“Oops,I didn’t know we couldn’t talk about sex”: Sex researchers talking back to the erotophobic academy using the researcher’s erotic subjectivities Guest editorial themed section ‘the researcher’s erotic subjectivities’

Abstract

A proliferation of research outputs in recent years that takes into account the erotic subjectivities of the researcher seems to suggest that both research on sexuality and the inclusion of the desiring researcher’s body in academic writings have become accepted as valuable and relevant academic research topics and methods. Yet, the often animated and at times uncomfortable discussions these academic interventions generate—also beyond academic settings—attest to the enduring sensitivity that comes with (discussing) the researcher’s sex and sexuality. This special section aims to provide a space to explore the methodological, ethical, and epistemological implications of (i) the researcher’s immersion in or withdrawal from sexual/ized interactions, and (ii) reflexively reporting about the researcher’s erotic subjectivities in scholarly outputs such as journal articles or conference presentations. In doing so, it not only critiques current academic structures and a masculinist politics of science that are at best not equipped to take into account the complexities of (auto-)ethnographic sex research. It also turns a critical eye towards the blind spots we might have as sex researchers towards the differential power relations with different actors involved in (auto-) ethnographic research that explicitly deals with the researcher’s erotic subjectivities. Reducing those blind spots will make us less vulnerable to gratuitous comments by the erotophobic academy as well as the increasing conservative societal forces who are all too eager to delegitimize our academic writings, while exploring the complexities of (auto-) ethnographic sex research aims to increase the rigour of our work. By talking back, we aim to advance conversations on the methodological, ethical and epistemological implications of taking seriously the researcher’s erotic subjectivities in our research endeavours.

Introduction

You wouldn’t let me say the words I longed to say

You didn’t want to see life through my eyes

You tried to shove me back inside your narrow room and silence me with bitterness and lies

Did I say something wrong?

Oops, I didn’t know we couldn’t talk about sex.

(Madonna, Express yourself/human nature)A couple of years ago, one of my (senior) colleagues shared a newspaper article that related to my sexuality research on one of my social media profiles. When another colleague reacted to that post, the colleague who shared the article warned my colleague: “careful what you say, or the next paper she writes might be about you.” The timing of that comment was not that surprising, as it appeared a couple of months after the publication of some of my first writings on the importance of reflecting on the researcher’s positionality, including the researcher’s erotic subjectivities (De Craene, 2017a, 2017b). I have argued and continue to argue that we need to understand and shed light on the context in which we conduct research to better understand how knowledge comes into being, and the power relations, structures, and everyday practices that privilege certain forms of knowledge to the detriment of others. To do so, I relied on some of my encounters and lived experiences as a researcher working on (geographies of) sexualities. By including this context in my writings, I not only include experiences from my professional and personal life but I also include the people around me who cocreate this context, whether it is my colleagues, friends, people in the field, co-producers of knowledge, distant acquaintances, those in powerful positions in the department we work at, reviewers, etc. Also in later writings, some of my encounters and lived experiences made it into public accounts, for example, in my doctoral thesis (De Craene, 2020), or in the reflections of an animated and at times uncomfortable discussion a panel on the researcher’s erotic subjectivities generated (De Graeve and De Craene, 2019). The many self-citations in this paragraph are no secret way to boost my H-index, but are included here only to show that my colleague was right: I do tend to write papers about what happens in my professional and personal life, and the very comment to warn my other colleague on social media indeed made it into this paper, ironically.

The reason why I am doing exactly what my colleague was warning against, is because the comment did not seem to point to the risks involved to me as a researcher (which has been discussed by several authors, see e.g., Carter, 2016; Cupples, 2002; De Craene and Wasserbauer, 2016; Irvine, 2014; Vanderbeck, 2005), but to those around me who appear in my writings. The warning can easily be read as a call to self-censorship when speaking to me. And, related to that, it might suggest my colleague questions the ethics of this research practice (even though my colleague might not have intended either of these issues). Rather than dismissing the comment as yet another critique that delegitimizes the blurring of the professional and the personal in research (outputs), I wondered to what extent the comment might also point to a blind spot of my own, and, by extension, of those colleagues involved in similar types of research. To what extent did I fully consider the consequences of including the people around me in my research outputs? And what other blind spots are we overlooking when advocating for the inclusion of the researcher’s erotic subjectivities?

