Queer theory, cyber-ethnographies and researching online sex environments

Abstract

Both the act and the commission of the act of sex have been transformed by technology. This has in turn led to emerging research that seeks to consider online research methods and methodologies that take account of the new medium, with a number of studies examining specific groups and the behaviour of those groups from a socio-legal perspective. This paper will seek to consider the application of queer theory to researching so-called ‘virtual’ or online sex groups. It will examine how the virtual spaces, and the researchers who survey them, are constituted. The ethical and practical issues that emerge in surveying these groups from a queer theory perspective will also be explored.

Keywords:

• queer
• ethnography
• research methods
• Internet
• sex

Introduction

At the heart of academic discourse is the researcher. Research is undertaken and ultimately written up through the prism of our own constructed identity; and this identity is in line with notions of ethics, values and methods that represent a negotiated settlement between ourselves as the individual researcher and the interests of, inter alia, a university ethics committee, the research guidelines of a professional association, or the research ‘subject’. The ruminations of these groups typically represent a settlement that aims to ‘protect’ the individual researcher, the institution and the research ‘subject’, but often presumes a universal set of values. With the emergence of postmodern, feminist and queer scholarship, these values have been questioned but such questioning often remains at the fringe of the academy and the most recent of these, queer theory, potentially challenges many of our assumed ethical and methodological norms.

Traditionally, the researcher identity has been publicly constructed as someone who, having undertaken their field research, returns home and removes themselves from the research environment. This transition of construction of the self from one identity to another has been seen as a shift from the barbaric to the civilised and from the artificial construction of self to the ‘true’ construction of self. This may have taken the form of the traditional western anthropologist who climbs aboard his boat and sets off to unexplored tropical islands (Malinowski, 1967) or, more recently, the researcher who seeks to examine a subculture through immersing themselves in that environment, perhaps even to the extent of breaking the law (Pearson, 2009).

For some, these ‘virtual’ or ‘real’ communities are spaces that the researcher does not leave and continues to inhabit. For Campbell (2004, p. 25), this was expressed as ‘I am less an academic gone native than a native gone academic’, while Bolton (1995) wrote ‘my primary identity is as a gay man’ and thus stated that he constructed his AIDS research though that prism. Lee's 1978 text, Getting sex places Lee, by now an out gay man, into a range of sexual environments that his diaries confirm he enjoyed in every sense (Lee, n.d.). Bolton admitted to having sex in queer spaces, where to do anything other would have been outside the value system of that space. In doing so, these researchers may have been ‘ethical’ within the discourse of space, but unethical within the discourse of the institutional academy.

Just as the real, or somatic, bar has been crucial in identity formation among LGBTQ communities, so too is the modern virtual social space inhabited by those who identify as LGBTQ (Campbell, 2004, p. 53). Whether it is through quick sexual hook-up and networking sites like Gaydar, Manhunt, or Punternet or ‘subcultural’ sites such as bareback.com and alt.com, different social spaces and different realities are constructed so as to enable a form of intimate interaction.

Clatts' (1999) study of men who have sex in public, like Humphreys (2005) before him, details his own observance of acts, but these are constructed as the ‘researcher’ observing and any fluidity of role remains hidden.

Within the confines of these ‘virtual’ spaces, the self exists as the textual body. Although the textual body is constructed as an entity separate from the physical body (Markham, 1998, p. 59), to describe this process as disembodying is perhaps misleading. Queer virtual space is dominated by image, and within male orientated homo-cyberspace, the penis and, to a lesser extent, the male bottom and anus. The choice of these images alone can be significant in indicating whether an individual is seeking to ‘receive’ or ‘give’ penetrative sex.

These sites enable the formation of a ‘virtual identity’ which may be regarded as ‘false’ (Campbell, 2004). This is particularly relevant in the construction of age. This may take the form of a 40-something male becoming a 30-something for the purposes of a networking site, or may attract the attention of the law where this is seen as representing a ‘subversive’ motive, for instance in the ‘grooming’ of children (Davidson & Martellozzo, 2008; Simpson, 2005, 2006), to facilitate fraud (Finch, 2007), or to create ‘anonymous’ identities in order to enable other forms of cybercrime (Reitinger, 2000). These are just some examples of where questions around the queering of identities in cyberspace, or alternatively, the ‘masking’ of identity, have presented new challenges for law.

