Abstract
The article describes the specific gender and sexuality relations that emerged in a life story interview I conducted with a gay-identified man who desires both women and men. I provide a detailed description not only of the eroticization he performed in the interview, but also of my reactions: I felt vulnerable, attractive, attracted, and repulsed. My reflexive analysis frames these reactions in the context of the power dynamics between us, as well as in the context of his narrated experiences with women (including solidarity, desire, abuse and economic interests) – some of which my analysis would not have revealed without taking our interaction into account. I thus argue for the importance of processes of embodied learning, and specifically, for the theoretical significance of the bisexual gendered dynamics between researcher and respondent. Further, my account illuminates the ambiguity of bonding between queer women and men. I argue that owing to the theoretical productivity of the researcher’s reflexivity, the transactional erotic aspects of our own subjectivity are telling of the very meanings (of sex, gender, sexuality and other categories) we aim to interrogate.
Introduction
The phenomenon of respondents sexualizing researchers is well-traced in literature on qualitative research methodologies, especially in sexuality studies (see Grenz, 2005, 2014; Kaspar and Landolt, 2016; Pascoe, 2007; Presser, 2005; Schwalbe and Wolkomir, 2003). Recently, a new strand of scholarship has started to discuss the role of the researcher’s bodily experiences, including their desires, in both hetero- and homosexual research interactions (see this issue and Carter, 2016; Kaspar and Landolt, 2016; McClelland, 2017). It argues for re-thinking the concept of the good researcher and proposes ‘including the desiring body of the researcher in our writings’ (De Craene, 2017: 454). For Pascoe (2007: 193) and McClelland (2017: 343), paying attention to their own feelings and desires during their interactions with respondents helped them recognize processes of masculinity and femininity, respectively, which formed the core of their research questions.
However, the complex and specific challenges women face when interviewing men with same-sex desires are rarely discussed, let alone if either or both parties have bisexual desires. In bisexual studies, the power dynamics in the case of a man interviewing men are addressed by Klesse (2007), and a theoretical discussion on positionality is offered in Hemmings (2002: 52), but these accounts do not address the insights which stem from my embodied experience. This article addresses the ways one of my interviewees was hitting on me during and after our interview in 2013.
I will argue that the erotic relation between the researcher and her respondent needs to be examined, including the researcher’s reflexivity on her embodied experiences, because it in itself carries gendered and sexual meanings. I interviewed Dániel, a gay-identified man with bisexual attractions, about his sexual history for a Hungarian bisexual research project. 1 My reflection on the affective-erotic interaction during our interview has contributed to a deeper understanding of Dániel’s narrative construction of sexual identifications and attractions. Illuminating the ambiguity of sexual-gendered power dynamics in research, my findings fit into the frame of critical feminist sexuality studies which underline sexuality as the source of both pleasure and danger (Fahs, 2014; Fahs et al., 2018).
After a theoretical introduction which contextualizes the researcher’s sexualization as part of the interactive narrative creation of self in the interview, I will describe in detail the experience of interviewing Dániel. Quotes from the interview and my field notes will show how he performed eroticization towards me and how that affected me. I continue with the analysis of this affective interaction in light of his narrative. Finally, I lay bare the complex gender-sexual meanings our interaction entailed, and how the erotic relation between us has helped me to gain a better understanding of his bisexuality.
Gendered-sexualized interactions between researcher and interviewee
I consider the interview as a specific, co-constructed situation out of which the actual narrative evolves, as storytelling itself is a site for performing identities. The sexual life story interview I conducted with Dániel can be understood as a space for the subject to create himself as a sexual being, similarly to confession narratives in the Foucauldian sense (see Foucault, 1978; Scott, 1992). This has been the starting point for scholarship which is reflexive about the sexual and gender performances of/in interviews (Grenz, 2005, 2014; Kaspar and Landolt, 2016; Klesse 2007: 53; Pascoe, 2007; Presser, 2005; Riessman, 2003; Scholz, 2004; Schwalbe and Wolkomir, 2003). Specifically, interviews about same-sex desire, like the one with Dániel, can be interpreted as a coming out experience. By talking about the realization of his gay desires, he provides a narrative which ‘not only reflects but creates that change of state’ which he had undergone in the past, or is repeatedly undergoing (Wood, 1997: 265; see also Kong et al., 2003; Plummer, 1995).
