Abstract
Born from my use of queer theory and duoethnography in my doctoral research, I out duoethnography’s queer tendencies. Informed by my queer positionality and time spent with both queer and duoethnography, I reveal duoethnography as a queer methodology. I highlight duoethnography’s flexibility as methodology and praxis with queer’s movement between identity and theory. While revealing the queer progeny of duoethnography, I also resist a normative limitation of queer to sex, sexuality and gender. By reframing duoethnography’s tenets into clusters of “knowing – the other – fluidly,” I illustrate duoethnography’s accessibility to queers and grant it a queer sensibility. With queer and duoethnography being lived experiences, I share experiences from my time with duoethnography’s queerness in my doctoral journey.
Introduction
As a queer doctoral student, I explored the divide between academics and administrators in higher education through duoethnography and queer theory. Seduced by queer theory as a lens through which to view the divide it took time to find a compatible methodology. However, when I first met duoethnography (Norris & Sawyer, 2012; Sawyer & Norris, 2013) our chemistry was undeniable, and it took a central role in my research as both methodology and intervention. But as I spent time working with duoethnography, I caught glimpses of its queerness. Amidst the fluid messiness of research, duoethnography outed itself to me.
If you are unfamiliar with duoethnography, it is a qualitative research methodology grounded in a conceptual framework of critical theory, the integration of narrative and autoethnography, and social justice concepts (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). Through dialogue, a pair of researchers critically explore and reconceptualize their experiences around the research topic to gain new insights for themselves and their readers (Norris & Sawyer, 2020; Sawyer & Norris, 2013). And while I am revealing the opportunities of duoethnography’s queerness, I do not limit queer to gender, sex, or sexuality. I think there are many who may not identify as queer, but who recognize their own queerness in their otherness, marginalization, or sense of being an outsider.
This paper emerges from observing, partaking, and nurturing duoethnography’s queerness. From my time spent with duoethnography and reading duoethnographies written by and about queers, I saw the potential to explicitly address duoethnography’s queerness for other queer researchers. What follows is the outing of duoethnography’s queerness and its compatibility as a queer methodology.
As I considered how to out duoethnography, Browne and Nash’s (2016a) curated volume of queer research: Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, offered insights. While the volume did not discuss duoethnography, the collection demonstrated the potential to explore the queer pleasures of duoethnography. I use queer rather than queer theory, because queer is slippery (Browne & Nash, 2016b; Pinar, 1998) and resists being normalized or constrained (Jagose, 1996; Warner, 1993). As I will discuss later, there is a fluidity between notions of queer and queer theory, hinted at by Browne and Nash’s reference to queer theories, since queer transcends the notion of a unified queer theory.
The reader is a critical participant in duoethnography (Sawyer & Norris, 2013) and so I invite you to join me in the exploration duoethnography’s queerness. Starting with introductions of my friends duoethnography and queer, I out an unexpected queerness of my own. From these introductions, I move on to the indelicate act of first outing the queers lurking in duoethnography. I then queer duoethnography’s tenets, making “knowing the other fluidly” central to duoethnography’s queerness. To move from concept to action, I describe my queer experiences of duoethnography from my doctoral research.
Meet Duoethnography and Their “Friend” Queer (Theory)
In their volume on queer methods and methodologies, Browne and Nash (2016a) engaged with the way queer and social science methodologies intersect or connect (Browne & Nash, 2016b). Rather than attempting to bridge notions of theory and methodology, Browne and Nash consider a more intersectional identity of methodology and queer. Extending their approach to duoethnography helps out its queerness. To shape this framing, it is important to first consider the fluid identity of both duoethnography and queer.