Alongside these developments in technology and our evolving notion of the virtual self, the concomitant emergence of feminist, postmodern, poststructuralist and queer scholarship impacted upon the traditional model of the ‘objective’ relationship between the researcher and object of study (Campbell, 2004, p. 38).

Writing in 2001, Dunne predicted that the sound of the future would be the whirling and beeping of a modem. With the emergence of popular access to, first, broadband and, more recently, Wi-Fi, the beeping has been rendered silent, but technology has nonetheless transformed the way we conduct our lives as citizens and the way many of us as researchers undertake our endeavours.

The ‘information society’ has created ‘an unlimited virtual market-place for the propagation and sale of ideas, goods and services on a global scale’ (Walker et al., 2000, p. 3; see more generally Castells, 2001). The emergence of the Internet and, more recently, Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook and Twitter have heightened our collective awareness of the Internet as a communication node for social interaction and moved the use of such technology beyond a small number of privileged early adopters (Bargh, 2002; Livingstone, 2003; Mehra et al., 2004).

With the growth of the Internet and these commercial uses, so too has their been greater use of the Internet by spatially and/or ideologically marginalised groups (Alexander, 2002; Fluri, 2006). Sexual minority groups, and/or those groups deemed sexually deviant, limited by the constraints of space, are able to interact through virtual media. These may take the form of bulletin boards, chat rooms, profile based sites and, with new technologies such as Grindr, location-specific networking through our cell-phones.

These developments have contributed to the increasing acceptance that the Internet itself can be a source of field sites as well as being a tool to examine ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ sites (Coomber, 1997; Hine, 2004; Illingworth, 2001), however false that dichotomy may be. Technology has offered the opportunity to investigate a range of law related phenomena and my own research has used the medium of the Internet to investigate the operation of public sex environments (Ashford, 2006, 2007) and sex work (Ashford, 2008, 2009).

In seeking to examine our approach to these ‘virtual’ spaces as ‘sites’ of socio-legal investigation, queer theory can provide us with a vital lens of analysis. Queer theory challenges heterosexuality's normative status, rejecting the binary labels that describe gender, sex and sexuality (see more generally Jagose, 1996). As such, it has criticised the liberal rights seeking agenda that has come to dominate the lesbian, gay and bisexual political programme, notably in relation to gay marriage. Yet, queer continues to be a controversial idea, the fluid nature and inevitable uncertainties of which can cause unease. The term ‘queer’ was repellent to many in the English speaking world, laden with negative connotations. Nonetheless, queer has gone on to gain traction as a theory in those languages which were less familiar with queer theory and its previous meanings (Rosenberg, 2008) but arguably remains largely Anglo-US centric (Engebretsen, 2008).

This article explores the different conceptions of self that have developed in cyberspace, the researcher as both self and the ‘subject’ or observed phenomena. It will seek to argue that cyberspace, freeing us of corporeal bounds, enables a queering of the self. This process, it will be argued, presents important questions about how we view the observed socio-legal phenomena and ourselves as researchers. It will also question the dichotomy between the two distinct identities of researcher and ‘subject’.

Constructing the researcher

The publication of Bronislaw Malinowski's A diary in the strict sense of the term in 1967 lifted the veil on the anthropologist in the field and ‘flicked on a light in the murky and unacknowledged realm of the anthropologist's sexuality in the field’ (Kulick, 1995, p. 1). The diary describes a series of studies in the Pacific between 1914 and 1918. For the most part, the diary reveals the author's preoccupation with his wife and the day-to-day monotony of fieldwork, but we also discover that one of his party contracts a sexually transmitted infection, although it is not explicitly stated whether it was contracted in the field (Malinowski, 1967, p. 165). He also describes fantasising over some of the indigenous island inhabitants:

A pretty, finely built girl walked ahead of me. I watched the muscles of her back, her figure, her legs, and the beauty of the body so hidden to us whites, fascinated me. Probably even with my own wife I'll never have the opportunity to observe the play of back muscles for as long as with this little animal. At moments I was sorry I was not a savage and could not possess this pretty girl. (Malinowski, 1967, p. 255)

At other times Malinowski reveals ‘homosexual’ fantasies in relation to the male inhabitants explaining his feelings as part of the ‘certain residue of homosexuality in human nature’ (Malinowski, 1967, p. 256). Malinowski's diary reveals a researcher who has travelled to observe ‘the savages’ and who continually asserts his identity as an ‘outsider’ in the space, retaining his own ‘civilised’ identity.