However, it is much less discussed that narratives of bisexuality also perform opposite-sex desires (for an exception, see Saxey, 2008). Indeed, accounts of how that might involve the interviewer, and the gender of both parties, are largely absent in the literature. Bisexuality, just as most social categories, ‘happens’ in various ways. In the present case, Dániel attributes his bisexuality to parallel sexual desire towards men and women and – as we will see – their respective genitals. Therefore I follow the most widespread definition of bisexuality as sexual attraction to women and men, in contrast to recent trends to identify bisexuality as attraction irrespective of gender (Eisner, 2013: 13–24). Moreover, upon my analysis, I will argue that my respondent’s bisexuality was being reproduced through our interview interaction, which at the same re-created the two of us as man and woman, respectively.
Building on the embodied learning I acquired through reflecting on the effects Dániel had on me, I will examine our interviewer-interviewee interactions with the use of classical biographical analysis, which focuses on the inner logic of the respondent’s textual narrative (Riessman, 2003; Rosenthal, 1993). I complete it with ethnographical insights which take the whole surrounding context into account as part of the data (see Goldstein, 2017; Kaspar and Landolt, 2016; McClelland, 2017; Pascoe, 2007). These methodological considerations stem from a performative understanding of gender, sexuality and affect. Lois Presser (2005: 2087) writes about her interviews with ‘violent men prisoners’: Stories are constructed situationally. (…) If methods are to cohere with critical theories of power, we must integrate research-situated dynamics into data analysis. This sort of strong reflexivity will better illuminate how gender is ‘continually being forged, contested, reworked and reaffirmed’ (Jackson 1991, 210). The researcher’s goal is not to emancipate the authentic story of the narrator—none exists—but rather to expose as much as she can of the relations that influence the construction of the story that is told.
I consider these ethnographic elements as contributing to understanding the interview as performatively co-creating meaning. From a performative perspective, gender seems to express an inner essence, but as the effect of repeated acts, it in fact creates what it seemingly represents (Butler, 1993). Similarly, sexual desire is an affect, experienced as an inner feeling, whereas it is also a social product constituted through interpersonal practices (Ahmed, 2004: 10, 84). Language is an eminent site for these practices of gender and sexuality; in the present case, it is the language of both Dániel’s life narrative and our interaction. Furthermore, my own emotions become products of the whole situation. Attending to the affective-performative aspects of sexuality then, language and nonverbal signs together produce, rather than simply reflect, the gender-sexual meanings which mark the interviewee as a subject with a specific life history. Our erotic interaction, including my emotions, contributed to his narrative identity and re-created specific gender relations between the two of us.
Dániel’s case thus allows us to examine masculine performativity in the bisexual context. The situation of a woman interrogating a man on his private life could potentially position me in power. Literature on interviewing men stresses that men often feel vulnerable in this position, especially with female interviewers. They look for various linguistic and non-verbal means culturally coded as masculine, in order to assure their masculinity, defined as power over the woman (Grenz, 2005, 2014: 68; Presser, 2005; Schwalbe and Wolkomir, 2003). Strategies used include giving short answers, or conversely, expanding unnecessarily; exaggerating rationality and control in the stories; as well as sexualizing the interviewer. However, out of the 26 interviews that I conducted for this bisexuality research, half of them with men, it was only with Dániel that such a sexualized performativity of masculinity manifested. This is perhaps remarkable, as in all situations the special combination of a bisexual interviewer talking to people with bisexual desires could have induced dynamics of sexualization (see Klesse, 2007: 53). Eroticization in research situations raises a whole set of dilemmas, including those of rapport and personal-professional boundaries (see Carter, 2016; De Graeve, 2019; Kaspar and Landolt, 2016; Presser, 2005). It therefore demands practical, ethical, methodological, as well as theoretical considerations concerning how best to incorporate it into the analysis and writing. In what follows, I will discuss how I attempted to take these dilemmas into account in my analysis of the eroticization Dániel performed.