Hi, I’m Duoethnography, I’m Both Methodology and Praxis
Duoethnography’s flexibility and fluidity as methodology have seen its use flourish (Norris & Sawyer, 2020) since the first duoethnography by Norris and Sawyer (2004) that explored the hidden curriculum of heterosexuality, an article they revisited a decade later (Sawyer & Norris, 2015b). Duoethnography brings together two (or more) researchers as the site of research, to explore the question or issue through their experiences and spaces of difference (Norris & Sawyer, 2012, 2020; Sawyer & Norris, 2013). Rather than relying on an autoethnographic understanding of the topic, researchers use dialogue to juxtapose the way their experiences have shaped their perspectives and to gain new insights of themselves, each other, and the question at hand (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). The duoethnographers’ journey of transformation is exposed to their readers, often in a written form. By exposing their dialogue and experiences, duoethnographers bring their readers on the journey of insights, disruptions, and transformations that arise through their collaborative and self-reflexive process (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). With conceptual grounding in both narrative inquiry and autoethnography, duoethnography draws on their intent “to seek not categorical conclusions but rather exposure, transformation, and uncertainty” (Sawyer & Norris, 2013, p. 11). While it draws on the approaches of ethnography and narrative inquiry, the integration of curriculum theory offers a transformative quality that makes duoethnography unique.
An important element of duoethnography’s conceptual framework is Pinar’s (1975a, 1994) work on curriculum theory, specifically currere (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). Currere (Pinar, 1994) suggests that our experiences form a lived curriculum that is regressive, progressive, analytical, and synthetical. Our understanding of the past (regressive) and expectations for the future (progressive) influence how we see the present (Pinar, 1994). Considering how experiences and expectations impact the present (analytical) can connect our understanding of the world around us (synthetical) allowing it to be transformed and reshaped (Pinar, 1975b, 1994). In duoethnography, currere is at play through the researchers’ discussions of their different experiences and understandings of the research topic. Through currere, the juxtaposition of differences can offer new insights. This transformative aspect of duoethnography (Sawyer & Norris, 2013) encourages duoethnographers and their readers to find new meaning from their interactions. For queer researchers, their currere also shapes duoethnography as a queer methodology.
Duoethnography straddles methodology and praxis through currere’s transformative potential. Through transformation, the praxis of duoethnography “can be ‘a process of integration’, a transformative engagement, assisting in reconceptualizing their beliefs” (Norris & Sawyer, 2020, p. 402). Duoethnography challenges researchers to critically and self-reflexively consider their currere. They engage their duoethnographic partner in a critical exploration of differences as a transformative and not expository interaction (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). Like the movement of queer between identity and theory, duoethnography shape-shifts between methodology and praxis.
Duoethnography is “emergent, not prescriptive” (Sawyer & Norris, 2013, p. 23). This openness brings fluidity and flexibility to the methodology but opens the research process to messiness (Jones et al., 2023). Traditional research design such as Cresswell and Cresswell’s (2023) starts with a review of the literature to shape the research question and research process. In duoethnography, duoethnographers treat literature as a participant in the research (Sawyer & Norris, 2013), offering insights and disruptions rather than shaping the approach to the question. Finally, duoethnography’s messiness arises from the centring of “difference as heurism” (Sawyer & Norris, 2013, p. 21), encouraging the researchers to focus on their spaces of difference rather than their shared perspectives to find new insights. These elements of duoethnography are part of its queer compatibility with research where ideas of situated messiness, fluidity, and difference inform inquiry and discovery.
Hi, I’m Queer, Sometimes I’m Theory
It would be hubristic and disingenuous to suggest that I can provide a concise stable definition of queer or queer theory. Drawing on the approach taken by Browne and Nash (2016b), I offer a perspective on queer and queer theory as I have come to understand and use them in my research. I draw on queer and queer theory’s resistance to normativity and appreciation for the intersectionality of identity as a means of challenging the way we understand the world. It is important to address that within my research, I draw on my queer positionality and concepts of queer, but I am not studying queer bodies (as reflected in sexuality, sex, gender, and attraction). This can be controversial, but has been addressed by authors such as Allen and Rasmussen (2015), Dilley (1999), Gowlett and Rasmussen (2014), Rasmussen and Allen (2014), and Renn (2010). These authors suggested the potential for the use of queer theory in the exploration of identities beyond queer bodies. Use outside of queer bodies also aligns with Warner’s (1993) statement “‘queer’ gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual, and normal includes normal business in the academy” (p. xxvi). However, not centering queer bodies or sexualities creates the potential for everyone to be queer. And if everyone can be queer then no one is queer. Rather than appropriating a queer identity, I suggest acknowledging individual queerness may enhance our understanding of our shared diversity.