The aim of this editorial and the special section at large is therefore twofold. First, it wants to talk back to the erotophobic academy (see Bell, 1995, 2007) that continues to dismiss a radically reflexive stance that is bound up with responsibility and accountability and who refuses to fully acknowledge the researcher’s role in shaping knowledge, also when this includes sexual/sexualized interactions. Second, it wants to fruitfully engage with some of the complexities current debates on the researcher’s erotic subjectivities have brought to the fore. And, in doing so, this section turns a critical eye to the blind spots in some of our own work as sex researchers ¹ , notably towards the differential power relations with different actors involved in (auto-) ethnographic research that explicitly deals with the researcher’s erotic subjectivities.

Indeed, we believe that there is a continuous need to provide platforms and open up spaces to allow for reflections and dialogues on intimacy and desire in the field and how these affect our research and the types of knowledges these produce. What we particularly need, is a critical exploration of the role and relevance of the researcher’s un/desiring, de/sexualized body in the politics and power dynamics that shape knowledge production and reflexive writing. Such a critical exploration is by necessity rooted in a feminist epistemological view of knowledge as situated and produced in interaction between the researcher and the researched, and rejects the idea of the detached, disembodied, and neutral observer (Haraway, 1991; Harding, 1991; Rose, 1997). This special section aims to provide a space to explore the methodological, ethical, and epistemological implications of (i) the researcher’s immersion in or withdrawal from sexual/ized interactions, and (ii) reflexively reporting about the researcher’s erotic subjectivities in scholarly outputs such as journal articles or conference presentations, in all their complexities and messiness.

Epistemological frictions and its consequences

Exceptionalizing sexual (ized) interactions

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of work that takes into account the erotic subjectivities of the researcher from a variety of disciplines, such as anthropology (see e.g., De Graeve, 2019; Ryan-Flood and Gill, 2010), criminology (Montmagny Grenier, 2021), geography (see e.g., Blidon, 2012; Brown, 2008; Catungal, 2017; Feliciantonio et al., 2017; Miles, 2020), law (see e.g., Brooks, 2018, 2019), psychology (Huysamen, 2018; Joyes and Jordan, 2022), and sociology (Hanson and Richards, 2019; Lauder, 2022; Rooke, 2010; Schneider et al., 2021). This body of work is not new and follows earlier calls from researchers in anthropology (Duncan, 1996; Kulick and Willson, 1995; Newton, 1993; Wekker, 2006) and geography (Bell, 1995, 2007; Bell and Valentine, 1995; Binnie, 1997; Cupples, 2002) that questioned the omission of the researcher’s desires in our research outputs. Not only does this create a remarkable dichotomy between the desiring informant and the non-desiring researcher, it also poses a series of methodological, ethical, epistemological, and political questions, of which the most obvious one is: why would the desires of a researcher not influence our interpretations and understandings of the desires of the informant? Unless we uphold the illusion of the detached, neutral, and objective researcher, there seems to be no reason to assume that the researcher’s erotic subjectivities do not shape the research process, especially—but not exclusively!—sex research. Indeed, scholars have shown how we cannot escape our sexuality in the field and therefore that it should be acknowledged and addressed (Cupples, 2002). And even if we were to diminish or deny the impact of our sexualities on our research, we will still be sexually positioned by those we research (Cupples, 2002; Newton, 1993; Valentine, 2002). In a poignant reflection on sexual assault during field work on sexual encounters between female tourists and local men in the Caribbean, Montmagny Grenier (2021) shows how it was actually the negation of her sexuality and the illusion of being able to work as a professional and “thus” asexual researcher that made her and other sex researchers not envisage being eroticized or sexualized during fieldwork by people other than the participants.