I will show below what role I as a researcher played in Dániel’s subjectivity construction, both through what I did and what he assumed. As Presser’s (2005: 2087) quote above shows, literature has proposed to consider the influential context of the interviewees’ narrative as including their perception of the interviewer. To this, I assert, bisexuality adds a further component of uncertainty and negotiations. With the exception of Pascoe (2007), most authors mention their bodies but gloss over its description. I nevertheless find it important to reflect on how I looked, to show how bodies become sites for meaning-making (Ahmed, 2004; Butler, 1993). At the time of the interview with the 42-year old Dániel, I was 29 and somewhat androgynous-looking due to my thin body, small breasts, short hair and lack of make-up. I wore jeans and a tight turtleneck sweater. My appearance could thus be easily perceived as gender non-conforming – consequently, lesbian/bisexual/queer. Being a researcher on bisexuality positioned me as a gay-friendly person, but could raise doubts about my personal motivations. First of all, the interview took place in an academic context, as part of an English-language research project in Central-Eastern Europe. Then, the broader context was that of an economically and ideologically divided Hungary, ruled since 2010 by a right-wing (sexist and homophobic) government with renewing attacks on Gender Studies. Here an interview on bisexuality clearly positioned both of us on the leftist-liberal oppositional minority. The interview was therefore the site where cross-cutting axes of power were negotiated through what Dániel and I represented for each other. Far from being an objective observer, I as a researcher also contributed to the situation with my questions, reactions (or lack of them) and, not least, with my bodily presence and behaviour. During the interview, I laughed, I was moved, I felt uncomfortable, I felt attractive, I was scared and I felt attracted.
I will argue that the inclusion of such bodily experiences of the interviewer is interpretative of the interaction (see Grenz, 2005). I understand the gender and sexuality not only of the respondent, but also of the researcher, as negotiated in the interview situation. While Kaspar and Landolt (2016: 109) rightly suggest that sexuality ‘unsettles relationships between researchers and research participants; it also highlights impressively that positionalities are re-articulated and re-negotiated again and again throughout the entire research encounter’, I argue that bisexuality does so even more. From the start of the interview I knew that Dániel was attracted to both women and men, as this was how I looked for my interviewees, but he could not be sure about my sexual preferences. As I will show, this information asymmetry mattered, because parallel to the construction of Dániel’s sexuality, my sexuality was also questioned and affirmed during our interaction, and the two processes impacted on each other. My analysis below will illuminate how my embodied reactions helped me see the process of Dániel re-creating his gendered and sexual self.
Modes of sexualization through embodied reflection
All of my interviewees in this project were acquaintances of my acquaintances. Also, in the case of Dániel, having a common friend meant some sort of assurance for both of us about trust and security. I realize that I felt more secure about interviewing an unknown man with same-sex desires in his home than I would have in the case of a straight man. I assume that from men with same-sex desires I expected less normative displays of heteronormative sexism. However, the field notes that I made about Dániel assert that already in our short email correspondence before the interview I had had a slight sense of fear about boundaries. He had promised to chill a bottle of wine, which made the interview situation resemble a dating situation. Given the intimate topic, however, it was hard for me to differentiate between various – professional and personal – aspects of intimacy. The establishment of trust and rapport was primary for me, especially since I was the one who intruded into his private life, both physically and psychologically.