As I sought to understand queer as theory and not just lived experience, I traced the threads of seminal thinkers who shaped the theory while disavowing their authority over it. Despite authoring Queer Theory: An Introduction, Jagose (1996) did not provide a definitive articulation, noting that queer “depends on its resistance to definition” (p. 1) and “queer theory resists fixing itself” (p. 2). This highlights a recurring theme of hazy boundaries between queer as a concept and queer theory. Warner (1993) similarly highlighted that queer offers a “resistance to regimes of the normal” (p. xxvi), including the normalization of queer. These references illustrate the places of resistance within queer theory, including its resistance to being defined.
In one of the earliest articulations of the shift from theories of lesbian and gay sexualities to the notion of queer as theory, de Lauretis (1991) suggested that queer theory offers the opportunity to transgress, transcend, and problematize. While she may have been addressing an ideological or theoretical shift, these notions of transgression, transcension, and problematization remain part of queer theory. Drawing on another key part of queer theory’s genealogy, Butler (2006) offered a challenge to “foundational categories of identity – the binary of sex, gender, and the body… that create the effect of the natural, the original, and the inevitable” (p. xxix). Within these notions of identity, queer theory has come to examine the intersectionality of identities such as race, location, class, gender, and culture (Alexander, 2024; Sullivan, 2003). This intersectionality demonstrates the way queer can emerge or merge with other identities. Queer theory evades a clear articulation, and dodges normalization into a coherent set of tenets and definitions. This is also seen in the way that queer and queer theory merge and separate in the resistance to be bounded. We see here the queer effort to disrupt and challenge normativity, particularly within identity, and questioning what is known or believed.
These ideas of resistance continue in the use of queer theory today. Alexander’s (2024) contribution to the sixth edition of the Denzin et al. (2024b) handbook of qualitative research articulated queer theory’s foundation of resistance, subversion, reappropriation, reclamation, denaturalizing, activist, and investigatory nature. This resistance to settling for clarity and definition, messiness caused by problematizing what we think we know, and a desire to avoid normativity are the features that also surface in duoethnography.
Hi, I’m the Queer Duoethnographer
Outing duoethnography’s queerness emerged from my doctoral research using duoethnography and queer theory to explore the divide between academics and administrators in universities. My doctoral journey revealed a new queerness that found its way into my use of duoethnography. I have been a university administrator for almost three decades. In that time, I have experienced and felt the divide between academics and professional administrators. With so much of my life spent as a student and working at a university, a PhD seemed a logical part of my journey. I could not have predicted that this endeavour would make me queer all over again.
From the moment I told administrative colleagues I was starting a doctoral program, they assumed my goal was to become faculty. While my motivation was to better understand the journey of faculty, my colleagues were reluctant to believe I was in the program for the experience and not to change careers. They made this clear with comments that implied I was a traitor or defector for pursuing a PhD. I had breached the normative borders of my administrative identity, and they were attempting to correct me. Their taunts echoed like the shouts of “faggot” thrown at me in the elementary schoolyard. On the playground I was breaching gender norms; now I was breaching university role norms. At least I would be welcomed into the company of erudite faculty, right?
Not a chance. While my administrative colleagues attempted to guide me back to “normal,” faculty wanted me to know I was an outsider. To faculty I was “just an administrator,” the enemy breaching their territory. I was an emissary of their sworn enemy and seen as an interloper in their midst. Their words and actions also echoed like the shouts of “faggot” in my memories of being a closeted small-town prairie kid. Other. Outsider. Excluded. My administrative colleagues wanted to pull me back into the group and faculty reinforced the boundaries to keep me out. This was an unexpected and startling re-queering. As I planned my research, I recognized the potential to engage with the intersection of my queer identities.
As a qualitative researcher, doctoral student, and professional administrator, living this insider-outsider paradox and being othered will always inform my positionality and shape how I experience the world. The queer experience of hiding in plain sight and peering through the closet door, taught me how to shift between insider and outsider. This lived queer perspective guided my research and helped me recognize duoethnography’s queerness.