Yet, it is not necessarily the researcher’s sexual identity that seems to stir discomfort. Rather, it is the consequences of fully taking into account that research can become real life and real life can become research in the context of sex research that continues to be problematized. Even though the appropriateness of full physically and emotionally engaged participation and the relevance of reporting on it are still considered taboo when it comes to sexuality and intimacy (Kulick and Willson, 1995), there is no legitimate reason to a priori rule out sex between researcher and subjects (De Graeve and De Craene, 2019). Indeed, prolonged and intensive participant observation in all kinds of everyday activities is widely lauded as an effective method for gaining deep understanding of the culture under study. Yet, interventions reflecting on the embodied learning in sex research, and the full inclusion of the researcher’s erotic subjectivities beyond paying lip service to researchers’ sexual subjectivities are often still considered disruptive, and often for no good reasons. When I recently wrote a popularizing article on my PhD (De Craene, 2022) in which I denounced the exceptionalization of sex(uality) in geographical research, one reviewer commented that when it comes to sex, one of course needs to “consider the power relations involved.” This is a common remark that, especially since the #MeToo movement which rightfully condemns the pervasiveness of unacceptable sexual behavior in male dominated culture, is made more often. And yes, we do need to take into account the power relations involved in sex research, especially because it is such an intimate topic which further complicates the already complex and messy nature of real-life research. Yet, this comment seems to suggest that (i) sex with participants is per definition unethical and exploitative (see e.g., Bell, 2002) as research relationships are always infused with power, and that (ii) this comment is only valid when it comes to sex research itself. When I replied to the reviewer, arguing that power relations as well as sexual(ised) interactions also inform research on, for instance, real estate or geopolitics, they replied: “problematic research on sexuality is immediately very problematic, can we say the same of research on real estate or geopolitics?” This question is especially remarkable given geography’s (and other social sciences’) colonial, imperial, extractivist, supremacist, and heteropatriarchal history that continues to inform our research and thinking today (Lacoste, 1976; Loopmans, 2018; Oswin, 2020; Schuermans, 2013). I am not including the reviewer’s comment to denounce their otherwise very constructive and helpful comments and suggestions to improve my paper (and later on in this editorial I will reflect on the ethics of using these types of reflections in academic outputs). Rather, it shows the difficulties in pushing the boundaries of what counts as legitimate and ethical knowledge production despite the proliferation of research doing exactly that, and the epistemological frictions these interventions still generate.

Writing about sex/research

Despite the growing attention to the researcher’s erotic subjectivities (organized panels are usually well attended and special issues receive many positive reactions), the critical reactions these interventions generate prove that they are still considered disruptive, which limits the possibilities to write about sex(uality) in the process of sex research. At the core of this tension lies an epistemological issue: a reflexive epistemology still challenges a whole scientific apparatus and its different means and tools of expression that are built on a positivist and masculinist politics of science. Putting oneself “out there” as a sex researcher is therefore still risky, as it involves relying on methods of observation (e.g., embodied emotions, sexual desires, …) and analysis (e.g., using the experiences of one person rather than statistically relevant representations) that have a long history of being considered unscientific. These methods still generate a lot of distrust and are disregarded as solipsism. Even though a writer constructs themselves in a certain way in all types of texts, this construction is less recognized or acknowledged in those texts that fit an objectivist frame, and writers will be less questioned about this construction. To choose to not write yourself into your research outputs is a way to be less vulnerable. It allows researchers to be invisible in their own texts, as it does not challenge the consensus of what counts as objective data.