A winter evening in 2013, it was already dark when I got to his place, a stylish apartment in a relatively new building, in an area just a few metro stops from downtown Budapest. During the short introduction and small talk before I turned my recorder on, we already seemed to share similarities, including our socio-economic position (educated, liberal-leftist middle-class of the capital). He had put on some music that was playing in the background throughout the whole interview. This was another element that I found a bit disturbing – on the one hand because it could jeopardize the quality of the tape recording, and on the other hand because it contributed to a sense of romantic intimacy. We sat on the couch facing each other, with a table between us with snacks and wine on it. As I usually do, following the narrative interviewing method, I asked him to tell me his life story. After a few minutes clarifying the bisexual focus of the interview, he started to talk (‘Then I have to begin at a very young age’), and he kept talking for more than two hours without stopping, making this the longest of my interviews. During the interview, we did not only have some wine, he literally drank a whole bottle. I did not have a clear position on alcohol consumption, and I wanted him to feel cosy and be talkative, but seeing Dániel getting drunk increased my anxiety about losing control and being sexualized in particular. He became less focused as well as less attentive to my needs and boundaries, and the more he talked, the more personal he got with me.
After some time into the interview, I began to suspect that Dániel was performing some sort of sexual seduction towards me, which confused and scared me a bit. Chronologically describing his relationships with both men and women, starting with his adolescence, he gave me compliments frequently to explain his willingness to talk so honestly. A few sentences later, he briefly commented on his present disinterest in women: Another thing. I don’t know what is relevant information for you, but I usually don’t worry, especially, I told you, if I drink a bit. And you look better than on your Facebook photos and I’m happy to talk to you. [– OK. I’m not that a shy type either, so as you prefer. – We laugh.] Your glance is open and I like that. Uhm where was I? Masturbation follows. (…) Actually, till today I think so, I’m proud of [in a lower voice, smiling] having a hard-on for pussies, and having a hard-on for dicks, too. (…) By the way, gays think I am gay. Because nowadays – I don’t want to jump to the end – nowadays I’m not concerned with women, only if I have to. Because of my working place, from time to time I have to. Because they would crawl on me, I don’t know why [laughs]. Otherwise, I like to talk with women, I can be honest with a very few of them, but now with you, you have to know, I’m being honest with you. [– Thank you.] I also feel, or think, that I can be honest with you. For example, at my workplace, there is more than one woman with whom I cannot.
I did not reject him, but tried to minimalize my responses to his questions, as I do in every interview in an attempt not to interrupt the interviewee’s storyline. However, this time I also reacted with the reservation that I typically feel when men ask too intimate questions in order to create a flirting atmosphere which I do not want. Retrospectively, I can see now that I tried to stick to my role as a researcher, imagined as emotionally detached from what the interviewee says and perhaps even as non-influential in it (see De Craene, 2017, forthcoming). At one point, I even wished we were not in a professional situation so that I could allow myself to flirt with him, even though literature has shown that flirting back can even be strategic in the field (Carter, 2016; Kaspar and Landolt, 2016). Nevertheless, I could not help but feel involved as a sexual being (a sexual object), an involvement that was made apparent by my emotional discomfort. I even became self-conscious about the T-shirt I was wearing, wondering how he perceived it (covering too much? too tight, revealing too much?) and my body in it (too flat? too feminine?). It has not been easy for me to reconstruct my ambiguous feelings. I wanted him to like me, and at the same time I did not want him to like me. Importantly, at that time I already knew that I wanted to have sex with women, but I was living in a monogamous heterosexual relationship. Dániel was attractive to me as a person belonging to a gay life to which I also wanted to belong – in this sense, he embodied both my ‘straight’ and ‘gay’ side. As researchers’ feelings often mirror those of the respondent (Goldstein, 2017: 158), I perhaps meant something similar to him.