While I drew on my queer experiences and identity to inform my perspectives on outing duoethnography’s queerness, I must also acknowledge my unearned normative privilege as a North American cisgender white male. “‘Queer’ sensibilities are theorised and understood through lenses that are largely academic, western, white, and privileged” (Muñoz, 2016, p. 57) and drawing on my experiences and positionality creates the risk that I do the same. By applying queer to methodology and not bodies, I hope to avoid speaking over or for other queers. However, I still risk applying my western cisgender white male perspective to the framing of queer. While my privilege affords me the ability to contemplate my queerness more distinctly from other parts of my identity, I hope I can also exploit it to gain entrance to spaces that allow me to challenge normativity with queer’s discomforting essence. I do not claim to speak on behalf of, or from a unified voice of queers, but rather to use my queer voice to advocate for the power of queer.
A Queer Sensibility
As I started my research journey, my first encounter with duoethnography generated a flush of excitement. It fit with my research topic, and it gave the impression it would be open to experimenting with my use of queer theory. As I undertook my research though, I came to realize that duoethnography and queer theory were not to become bedfellows, but rather duoethnography slowly outed itself as queer. Rather than dealing with an entanglement of theory and methodology, duoethnography’s queerness offers accessibility to queers who find themselves on the margins of other normativities in their individual situated and intersectional identities.
In outlining a conceptual framework for duoethnography, Sawyer and Norris (2013) do not articulate queer theory, but as I worked with the methodology, I kept encountering queers. In the following section I will out some of duoethnography’s queers before considering the tenets that frame the approach to the methodology and how they may reveal duoethnography’s queerness.
Queerly Conceived
As I delved into duoethnography, it felt familiar, comfortable, and safe. Like knowing I was queer before I realized I was gay, there was something familiar and relatable about duoethnography. Some of that familiarity may be attributable to queer presences within the methodology. Joe Norris and Richard Sawyer are the authors of the first duoethnography (Norris & Sawyer, 2004) on the hidden and null curricula of heterosexuality, and the first queers I noticed in duoethnography. The foundational duoethnography juxtaposed Sawyer’s homosexuality against Norris’s sensitive male heterosexuality that others often mistook for homosexuality (Norris & Sawyer, 2004; Sawyer & Norris, 2015b). While neither labelled themselves queer, there is a queerness to both Sawyer’s homosexuality and Norris’s non-normative heterosexuality. Their duoethnography challenged the way normativity and sexuality hide unquestioned within our daily lives, closely aligned with queer theory’s resistance to the normative and interest in exposing the unquestioned.
The presence of queers continues with the contributions of Pinar to duoethnography’s conceptual framework and design. Recognized as a key thinker on queer theory and education (Pinar, 1998, 2003), I discussed Pinar’s work on curriculum theory and currere (Pinar, 1975a, 1994) earlier. Foucault also joins the queer cast in the research design of duoethnography. Foucault’s (1980, 2003) concept of subjugated knowledge draws out counternarratives that critique or challenge dominant narratives (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). Challenging narratives within and between the duoethnographers is integral to the opportunities for difference to draw out competing or conflicting perspectives (Norris & Sawyer, 2012; Sawyer & Norris, 2013). Duoethnography’s fluidity and evolution also open the door to the addition of other queers as a living methodology.
Duoethnography’s authors have more recently discussed how Judith Butler’s (2006) concept of performativity influenced the way authors are using the methodology (Norris & Sawyer, 2020). Performativity also features heavily within queer theory and challenges notions of essentialism, to consider a more constructivist notion of identity (Gunn & McAllister, 2013). Within duoethnography, performativity can challenge duoethnographers to juxtapose not only their perceptions of the world but also inquire how their actions, performances, and practices differ as an avenue to new insights.
While queer did not form part of the conceptual framework, seeing queers within the methodological space not only made it feel welcoming, but also familiar. Queerness as a part of currere shapes one’s subjective experience and the way we perceive the world. Sawyer (2021) illustrated the impact of queer currere by applying queer narrative theory and currere to reconsider his public-school experience. By doing so, he highlighted the impact of a queer currere on the perception of the world. The representation of these noted queers within duoethnography also instills the methodology with a queer sensibility that challenges the normative, questions the dominant, and has the potential to make non-queers a little uncomfortable (or potentially recognize their own queerness).