This is not to draw an artificial line between those who do and those who do not write their presence into their research outputs: we all participate in these types of mechanisms to make our arguments sound more robust. The whole politics of citation are in the end a way to attain authority by situating ourselves in debates that are considered legitimate and that in turn will legitimize our own work, while the quantification of qualitative research (e.g., by mentioning how many interviews one conducted) is used to signify that our research is reliable and generalizable. The anticipated criticism of our writing also forces many sex researchers to state some arguments with more confidence and assertiveness than we might feel comfortable with, which ultimately may hinder a more profound conversation and debate exploring the boundaries of legitimate research methods and ethics and what we can learn from this. A researcher putting the self centrally in research, especially in the realm of sexuality and intimacy, even when it is carefully embedded in the usual justification techniques, seems to be pushing too hard on the fundaments of our scientific apparatus. Reflecting on the researcher’s subjectivities, however, reveals the different dimensions of power involved in the process of knowledge production, especially when they concern our own eroticism and that of the people around us, as they blur the boundaries between the professional and the personal (see Di Feliciantonio and Gadelha, 2016). The potential to reveal power relations through sex research, as a process (where reflections on the experience of doing research on sexuality reveal the academic boundaries of what are considered legitimate research topics, methods, and bodies) and as a product (when sex research reveals power relations in society), is also why many scholars point to the political reason for including the researcher’s erotic subjectivities: to remove the stigmatization of sexual dissidents in academia and society (see e.g., Bell, 1995, 2007; Jones, 2018; Newton, 1993; Valentine, 2002). In the words of Esther Newton (1993: 8) “We must begin to acknowledge eroticism, our own and that of others, if we are to reflect on its meaning for our work, and perhaps alter our cultural system for the better.”

An important point to make, however, is that not all subjectivities are considered when writing about the emotional and sexual subjectivities of research. Notably, the subjectivities of the reader are often not taken into account. What a reader reads is not a neutral process of knowledge transfer either. The experiences, positions, and perspectives of the reader also determine which meanings are being transferred, and which remain unseen and unheard. This not only co-creates the epistemological contours of sex research but is pertinent to further developing the ethics of including the researcher’s erotic subjectivities, which I will turn to in the following section.

Ethical negotiations

As discussed above, when writing about our own subjectivities as researchers (and persons), the subjectivities of those people around us are co-constructed. This is particularly the case for research participants and informants, but this might as well be our colleagues, friends, other people in the field, co-producers of knowledge, distant acquaintances, reviewers, etc. This is of course the goal, as this co-construction is where the broader relevance and added value lies when we include the researcher’s erotic subjectivities. Yet the ethical dimensions of this remain underdeveloped and undertheorized. Rather than providing answers, this section opens up a series of questions ² related to the ethics involved when blurring the personal with the professional in research outputs.

Institutional boundaries

A first issue is that many institutional ethical guidelines are not equipped to deal with the complexities of the inclusion of the researcher’s erotic subjectivities in (auto-) ethnographies. Not only have these been criticized for fixing the position of the research and participants, their institutional guidelines might also erase the voices of research participants (Di Feliciantonio, 2021). The reasons behind these guidelines also often rely on the notion that researchers can and should be able to draw the boundaries of the field—an assumption that is rooted in a positivist politics of science (Cahill et al., 2007; Di Feliciantonio, 2021). Not only does this suggest that field work has a specific start and end point, it also means that at every moment throughout field work, one is able to differentiate between what is research and what is “real life.” In her study on non-monogamous sex and relationships in Belgium (later in this issue), Katrien De Graeve (2019) complicates these assumptions and reflects on the impossibility of a complete overtness when researching and participating in online dating sites for personal and professional reasons. She always informed her interlocutors that her participation in the dating sites was sincere, yet also that there was the possibility of the interaction becoming significant for research. However, the development of friendships and relationships often made her position as a researcher invisible, and generated moments that only in hindsight could have been labelled research. If indeed context can become research and research can become context (Cupples, 2002; Newton, 1993), it is impossible to know which is which at each moment in time; both for researchers, and those around us. And while De Graeve’s involvement and participation in these dating sites were part of the research question all along, what happens when this is not the case? For example, in my own doctoral research, my initial focus on heteronormativities in student nightlife changed to one on the experience of doing research on sexualities (De Craene, 2020). What had been my research diary, used to note down all the reflections I made (however, small and insignificant at the time) when researching student sexuality in student nightlife, turned out to be a main data source when deciding to change the focus of my PhD. This also means that I never informed anyone prior to the conversations that made it into my dissertation, as, at that moment, I did not know myself that these real-life interactions would become my research focus.