The content of his life narrative contributed to my embarrassment, as it included diverse sexual adventures with people of different genders and ages, in various scenes and even in groups, all of which he detailed in explicit language. On the one hand, I was happy to listen to these, approving his sexual openness, perhaps even wishing I was in similarly exciting situations. On the other hand, some of his stories (e.g. about his interest in boys) worried and even disgusted me. When his T-shirt rode up on his belly and I saw his bodily hair, I felt aversion. But I also felt a bit bad about my negative feelings towards him; I wrote in my notes afterwards, ‘I don’t want to punish his honesty with keeping distance’. Despite my anxieties, I managed to balance my reactions in a way that meant he did not cross more boundaries but continued to talk, and I could be fully attentive to what he was saying. Still, I wanted to avoid getting personal, and this was also why I did not ask follow-up questions; it was an escape for me from the riskier terrain of dialogue. When I was leaving, he wanted me to stay, and asked when we could meet again. I said we could repeat the interview in half a year, which sounded too long for him. At the door, he said, ‘I’d rather not move closer, because you would misunderstand it’, restraining himself from hugging me. To avoid unwanted physical contact and to end the situation, I left quickly and just waved back at him.
On the evening of the interview, I listed in my field notes the elements which suggested eroticization, accompanied by a side note, ‘does it feel good to collect these?’. Apparently, I had to get to grips with why I liked what he did and why I wanted to keep some distance. I wanted to resist his seduction and my own attraction because, on the one hand, I probably considered the professional relationship between us requiring that. On the other hand, it was also because his behaviour unfairly put me in an uncomfortable, possibly subordinated position – but I only realized this some time later, having examined my own feelings. For me as a feminist researcher, it was important to avoid being treated in sexist ways in interview situations. However, in this case I was indeed probably treated that way; and it took me a long time to find peace with it. Importantly however, it was only later, when I was working on the textual analysis, that I became more aware of the sexist aspects of his relation to other women in his life.
Later that same night, he sent me messages about meeting up again, but with an unclear purpose, and I found his tone to be a mix of flattery and demand: ‘I didn’t dare to hug you when saying bye’, ‘You are captivating and lovely’, ‘I wish we could meet more’ and ‘Please process the material as soon as you can’. I wanted to re-create the distance and boundary between us, so I just responded that we could continue our conversation later. His answer included that he was ready whenever I might ‘need a man’: ‘Don’t misunderstand, just as a companion I would be happy to go with You anywhere’. I was not sure what he meant, but now I think he might have offered me an alibi relationship. That is, showing up together would have helped us both to be perceived as (coupled) heterosexuals and it thus would prevent expectations of heterosexual display or charges of homosexuality. It is again his relation to me which might suggest his attitude towards women in general: namely, that they can be useful for him to be able to stay in the closet. Moreover, deeply examining my own feelings revealed to me what his behaviour achieved in the situation. His compliments showed his interest in me as a woman, therefore attesting to his bisexuality. At the same time, his compliments relied on the familiar sexist technique of picturing me as an exceptional woman, different from and better than most women. With such a move, he also acquired legitimation for why he did not date more women.
Addressing the power imbalances in our interaction includes examining not only his use of masculine power over me, but also the ethical questions stemming from the power I had as a researcher. After the interview situation, I did not thematize the issue of sexualization with him, as I feared it would itself strengthen the non-professional ties between us. If I were to do the same interview now, I would probably tell him off-record that I thought he was flirting with me and would let him comment on it. Years later, when I published a paper (which mentioned that he sexualized our interaction), I asked for his approval. He answered that he trusted me enough and did not want to read the text before publication. I also let him know before another publication and provided him with the link. Understanding that I have his approval, I did not consult Dániel about the present article. I also faced an ethical dilemma when talking to our mutual friend. At first, I did not tell him anything about the interview, but then after a couple of months I mentioned Dániel’s flirting behaviour to him. I needed the opinion and support of someone who knows Dániel, to be able to understand the interview dynamics better. Although I did not disclose anything of what Dániel had told me about his life, my decision still raises questions about confidentiality and the limitations of snowball-sampling. My friend was surprised, which stemmed from his image of Dániel as a trustworthy person who would not make others uncomfortable, as well as someone who had ceased to like women. This information made me feel proud, again both as a researcher who knows more about Dániel than his friend does, and as a woman whom even gays like. However, now I think I should have just relied on my own self-reflective analysis to understand how the sexualization he performed functioned.