With these queer influences in mind, I will review the tenets or working principles of duoethnography. Explicitly articulated by the authors as not being prescriptive (Sawyer & Norris, 2013), duoethnography’s tenets, design concepts, and framing have evolved through various articulations of the methodology (Burleigh & Burm, 2022; Norris & Sawyer, 2012, 2020; Sawyer & Norris, 2013, 2015a). Drawing on the recent articulation of nine tenets by Burleigh and Burm (2022), I will consider how these tenets offer a queer sensibility.
Repositioning and Revealing
While considering duoethnography as method, Burleigh and Burm (2022) identified nine tenets that have evolved (and continue to evolve) around duoethnography: (1) Life as a curriculum (2) Polyvocal and dialogic (3) Deliberate juxtaposition (4) Differences are articulated and discussed to interrogate and disrupt stories (5) Question meanings held about the past to invite reconceptualization (6) Universal truths are not sought (7) A form of praxis (8) An ethical stance is a negotiated space (9) Deep layers of trust grow over time and allow disclosure and rigorous conversation. (pp. 2–3)
Reframed Duoethnography Tenets
Knowing
The tenets life as curriculum (1), questioning meaning (5), and universal truths are not sought (6) coalesced together into
Life as curriculum resonates with the Jagose’s (1996) articulation of queer as “provisional and contingent” (p. 77) and identity as “ongoing, and always incomplete, it is a process rather than a property” (p. 79). Queer, like currere in duoethnography, is living and changing. Heckert (2016) suggested “being is always a becoming” (p. 43) and this applies equally to queer as to duoethnography. In duoethnography and queer, knowing and being are a story in progress. Duoethnographies “are placeholders or stepping-stones until another experience or reflection instigates a change in perspective and action” (Sawyer & Norris, 2013, p. 108) much in the same way that Heckert declared “that life is transformation” (p. 43). In this sense, knowing cannot become known.
Building on these concepts, questioning meaning held about the past to invite reconceptualization resonates with Browne and Nash’s (2016b) suggestion that queer research highlights “the instability of taken-for-granted meanings and resulting power relationships” (p. 4). Duoethnography’s disruption of perceptions and relationships is consistent with this definition. Universal truths are not sought in duoethnography also resonates with queer’s “resistance to regimes of the normal” (Warner, 1993, p. xxvi). For duoethnography this also disrupts the norms of research methodologies seeking generalizable outcomes.
The Other
The tenets of polyvocality (2), juxtaposition (3), and difference (4) unite in duoethnography as
Through duoethnography’s polyvocal and dialogic nature, the voice of each duoethnographer offers the potential to hear, if not come to know, the other. By centring dialogue and polyvocality, duoethnography meets Alexander’s (2024) call to “rethink the relationship between intersectionality and normalization” (p. 198) including action being taken to resist “homogenizing queer studies” (p. 198). Rather than seeking to generalize a singular understanding or unity in a singular voice, duoethnography shares queer’s interest in reflecting individual and intersectional perspectives.
Through deliberate juxtaposition of the duoethnographers’ differences the opportunity for critical self-reflection and new insights emerge. Calling it becoming-queer, Heckert (2016) drew on anarchism and queer considering similar ideas, such as “juxtaposition of stories: of self, of research subjects, of audiences” (p. 43). Speaking of queer research, Gorman-Murray et al. (2016) noted that researchers must remain “alert to how subjectivities are an outcome of a relational process and to how a queer methodology must facilitate telling and interpreting narratives that do not inadvertently impose meanings rather than seeking to rework and create new meanings” (p. 101). These queer methodological ideas connect directly to duoethnography, both in ways of knowing, but also in the engagement of the other. As duoethnographers, we may at times need to take a queer outsider perspective that challenges our own narratives. This ability to interrogate our own stories and consider the perspectives offered by the other has the potential to queer our understandings and disrupt our internalized norms. Through these processes, we come to know the other duoethnographer and disrupt the subject-object dichotomy of researcher and researched.