A similar argument can be made about General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) that are often translated by institutional ethical guidelines and data protection officers into the use of pseudonyms and the depersonalization of data. Di Feliciantonio (2021) has shown how in the case of HIV migrants, the use of their real name in research outputs can actually have liberating and empowering effects as opposed to pseudonyms who might reinforce the “second closet” (the nondisclosure of HIV status in order to avoid social condemnation). Moreover, the idea that data can be depersonalized seems at odds with the thick descriptions needed to increase and enhance rigour ³ , especially when research outputs include auto-ethnographies of the researcher’s erotic subjectivities. Blurring the context of certain quotes, situations, and events to depersonalize data also means obscuring the relevant context in which a certain quote or event needs to be situated. When is it ensuring privacy and anonymity and when does it become cherry-picking from the context? And what do we do when that context is relevant, making the person or situation traceable, and recognizable not only for the people themselves but also the people around them?

Whose science? Whose vulnerabilities?

Both issues mentioned above require the rethinking of institutional ethical guidelines which should be based on a relational ethics of care (De Graeve and De Craene, 2019; Di Feliciantonio, 2021). In this editorial, I also aim to look at ethical frictions beyond the more formal and institutional structures. One issue that needs developing and theorizing further are the difficulties of discussing researchers’ vulnerabilities. All the contributors to this special issue have dealt with the vulnerabilities related to their erotic subjectivities: Ráhel Turai does so in examining the interactions of a bisexual interview, explaining how she felt attracted, attractive, and vulnerable when her research participant Dániel sexualized her during the interview and what she learned from her embodied emotions in that moment; Katrien De Graeve discusses how a break up with a lover and her feelings of vulnerability because she did not receive any explanation for this break up, put her in the position of the “crazy ex-girlfriend,” and wonders what we can learn from that apparently inescapable position itself and from the way we report on those instances that might be revelatory for structural gendered scripts but that challenge current ethical standards about over research; Katrien Jacobs explores how researchers have engaged with erotic and pornographic (self-) imagery that opens up bodily sensations and analysis in the public. Jacobs’ search for corporeally driven scholarship also shows how scholars experimenting with new methodologies to include the researcher’s erotic subjectivities become vulnerable to structural mechanisms that present the use of sexually explicit media in classrooms as contributing to sexual harassment. All three contributors use this position to shed light on structural dynamics while paying attention to the embodied emotions and erotic subjectivities of the researcher. They explain how these add to more insights into how these structures are (re)produced, challenged, or circumvented in everyday situations and they use these positions as useful vantage points from which to suggest alternative epistemologies and ethics that allow for the full inclusion of the researcher’s erotic subjectivities. Yet doing so from a position of vulnerability makes them susceptible to accusations that researchers take the higher moral ground when doing so, a comment that Don Kulick also makes in his commentary in this issue on De Graeve’s paper: “But saying that we are all vulnerable is different from using vulnerability as a platform from which those who say they embrace it can decry those who they allege don’t, using claims of vulnerability to stake out the higher moral ground of counterhegemonic positionality.” This is also where the often neglected subjectivities of the reader come in, as mentioned earlier. Indeed, throughout the setting up of this special issue, I noticed how De Graeve’s article was read differently by the reviewers, who—contrary to Kulick—felt the position of vulnerability was a powerful position from which to challenge the gendered neoliberal narrative of individualism and self-reliance that pervaded the break-up experience.