The role of sexualization in bisexual self-construction
The textual analysis of Dániel’s narrative illuminates a lot in terms of the sexual and gender power relations between us, as well as the gender/sexual meaning of the whole interview. As through a performativity lens, Ahmed (2004: 4) asks ‘What do emotions do?’, for me the main question is what were the effects of his comments? What did they do, what image did he seek to evoke in me about him? Keeping in mind the literature on woman–man interviewing relations which I have outlined above (Grenz, 2005, 2014; Schwalbe and Wolkomir, 2003), Dániel’s flirtatious behaviour can be read as performative of masculinity in relation to me as a woman, with the effect that I became insecure, and my confidence as a professional was undermined.
However, Dániel’s masculinity performance gets a twist from his ambiguous sexual identification. His preferred identity label is gay, yet he has always been sexually attracted to women as well. In this sense, his flirting could also affirm a shared queer belonging, which Carter (2016: 134) noted in the interview context between queer women: Desire in research is a powerful form of communication and is not solely reflective of sexual desire for a person or persons. Rather, in my study, expressions of desire were revealing of individuals’ negotiations with and assertions of their sexual identities, as well as what it means to be queer and part of queer community.
During the interview, he said that I probably expected he would report more experience with women than he actually did. Bisexuality is almost by definition considered inauthentic, and thus in most conversations requires explanation (Hemmings, 2002: 25; see also Turai, 2018). As Linde (1993: 90) argues about coherence constructions in life stories, interviewees will explain at length those experiences they consider to be outside the normal course of things, or uncomfortable, problematic or challenged. Even without being asked, many bisexuals feel that they need to show evidence of their attraction to both sexes, as well as of their different extents. Explanation thus is one of the main elements in the process of bisexual people’s creation of a coherency of the self; in Dániel’s case, it is able to unite heterosexuality in the past and homosexuality in the present. His flirtatious behaviour can therefore be read as an expression of the expectation for explanation of bisexuality.
A quote from the second part of the interview, right before Dániel commented on his honesty with me in the form of a compliment, is worth a close examination. It reflects sexual and gender power relations by illuminating the complexity of his relation to me as a representative of both women and gays: I don’t know why I think you want to hear about women [little laughs], and I speak so much about men. [10 second silence] After [the last girlfriend], I didn’t have another woman for a very long time. This is always something … I have told you already, I see someone, I like her very much, I could imagine anything with her, anything. But this is also repulsive, the ‘anything’, because the way I understand ‘anything’ is that I’m afraid of women, because … No one shall want exclusivity from me, do you understand? What if a woman, whom I fall in love with, says ‘let’s get married, make me a baby, leave the person you are now with, move out to a nothing town, leave your workplace’. What if she makes this to me? Then I perish right away.
In the last half an hour of the interview, he talked to me about Szandra, a recently acquired female friend with whom he does not have sex, although she seems to be interested in him. Szandra nevertheless does act as Dániel’s girlfriend in certain situations. In particular, at parties where women colleagues were hitting on him, Szandra sometimes ‘saved’ Dániel just by appearing and giving the impression that the two were dating. Although Dániel did not say this explicitly, I assume that for him rejecting his colleagues would also have carried the risk of being ‘outed’ as a non-heterosexual. He added about Szandra: I feel the same with her as with every woman so far. It would be good [to date her], but then I would have to be very much a man. Because I can … how shall I say it? So. I can mount her 10 times a day, it’s not that. And it’s good, it’s attractive, too. It’s just … In other areas of life I would have to be a very confident man, which I don’t like to be. (…) I have this idea that she would expect me to always be a strong, muscular, stately man, protecting her, and this is what I’m afraid of, not always being able to be like that.