In duoethnography, differences are articulated and discussed to interrogate and disrupt stories of both self and other. The potential to create new meanings emerges from queer’s anti-normativity, non-normativity, or a resistance to norms (Wiegman & Wilson, 2015). Drawing on the work of Foucault, Halperin (1995) articulated that “liberal power does not simply prohibit; it does not directly terrorize. It normalizes” (p. 18) and queer is a resistance to this normativity. Applying queer’s resistance to normativity to this tenet illustrates how the dialog between the duoethnographers and the juxtaposition of their spaces of difference offer the potential to disrupt the way we individually normalize the world through our own experiences. Transformation emerges when that normalized perspective is disrupted and duoethnographers are fluid.
Fluidly
There is a fluidity to duoethnography, not only as it is described, but in its practice and use. This
As a form of praxis, duoethnography draws the reader into the intervention, looking to engage the reader in the identification, consideration, and self-reflection of their own perceptions along with the duoethnographers (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). Duoethnography departs from traditional research methodologies that focus on studying a topic or question (Creswell & Creswell, 2023). Instead of focusing on just discovering meaning, duoethnography embraces the transformational nature of research (Norris & Sawyer, 2012). This recognition of a transformative practice to research aligns to a queer resistance to the normative traditions of the academy as encouraged by Warner (1993).
Duoethnography calls for an ethical stance is a negotiated space and to see that deep layers of trust grow over time and allow disclosure and rigorous conversation. Both duoethnography and queer theory recognize that identity is not a stable construct, but is fluid, layered, and intersectional (Alexander, 2024; Browne & Nash, 2016b; Jagose, 1996; Sawyer & Norris, 2013). This shared understanding of identity and duoethnography’s exploration of lived experience through currere, necessitate an ethical space of duoethnography that seeks to develop a trust between the duoethnographers. To understand the other necessitates a comfort and safety, to explore not only the perspectives of the other but to interrogate our own perspectives. As a result, fluidity emerges from duoethnography as methodology and intervention. Without some transformation, new perspectives, or new insights, there is no duoethnography. Not only do queer concepts underly duoethnography, but duoethnography itself is queer as a methodology.
To this point I have conceptually linked queer and duoethnography to demonstrate both the compatibility and duoethnography’s inherent queerness. This satisfies an intellectual pursuit of juxtaposing theory, methodology, and notions of queer together to offer new potentialities. However, it misses the lived experiences that both queer theory and duoethnography bring forward. Building on this conceptual framework, I want to surface my queer experiences of using duoethnography and queer theory together and like Shakespeare’s beast with two backs, it was hard to distinguish where one stopped and the other started.
Queer in Practice
To consider only the conceptual embodiment of queer within duoethnography would ignore the lived and experienced aspects central to both. The following experiences draw on queer and duoethnography to illustrate the opportunity to rethink the way queerness is revealed in duoethnography. In my doctoral research, I engaged in three duoethnographies on the divide between university academics and administrators. Engaging with a faculty member, an administrator, and a faculty member who was also an administrator gave me the opportunity to work in duoethnography’s queerness. Combining my queer sexuality; queerness as a doctoral student and administrator; and the queerness of collaborators, who often felt they were outsiders in their peer groups, brought duoethnography’s queerness to life.
Inviting in Other Queer Participants
I previously addressed the role of researcher as site of research in duoethnography as a departure from traditional research working with participants. However, beyond the duoethnographers, duoethnography has other queer participants: place, literature, and artifacts (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). Through my research, the role of literature as a participant is a useful illustration of duoethnography’s queerness. Duoethnography typically does not engage in a traditional literature review before the research, but instead it is “blended into the written study” (Sawyer & Norris, 2013, p. 20). This alone makes duoethnography queer, as a methodology, but the experience of bringing in literature as a participant offers new ways of
While literature I previously read informed the duoethnographies, they did not guide the research. Rather previous literature formed part of my currere, my experience. Through the duoethnographies, academic literature was engaged to inform questions that arose. We also drew on non-academic literature in the form of poems, articles, and opinion pieces into our conversations. Instead of literature shaping our research it offered us new meanings and different ways of
What makes this queer, is the way in which literature led us to question our own perspectives and moved our dialogue in different directions. Literature was not just a foundation to our research, but an active voice in moving the conversations along. In one duoethnography, the use of the passive voice in an article transformed the resulting manuscript. In another duoethnography, a poem that held meaning to my collaborator redirected the course of our conversations and discussions.