The difficulties and limitations of discussing the researcher’s vulnerabilities in sexualized interactions, for example, because of the fear of criticism, is one of the reasons why, more often than not, scholars prefer to discuss the vulnerabilities of research participants rather than the researcher’s. This, however, does not prevent potential criticism. Especially when the vulnerabilities in sexualized interactions of participants in less powerful positions are being discussed, researchers can be accused of victimizing participants or paternalizing them. Related to that, the decision to focus on the researcher’s own experiences and subjectivities and their own embodied learning as opposed to that of participants, can also be (mis)read as inadequately or insufficiently recognizing the participants’ vulnerabilities. This can be especially true in those instances where the inclusion of the researcher’s subjectivities is deployed to expose how structural harm is being done (e.g., when calling out everyday experiences of racism and/or sexism). In that instance, including specific situations from the everyday experiences of researchers in our analyses and outputs can be used to criticize structural systems and how they operate in everyday interactions, rather than being a judgment call on the person involved in that situation. However, doing so might also easily be perceived as overlooking the vulnerabilities of the people involved, even those in positions of power. Trying to incorporate other people’s perspectives in such a situation is not without ethical frictions either, as it seems difficult at best to account for other people’s perspectives, experiences, and motives to behave the way they did in a certain situation without making assumptions for them. In other words, from an ethical point of view, there seem to be legitimate reasons not to speak for somebody else and therefore to exclude their accounts of a specific situation, even though participants might disagree with the way they are portrayed in research outputs. Indeed, asking for consent from the people involved might not always be possible (e.g., in the case of the reviewer’s comment I included earlier, I simply cannot ask for consent because the review process was double blind, even though the reviewer might recognize their comment at some point in the future when reading this paper and potentially disagree with the way they were portrayed) or might not be desirable (e.g., when addressing discriminatory practices by people in powerful positions).

Even if asking for consent to be represented in (public) research outputs were possible, the question remains to what extent the person consenting, as well as the person asking for consent, can envision the consequences of being included in research outputs, and how these consequences might affect them. To the extent that researchers can foresee how these outputs may circulate and travel, can we expect the same from people who are less or not at all familiar with (academic) research outputs? We do not know exactly who will read these accounts (especially not now our work is digital), and—as stated before—what readers will take from our texts.

Telling sexual stories

Even though the ethical questions raised in this section are relevant to all auto-ethnographic research in which the researcher’s subjectivities form a central focus, the specificity of including the researcher’s erotic subjectivities is central to this special issue. I will use the paper by Bri Ozalas (2020), to show the complexities of the different ethical questions raised in the previous paragraphs. In this paper, the author uses an auto-ethnographical account of being in an emotionally abusive relationship in order to demonstrate the significance of altering the discourse surrounding intimate partner emotional abuse in queer relationships. To me, the author quite effectively achieves the goal of showing how the narrative of a male perpetrator and female victim is more hindering than helpful when understanding emotionally abusive relationships, and how this binary does not apply to queer relationships. The personal experiences, included as different fragments of Ozalas’ personal and professional life, work very well in disclosing the mechanisms of how stereotypes of bisexuals as being promiscuous were used to exercise power. As such, it effectively shows how bisexuality and queer relationships are being erased and dismissed from debates on emotional abuse. In many ways, I think the paper achieves the goals it aimed to achieve very well, and I think academically, there is a clear added value in the way the paper has been written.

