances that our work would meet. Antiqueer hate crimes provoked me to think about what it meant to be cast as vulnerable, sometimes against my will, via media interpellation into the LGBTQ+ community and in the academic work of which I was seen to be part. I did not “feel” vulnerable. Was I being buffered by a bubble of racialized, geospatial, and class protections, as precarious as they may be? Mitchell and Nel (2017) note that most hate crime perpetrators are known to the victim or from the victim's community. Perhaps feeling vulnerable and being vulnerable are two different things. Melanie Judge (2018, p. 128) captured some of my sentiments more eloquently:
Being queer at the intersection with violence is a sphere of epistemological, identitarian, and political struggles wherein conflicting truths and the interests they advance jostle for primacy in the crafting of queer political futures … Violence against queers is neither just about queers, nor just about violence. It is about distance and proximity to conditions of violence and the queer inclusions and exclusions these mark.

Our academic work was always designed with a view to positively change attitudes, behaviours, and professional spaces in the pursuit of social justice—going beyond the self-congratulatory sterility of mere journal publications. In an effort to pragmatically translate our work for grassroots change, we designed sensitization trainings, using the guidelines as our theoretical base. From 2018 onwards, we ran training courses for over 500 social workers and social service professionals. This was my first foray into paid LGBTQ+ workshops (having normalized such labour as pro bono activism for many years). There are certain vulnerabilities and affective conflicts of interest that “paid activism” can open itself up to, perhaps not nefariously but certainly opportunistically, in ways that require a hypersensitivity to an ethical-reflexive awareness on the part of the scholar-activist-facilitator. I am no stranger to emotionally complex group work, but the opportunity to help health professionals develop a critical and queer-affirmative consciousness was not easy. It forced me (“the service provider”) to confront the limits of my ability to empathize with queer-phobic peers (“the clients”), while maintaining a safe space conducive to learning and unlearning. Through a painstaking process of careful cofacilitation to unpack (not confront) and understand (not judge) healthcare workers’ prejudices and myths about LGBTQ+ people, I gained confidence in allowing my own affective vulnerabilities to be routed towards a higher goal of education for social change (Frizelle, 2020). Embracing a pedagogy of vulnerabilities can have transformative educational outcomes if both the facilitators and the students are willing to take mutual risks (Behari-Leak et al., 2021), including building a climate of trust to enable the pedagogical value of shame as an affective, antipatriarchal resource (Zembylas, 2019). There are, of course, no easy solutions to complex historical problems, and the emotional labour that such work entails was a journey into, and through, a Borderland that continues today.

The emotional labour of embracing my (vulner)abilities

“That's what writing is for me, an endless cycle of making it worse, making it better, but always making meaning out of the experience, whatever it may be”. (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 95)

Against these backdrops of seemingly diverse but intersecting vulnerabilities (epistemic, ethical, artistic, and activist), I decided to finally pursue my PhD research in LGBTQ+ psychology. This was despite registering for my PhD a few years prior, with the aim of studying public mental health systems. I made little progress for a variety of reasons, mostly related to bad timing: I had spent most of 2016 onwards prioritizing my involvement in grassroots community interventions and setting up mental health advocacy structures in Durban. There was, however, also some psychological resistance to going down a new path and embracing the implicit and explicit vulnerabilities that such a decision would entail.

My first, and central, cause for reluctance was the “closeness” of the subject matter and the idea of researching myself vis-à-vis putting a spotlight onto a group to which I (sometimes) belong. Would this blur the lines of normative objectivity expected for a doctoral study? As an intimate insider who is deeply embedded in the historic and psychosocial realities of my sample, would I be far more than a mere participant-observer? Although “insider” research is not uncommon, the emotional labour needed to navigate these questions and its embedded anxieties felt qualitatively different from other forms of work. For example, it felt easy and uncomplicated to write a collaborative autoethnography with colleagues about “being psychologists in a public hospital” (Pillay et al., 2018). Identities that are not forged in the fires of minority stress are less burdened with historical traumas. I do not see any emotional equivalence in my navigation of being a clinical psychologist in a demanding and often stressful setting versus the developmental stress of navigating queer identity. These stressors are qualitatively different, and I had no anxiety writing about being a psychologist, an important but not enduring aspect of my identity. Certain subject positions come with far less “baggage.” Excavating sexuality, an aspect of being that so many gay men compartmentalize in order to simply survive, felt dangerous and risky. Was I prepared to do this emotional labour?

Secondly, and tied in, was the issue of disclosure. No stranger to “coming out,” I wondered how my research choice itself could “out” me, and the ripple effects this could have on other aspects of my professional life. For example, as a clinical psychologist, I see patients for psychotherapy, a space in which I generally do not self-disclose my sexual orientation and rarely feel the need to “come out,” even to LGBTQ+ patients. I am not a “blank slate” at all, in a strictly psychodynamic sense, because I write frequent sociopolitical commentary in the media, and regularly coproduce community interventions with service users. But those activities do not carry the same sort of identity dilemmas that being gay brings about. I rarely experience my sexual orientation as something to foreground, or to consciously hide, but suddenly it began to loom large. Should I anticipate prodding questions from regular patients who may be surprised to learn that I am gay? Will this impact our therapeutic relationship? Would a patient ever really stumble across my PhD thesis? Is doing LGBTQ+ research on one's own subgroup yet another context that calls for continuous coming out? Again, was I prepared to do this emotional labour?