The ways in which the literature changed the course of our conversations also transformed our exploration of
Distasteful Queer: No Offence, None Taken
My use of duoethnography and queer as
Queer’s disruptive power was revealed when I had the opportunity to present a research poster at a higher education conference. Not only did I eschew traditional poster formatting and presentation, but I also centred queerness in my title, Academic-Queer-Administrator: Bridging the divide through duoethnography. After looking at my poster, another scholar suggested that including and highlighting queer in my title, particularly without focusing on queer bodies, was not helpful to my academic thesis. The comment highlighted for me that, despite the argument that queer is not that queer anymore (Nair, 2016), the academy still sees queer as incompatible with advancing legitimate higher education research. While the feedback seemed earnest and well intentioned, it strengthened my resolve that queerness remains a disruptive force, even in today’s university. What was particularly interesting to me was the immediate impulse to normalize legitimate ways to discuss higher education, before attempting to understand the centrality of queer or duoethnography to the question.
Duoethnography demonstrated a similarly disruptive force through the ethics review process. The ethics process seeks to ensure that the subjects of research understand the meaning of the research and provide consent (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). Within duoethnography, the researchers are the site of research and are engaging with one another. There are no participants. This posed challenges for the traditional ethics model; the review board had not encountered duoethnography before. Like my queer poster, duoethnography was disrupting the normal ethics process.
Together, duoethnography and queer further challenged the ethics process. I was required to have a participant agreement, despite there being no participants. To meet the requirements, I reframed the traditional consent forms into collaborator agreements to demonstrate the shared ethic between the duoethnographers. The first review of my ethics suggested that the use of queer in the title is misleading because I was not studying sexual orientation or gender identity. The same message suggested complications of a dissertation and a collaborative research approach via duoethnography. Recognizing the negotiated relationships within queer methodological approaches, Gorman-Murray et al. (2016) suggested the need for “revisiting the ethics of the research as a negotiated process, rather than the formal research procedures of a Human Research Ethics Committee” (p. 102).
Denzin et al. (2024a) contemplated the possibility that ethics boards have gone beyond ensuring quality in research design to become a police force for what is acceptable research in the academy. Recognizing the need for ethics approval for my dissertation, I was able to resolve and address the questions through explanations and in some cases accommodation of the normative research requirements. However, these ethics challenges demonstrated that despite three decades having passed, Warner’s (1993) suggestion that “for academics, being interested in queer theory is a way to mess up the desexualized spaces of the academy, exude some rut, reimagine the publics from and for which academic intellectuals write, dress, and perform” (p. xxvi) is still germane. Despite the time that has passed, it is still necessary to recognize that “for both academics and activists, ‘queer’ gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual, and normal includes normal business in the academy” (Warner, 1993, p. xxvi). This remains true today, in both the ways that queer and (in my research) duoethnography can respond to that call.
It’s Messy
Duoethnography can be messy (Jones et al., 2023)… queer is messy… research is messy… life is messy (Alexander, 2024; Cavanaugh et al., 2023; Love, 2016). This messiness may be the way in which queer and duoethnography
I can attest to the messiness of both queer and duoethnography within my research. As a fluid, dialogic, and emergent methodology, duoethnography challenged my normative expectations of the research process. Data and answers did not emerge from the duoethnographic dialogue, rather insights and opportunities emerged through each conversation. Instead of exploring just the research question, duoethnography called on us to look inward to consider how our perspectives were shaped. This experience illustrates the shift articulated by Denzin et al. (2024a) from positivist and scientific method informed research to emerging methods that resist normative structures. Like queer, duoethnography also pushes back on these normative methodological structures.
This resistance to the normative can be seen in duoethnography’s inclusion of literature in dialogue, rather than a traditional literature review (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). Similarly, there is no clear data collection, analysis, and reporting process. Instead, dialogue serves as both the collection and analysis of data (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). During my research, this was often an unsettling experience. While the topic of our duoethnographies was clear, it was not always obvious how our conversations were exploring it. Relying on normative practices of recording and transcribing our conversations, I often found new insights, queer moments, or piqued curiosity during transcription of our dialogue. I would highlight these thoughts and observations with my duoethnographers as I returned the transcripts to them for their review and reflection. These moments also led me to explore literature on these topics or insights. In several cases, it was not only the academic literature, but social media, poetry, or other literature that is not typically part of a literature review. This departure from both research structure and academic sources is both part of duoethnography (Sawyer & Norris, 2013) and queer in its departure from normative research.
