A Queer Cyborg Ethnographer in the Performative Friction of Dissenting Ontologies

Abstract

The reader of this article is invited to join an encounter of methodological experimenting, productive tensions and a way of writing that seeks to challenge conventional human- and language-centered scholarly discourses. This article speculates with the possibility of two dissenting ontologies co-existing simultaneously and making each other visible. Troubling moments of the ontologies rubbing together are elaborated as friction and demonstrated in “queer reiterations” presented throughout the article. The moments of friction orient and reorient the research process. The article draws on Barad’s agential realist onto-epistemology in an interdisciplinary ethnographic research project embedded in psychometric capturing of data. The first part of the article scrutinizes theoretical frictions. The second part, “empirical frictions” takes the reader through encounters with so-called fieldwork and data. The final layer of research writing, “productive frictions” has been inspired by Haraway’s cyborg manifesto to foreground the emergence of the Queer Cyborg Ethnographer.