My third cause for reluctance was about managing boundaries. Most South Africans of Indian descent live in KwaZulu-Natal (Durban in particular), which is where I also live. If I were to collaborate with such a niche subgroup of gay citizens, I would inevitably cross paths with them in social circles, given Durban's small LGBTQ+ social scene. The ethics of friendship in research needs careful management (Taylor, 2011). Was I prepared to navigate these boundary issues (Mnyaka & Macleod, 2018)? Would I be able to convince others to conavigate these boundaries with me by agreeing to be interviewed and join a focus group? How would the very probable possibilities of boundary crossings in social settings affect the imagined collaboration through a participatory action research approach, which I hoped to use? Yet again, was I prepared to do this emotional labour?

Despite my trepidations, I took the plunge with nervous excitement—aware that I must continually grapple with how I use my own identity to navigate a world that is psychosocially familiar but analytically new. Vulnerabilities in social science research are, ultimately, a relational concept and whatever arises “in the field” must be duly navigated intersubjectively (van den Hoonaard, 2018). What spurred me on the most was this space's Borderland potential for academic-activist solidarities, and its psychopolitical positioning within a decolonial and social justice agenda. How can we use our personal identities as researchers to step outside the parameters of “traditional” scholarship and contribute meaningfully to social change, beyond the “feel-good” peripheries of communities we do not really belong to? How do we centre our own insider membership as a form of social capital, to be used reflexively but powerfully? These are the kinds of questions I am asking while thinking through the concept of vulnerable advantages.

As I move from the margins towards the centre of queer scholar-activist writing, I am sensitive to the varieties of vulnerabilities that this journeying entails. I do not find it easy, but I believe no cause worth pursing is without emotional entanglements that render the personal political and vice versa. Much like Bhattacharya (2015, p. 499):
I let go of the need to pretend that I lead separate personal and professional lives, and accept that I exist in relation to both. I carry with me my wounds, my accomplishments, my efforts, and my struggles that are all intertwined culminating in the current moment.

Despite my perceived insider status as a gay South African cisgender man of Indian descent, my emotional labour in the profession is mediated by protective personal factors such as middle-classness, suburban geospatial location, supportive family, stable relationship status, professional identity, and access to social capital. Being an insider is therefore not apolitical, and formulations of queer subgroups, however familiar, must avoid homogenization. As Judge (2018, p. 130) argues, politicized articulations of queerness in South Africa must be “intersectional, diverse and internally contestable.” Some vulnerabilities will therefore be shared and inform a communal construction of historic woundedness, while others will be unique embodiments of pain, resilience, and agency.

For example, while submitting a revised version of this manuscript in 2022, LGBTQ+ people at Club Q in Colorado, US, were attacked by a gunman, only a few weeks after Pride in Sandton, South Africa was almost cancelled due to the threat of a terrorist attack. While submitting the final manuscript in 2023, Uganda had just passed its Anti-Homosexuality Bill, as a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation spreads across parts of Africa, including Kenya and Tanzania; and further afield, the Indian Supreme Court is aggressively debating whether to legalize same-sex marriage. Indeed, as Gutierrez-Perez (2017, p. 151) observes, “like all other contexts in which we exist, auto/ethnographic performances of queer bodies of color are dangerous work because our histories with master narratives grapple with the politics of colonialism, violence, and genocide.” Having the power to write myself into existence is therefore a privilege I do not take lightly.

Concluding hopes: Towards visibility

Using the radical subjectivity of autoethnographic writing as a decolonial method with social justice potential, I rendered myself vulnerable in this article, as I shared my own thoughts, yearnings, feelings, fantasies, anxieties, and hopes to personalize the political and politicize the personal. My academic journey towards LGBTQ+ research began with a need for visibility, prompted by a curious search for psychological literature about people like me. This yearning has forced me to grapple with a flip side, the emotional labour of visibility and the ripple effect on my personal and professional life. I drew on Anzaldúa’s queer feminist theory of Borderlands to frame my varied vulnerabilities and their advantageous potentials. Using the term vulnerable advantages, I navigated the productive possibilities of vulnerable spaces, wherein woundedness and healing mutually metamorphosize in ethically and emotionally complex configurations. Drawing on four interconnected experiences of traversing through these vulnerable vantage points, I reflected on the epistemic, ethical, artistic, and activist dimensions of vulnerabilities, pausing to consider the emotional labour embedded in their reckoning.

Ultimately, this space is liminal and cyclical, there is neither a neat beginning nor a tidy ending. I will continue to write myself into existence. A luta continua.

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: I previously was a council member of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA) and I am currently an executive member of the PsySSA Sexuality and Gender Division.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: No funding was specifically used or influenced this particular manuscript. My doctoral research is funded by the National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) in South Africa. The PsySSA Africa LGBTI+ Human Rights Project was funded by the Arcus Foundation.

ORCID iD

Suntosh R. Pillay

Notes

Author Biography

Suntosh R. Pillay (he/him) is a clinical psychologist at King Dinuzulu Hospital Complex in Durban, South Africa, with an adjunct affiliation to the Department of Psychiatry at the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal. His doctoral research on Indian LGBTQ+ identities is located in the Department of Psychology at the University of South Africa. His research interests and community collaborations are centred on critical, creative, and decolonial forms of psychosocial praxis related to mental health, race, sexualities, power, and social justice.

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Vulnerable advantages: Re-searching my self while navigating queer identity,research ethics,and emotional labour

Abstract

Keywords

The healing wounds of the Borderlands

Epistemic vulnerabilities: In search of self

Ethical vulnerabilities: In search of safety

Artistic vulnerabilities: In search of space

Activist vulnerabilities: In search of solutions

The emotional labour of embracing my (vulner)abilities

Concluding hopes: Towards visibility

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author Biography

References