Building on these experiences within my duoethnographies, there is the inability to distinguish data collection from analysis and synthesis within conversation. This is a queer boundary transgression noted by Heckert (2016) as a need to “let go of borders: between theory and data, researcher and researched, hetero and homo, right and wrong” (p. 43). Throughout the dialogues within the duoethnographies, I found myself contemplating the perspectives of my collaborator and thinking about how that reinforced, challenged, or disrupted my thinking. Drawing on currere, each conversation shaped my understandings and the ways I thought about our topics. Like Heckert (2016), at times I was unsure of how conversations were addressing my research topic but found “the most interesting stories were not born of a purely instrumental logic – they came from moments of connection” (pp. 52–53). This integration of data collection, analysis, and synthesis extended into the writing process. While duoethnography is not prescriptive of the format of output, the need to engage the reader, surface each voice, and help illustrate transformation means that the writing process is not a writing up of the research, but rather is part of the synthesis and analysis (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). Like queerness, this fluidity in methodology refused to be labeled.
Writing duoethnography is a queer messy process. As noted, we do not just write up duoethnographies, rather writing is part of the evolution, part of the process. Academic writing often emerges later in the research process. As the lead author in my research, I looked to our conversations to draw out the themes and ideas to turn over to my fellow duoethnographer to react to, respond to, and offer their voice. From some discussions, I drafted pieces of writing that illustrated my reactions or insights to our conversations. Sometimes these resonated with my collaborator and other times they were surprised by what I took away. In another illustration of duoethnography’s queerness, writing was not a final step of the research, but a part of the dialogue, synthesis, and sensemaking of the methodology.
Not only does writing serve an analytic, synthetic, and generative role in duoethnography, but writing duoethnographies is also queer. Duoethnography calls on authors to prepare “polyvocal texts presenting multiple perspectives on a phenomenon, avoiding the metanarrative of a singular point of view” (Sawyer & Norris, 2013, p. 75). To do so challenges authors to find ways to convey individual voices, perspectives, and the way they interacted through dialogue. From my experience this challenges one’s writing skills as you seek to find the right voices of you, me, we, us, and the ways in which to represent the more descriptive components of methodology or explanation. It goes far beyond the acceptability of writing in the first person and instead challenges you to find ways to present multiple voices speaking in the first person and determining when a unified voice is appropriate.
One final thought on writing duoethnographies is the queer role played by the reader. In duoethnography, readers are not just consumers but are called to make meaning from interaction with the duoethnography (Sawyer & Norris, 2013). This requires the duoethnographers to write for an audience with the intent of pulling the reader into the dialogue, meaning making, and critical self-reflection. This queer notion has called on me to address the reader directly while writing duoethnographies, something that feels awkward at first but offers innovative and creative approaches to engaging the reader.
As a queer engaging with queer theory and duoethnography, I could not help but experience a sense of compatibility with methodology. From these experiences, I hoped to expand on the conceptual illustration of duoethnography to the queer practice of duoethnography. Duoethnography is not just a queer in theory but also in practice.
The Afterglow
As I wrap up my doctoral research and several years living with duoethnography’s queerness, I wanted to offer this potential to other queers. Queer, duoethnography, and qualitative research are each difficult to separate from the individual. I chose not to segregate and keep them apart. Instead, through my research I let them melt together. Walking you through the conceptual framing of duoethnography’s queerness, I provided a methodological and theoretical framework upon which it can rest. With the importance of the lived experience in both duoethnography and queer theory, I offered my experiences working with duoethnography as a queer methodology. What remains is for you to evaluate whether you recognize the queer experience that opens this approach to your research. If you too are a queer, take this, play with it, and make it your own. If queer does not resonate with you, there may be another intersectional aspect of your identity that offers your own critical approach to duoethnography that you can make your own.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my PhD supervisor Dr. Michelle Bussière-Prytula at the University of Saskatchewan for her encouragement to develop this article and her review of the manuscript.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interest
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.