It was on the basis of retaining one's identity as a researcher that Wengle stated ‘the vast majority of anthropologists remain celibate while in the field’ (Wengle, 1988, p. 25). Cesara (1982, p. 217) described ‘risking’ involvement, but this was again on the basis of constructing her identity as separate from the ‘other’ she was studying. In the case of Campbell, he was the ‘other’, and did not construct a separate identity as ‘researcher’. Here we see the tension between the self as mask and the self as queered identity.

Dubisch (1995) notes that the fieldworker does ‘almost everything else with our “informants”: share their lives, eat with them, attend their rituals, become part of their families, even become close friends, and sometimes establish long-life relationships’ and while the fieldworker may be presented with some situations in which sexual advances or behaviour may bring a study to an end, there are other situations where celibacy in the field may appear contrary to the norms of the community being observed and the researcher (Dubisch, 1995, p. 31). This may be particularly relevant in the observation of phenomena that may be regarded as sexual.

For both Blackwood (1995) and Killick (1995), a ‘straight’ sexual identity was constructed by them for the purposes of their fieldwork despite their gay identity beyond the field. For Blackwood, this became more complex as she embarked upon a ‘secret’ lesbian relationship with a member of the community she was researching. In the space of the study, Blackwood's identity was apparently queered, but beyond that space, Blackwood continued to assert her ‘civilised’ or straight identity.

Attwood (2009) describes struggling to retain her identity as a researcher, particularly as she became increasingly familiar with the site users she was observing and with whom she was interacting. Significantly, this suggests that the breaking down of barriers between the researcher and this ‘new’ person interacting within cyberspace was in some way disquieting. Whether that was down to a personal fear about exploring the self or a professional concern about moving beyond what was for her, a cloak of objectiveness, is unclear.

Bolton does not appear to share Attwood's concerns, describing engaging in sex in the field as ‘a purely personal matter’. Bolton also comments that ‘refusing to share in sexuality across cultural boundaries helps to perpetuate the false dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘the natives’ (Bolton, 1995, p. 140), but the presence of such a boundary is itself often a construction of the researcher. Given that, in Bolton's words, ‘in gay culture, sex is where the action is’, it is perhaps unsurprising that sexual encounters remain a point of debate for researchers. Same sex interaction may have been unmentioned in the recent past (in western discourses) due to homophobia within the academy and may still be deterred by a fear of endangering chances for tenure (Williams, 1993) or hindering one's establishment in the disciplinary field.

In addressing the ‘ethics’ of sexual participant observation, Bolton comments that he never engaged in sex for the purposes of collecting data and that he never engaged in unsafe sex, which he defined as unprotected anal intercourse. This is a response to what Bolton describes as ‘ill-intentioned or badly informed colleagues spreading rumours that I engage in unsafe sex in the field’ (Bolton, 1995, p. 163).

Tim Dean's 2009 text, Unlimited intimacy, is notable for discussing the barebacking sex phenomenon while openly revealing his own barebacking activity and his own approaches to personal risk management rather than projecting an apparent objective vision of identity. Dean goes much further than Bolton in revealing his own ‘unsafe sex’ behaviour in the field, although, like Bolton, the barriers between gay man enjoying a sexual encounter in San Francisco's Blow buddies and the researcher observing behaviour becomes blurred.

Davina Cooper's 2007 study of the Toronto Women's Bathhouse (TWB), or ‘Pussy Palace’, offers a contrasting perspective where Cooper, a self-identified lesbian, distances herself from the space she is surveying through 18 semi-structured interviews. She described her aim as: ‘to be attentive and respectful towards the meanings TWB had for participants, without necessarily being personally committed to the sexual agendas advocated’. Although this is a very different space from those surveyed by Bolton and Dean, we see an alternative approach by a queer researcher to surveying queer space and the construction of alternative identities in the field.