However, the ethics involved left me somehow puzzled after reading the paper. The whole paper has been pseudonymized: recognizable references to the ex-girlfriend are absent (as far as I can tell), and the author even blurred some of their own context, for example, leaving out the names and locations of the universities they applied for or moved to (which was a central element of the life story). Yet, it seems very unlikely that the author asked permission or consent from the ex-girlfriend to use the text messages or telephone conversations used throughout the paper, especially given its content. There is also no reference made to consent. And, even though Ozalas reminds the reader in several instances that this is their perspective, their personal life story, it is not so difficult to see that the ex-girlfriend would very likely disagree with her representation in the paper. It also does not seem unrealistic to assume that the ex-girlfriend might be hurt, and even harmed, by this representation, as well as by the public account of the representation, as it is being written about in an academic journal which could be read by everyone (with paywall access). At the very least, at this point the ethics involved enter a grey area, definitely if they are confronted with institutionalized ethical guidelines. But this paper is particularly interesting in the context of this special issue because of what comes after the main body of text. Not unusually, the paper ends with a “notes on contributor” section, in which a short (professional) biography of the author has been included. Of course, this includes mentions of Ozalas’ current and previous affiliation. Or better: it discloses the previously blurred universities, including the names and locations of the institutions (but not the people involved). It is clear that much of the anticipated anonymity and untraceability is now gone. Not for me personally; I of course still do not have a clue. But this might not be the case for many other people who are closer to the author and/or ex-partner.

This is particularly relevant for this special issue because the content added in the “notes on contributor” is nothing more than the context in which the author works. It seems almost odd not to add this information while studying/working in academia. The only solution (besides not writing the paper or leaving out all quotes and thick descriptions, which are actually some of the most valuable aspects of the paper) would probably have been to write under a pseudonym, which also brings a lot of dilemmas with it (if only for the strategic reasons that you cannot claim the publication as your own, which might be a relevant thing to do as an early career scholar in the publish-or-perish academic rat race).

Reading Ozalas’ paper and the different contributions in this special issue urges us not only to push the boundaries of what is now considered acceptable knowledge but also shows the need to further develop and theorize the ethics involved when including the researcher’s erotic subjectivities. How can we, as sex researchers, incorporate our everyday context, including our erotic subjectivities, in our research outputs to push the epistemological boundaries of the erotophobic academy in a way that does not erase the vulnerabilities of those around us, nor speak for them in a potentially victimizing or paternalizing way? One question that pops up is whether auto-ethnographical methodologies can indeed do all of that, a question that was also raised in Don Kulick’s commentary (2019: 4) when he writes:

‘[W]e need more perspectives than reasonably can be documented through auto-ethnographic reflection. I won’t go down the route seemingly suggested in Jacobs’s contribution, that ethnographers should explore the issue by making or participating in pornographic films (the last people I would ever want to see in a pornographic film are my anthropological colleagues! The horror!). But I do lament that anthropologists are not schooled in more creative writing. I bemoan the fact that as part of an anthropology education students don’t receive training in how to write short stories, novels or collaboratively produced screenplays.’

In other words, can we envision methods that are not followed by warnings from colleagues to not engage with sex (or other) researchers, such as the one this editorial started with, to avoid being included in research outputs? These and other methods and methodologies need to be further explored, and therefore we also need spaces where we can experiment with different methods and methodologies and even risk failure. Interestingly, in his quote above, Kulick seems to be especially wary of those methods (e.g., porn movies) where the materiality of the researcher’s erotic subjectivities may be much more difficult to escape. Even for sex researchers, it is therefore important to investigate the epistemological underpinnings of which possibilities we want to explore and which we prefer to shy away from, and for what reasons. This means that as sex researchers, we need to talk back to the erotophobic academy, but we also need to turn a critical eye to our own blind spots as sex researchers if we want to escape a position where the full inclusion of the researcher’s erotic subjectivities is hampered by criteria that are rooted in objectivitist and masculinist politics of science. Reducing those blind spots will make us less vulnerable to gratuitous comments by the erotophobic academy as well as the increasing conservative societal forces that are all too eager to delegitimize our academic writings. This is not to say that the different actors and conservative forces denigrating and marginalizing our work have a point, let alone that we needed their denigrating and marginalizing remarks to have the critical conversations that this special issue aims to deliver. Rather, they are testimony to the tightrope researchers working on sex and sexuality in an embodied and engaged way need to walk when we try to push back and create space when there is none created for us, while attempting to avoid the serious backlash this pushing the boundaries of what counts as legitimate academic knowledge might generate.