However, questions about the authenticity of his straight desires appear on a second level, with regards to alibi relationships. In the messages he sent me after our interview, he offered to join me, I assumed, in order to appear as heterosexual. This offer confirmed that my previous interpretation about some of his relationships as serving a similar purpose could be accurate. As it turned out from earlier stories and this last one with Szandra, women mean a lot of help for Dániel – I would claim he uses them, for example, in order to appear as non-single and as heterosexual. At the same time, his offer to me could also be understood as both to show and hide that he was genuinely interested in me. It is no wonder that I got confused about his intentions towards me. In sum, Dániel performed as at the same time very gay as well as heterosexually very active; both as interested in me as a person and as seeing an opportunity in me to pass as straight. Further, his offer also aimed at my own sexual preferences in a parallel way, testing if I needed a man – either as a straight person or as a lesbian.
His whole performance towards me, then, could also be considered a test, helping him to find out if I was interested in him, or in men in general, and if he could still be attractive for women. It is also possible that he perceived me as a woman different from other women about whom he has fears – knowing that I belong to gay circles, but also that I am interested in men. Because of all these potential layers of meaning, it has been important to contextualize this case in the framework of Dániel’s and my bisexual desires, and our belonging to lesbian/gay communities. Eventually, Dániel’s bisexual performativity in the interview as a whole both relied on and reproduced gender, assigning different social positions to women and men. In this sense, both bisexuality and unequal gender relations were performed in our erotic interaction.
Conclusions
Examining the interactions in a bisexual interview between a man and a woman, the starting point of this article was the importance of the researcher’s desires and emotions. Erotic research dynamics and their reflexive analysis have been shown to contribute to the data and meaning researchers are looking for (Goldstein, 2017; McClelland, 2017; Pascoe, 2007; Presser, 2005). Although authors like Carter (2016) have underlined that the presence of sexual desire in queer fieldwork displays the wish to belong to a community on both sides, a discussion of the specificities of bisexuality is still missing. In the case I analysed, Dániel, a gay man with bisexual desires, made sexual advances towards me, a bisexual woman, interviewing him. The sexualization reflected both hierarchical gender power relations, as well as solidarity between queers, both of which, I suggest, bear potentially sexual meanings. On the one hand, our erotic interaction pointed to the specific constellation of gender and sexuality in bisexuality, where desire for the other has a double direction, both towards the opposite sex and towards the fellow queer. However, this erotic interaction, including unwanted sexual advancement, also induced a great level of discomfort in me. Although the complicated nature of sexual power dynamics between a woman researcher and male respondents has been addressed in heterosexual contexts (Grenz, 2005; Presser, 2005), my case study proposes that the examination of queer men as potentially harassing women (interviewers) is needed.
In contrast to my early analyses of the interview with Dániel, it was a later reflexive analysis of my embodied experience which helped me see the power dynamics that were at play. Initially, in his narrated life course, I had not noticed the ways in which he used his relationships with women opportunistically. This lack of attention was partly due to my focus on sexual freedom, including his same-sex and multi-partnered encounters (see Fahs, 2014). I had also been influenced by the idea of the emotionally detached researcher. Acknowledging my own feelings – of being both interested in him sexually, as well as being suspicious about his intentions – made me sensitive to certain gender dynamics in his stories that I had not noticed before. It highlighted to me that Dániel performed his heterosexual desires in our interaction, and at the same time expressed his relation to heterosexuality as useful for face-saving. Our interaction both completed and illustrated his life course narrative, where he performed as both gay and straight. Importantly, my analysis accounts for both sexism/heteronormativity and queer solidarity/pleasure – that is, for the complexity of power and desires (Fahs, 2014; Fahs et al., 2018). The examination of gendered interview interactions in a bisexual context thus opens up space for the complex meanings of sexuality.
Consequently, I argued that methodological-personal considerations building upon the researcher’s embodied experiences enhance theoretical analyses and knowledge. The dynamics of bisexual interactions also have broader methodological-theoretical significance, and could play into other contexts as well. Bisexuality in particular makes it visible that power dynamics do not emerge from frozen positionalities but unfold over the course of the research encounter. Paraphrasing Kaspar and Landolt’s (2016: 109) argument, I argued that bisexuality ‘is particularly well suited for examining the fluid and contingent co-constitution of relationships between informants and researchers, including contradictory emotions in fieldwork’.