Reflexive interventions: from damage-centered to desire-based bisexuality research

Abstract

Research about bisexual communities is scarce, demonstrating a need for continued scholarship focusing on their experiences. Much of the qualitative research about LGBTQ communities, and bisexual communities more specifically, center narratives of invisibility, marginalization, and exclusion. It is critical to examine the ideologies that undergird this type of knowledge. In this essay, I draw from Indigenous scholars to reflect on the ways I privileged damage-centered narratives in my own work about bisexual college students. To do so, I engage in an unsettling reflexivity as both an intervention to hegemonic ways of producing knowledge about bisexual communities, and an invitation to other qualitative researchers to embark on this reflexive journey to consider the ways we can turn our gaze back to power, and tell stories that aim to capture more holistic, expansive, and desire-based stories of our communities.

Keywords:

• Bisexuality
• LGBTQ
• higher education
• qualitative research
• reflexivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jayna Tavarez

Jayna Tavarez (she/her) is an educator, researcher, and student affairs practitioner. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Integrative Studies with a concentration in Social Justice and Human Rights, a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies with a concentration in Social Justice and Human Rights, and a graduate certificate in Women and Gender Studies from George Mason University. She is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she explores the intersections between identity negotiation, intracommunity dynamics, and performance within higher education contexts.