For an academic who has drawn upon the personal (see for example Cooper, 1994), this apparently ‘objective’ analysis may seem illusionary. Hammers and Brown (2004) noted the illusion of objectivity and, instead, advocated a postmodern approach, arguing that ‘such indeterminacy should not be uncomfortable’. It has also been noted that absolute objectivity is not necessarily a good thing in a researcher, with Williams (1993) commenting that his experience ‘suggests that those researchers who have personal motivations do better research’. This may take the form of the ‘activist’ researcher who is openly pursuing a political, social or cultural agenda (see for example Fish, 1999). The ‘activist’ identity attributes a ‘worthiness’ to the researcher identity that moves the identity beyond ‘sex’. Breen (1999) noted the presence of the female queer academic, like her male counterpart, remains ‘a token, a “pet” cock … academia's strap-on’. Although there has been a dramatic legal and social shift in sexual identities in western cultures, particularly European sexual cultures in the decade since Breen's assertion, many continue to occupy a precarious position within the academy.

These questions of identity for the researcher have been amplified by the Internet. Bargh et al. (2002) recognise that the Internet offers the opportunity for a range of identities to be explored but also talk of the ‘true’ self, arguing not only that the Internet allows an exploration of self but also that the true self can, following Rogers (1951) and Jung (1953), be distinguished from the ideal self or possible selves.

Moreover, McKenna et al. (2002) found that the Internet can be a way of sustaining ties with existing family, friends and networks and forging close and meaningful new relationships. This counters the popular idea of the isolated Internet geek or social pariah. It is also significant for the researcher seeking to move beyond the lurker role in cyberspace, for greater meaning may be attached to these ‘virtual’ relationships than the researcher may realise at first.

These issues of ‘virtual’ relationship formation may be of particular significance where this communication gives access to a group that would otherwise be less visible. One example of this is queer virtual space, which may offer important connections for those in traditionally isolated rural communities (see more generally Fellows, 1998) or who are exploring their more sexual selves (Ashford, 2006, 2007).

Stychin (1998) has argued that membership of queer space can be distinguished between ‘good gays’ and ‘bad queers’ (Stychin, 1998, p. 200) which may also be seen as the ‘straight'/' queer’ gay dichotomy. The straight gay is free to embrace all aspects of their identity except sex itself. Bain and Nash attribute this positioning of gays and lesbians as a result of the ‘rights-based politic’ (2007), and this rights-based discourse is perhaps evidenced in the recent legislative focus on ‘equality’ whether in the form of the Civil Partnership Act 2004 or the Equality Act 2006. These legislative developments have been underpinned by academic literature which has sought to explore issues of equality and legislation, for example, the state regulation of marriages and partnerships, access to service rights, hate crime protections and so on.

This has also been seen as a ‘homosexual agenda’, which is now being exported globally, although it is not necessarily embraced (Amirthalingam, 2009). While the academic discourse of the 1960s and 1970s was rich with literature that explored the sexually active queer, and sometimes the sexually active queer researcher, this contemporary discourse reflects only Stychin's ‘good gay’ or what might be termed, the ‘good gay academic’.

The ‘good gay academic’ may embark on snowball sampling as Harding and Peel did in their same sex relationship survey (2007). This may involve sending an email to friends, but those friends will be from their own pool of contacts and are therefore likely to reflect their own values.

While the sex researchers of the 1960s and 1970s presented the sexually active researcher, this rights based discourse marginalises the ‘bad queer’, the sexually promiscuous, and the researcher who participates in ‘sexually deviant’ behaviour. The dearth of literature by open BDSM practising academics has meant comparatively little academic literature opposing the recent ‘violent pornography’ ban, contained in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.

The Internet enables the identity of the researcher to be recast as a fluid, relentlessly shifting construct. Those researchers who maintain Facebook and other Web 2.0 accounts, project one self; another self may be projected on a dating or hook-up site, another in the classroom and a further self at a conference presentation. No single self can, or should, be regarded as ‘true’ in any absolute sense.

For King (1999), it is important that we are forthright, or at least acknowledge our own stance, and ‘it is another issue to deploy a stance as an act of resistance’. Queer theory does provide for such a resistance and, just as it can enable us to (de)construct the subject of study, so too can it (de)construct the person studying it. This fluidity of identity in cyberspace also extends to the ‘subject’ of study and the acts under examination.

Constructing sex in virtual environments

Sedgwick notes modern culture's blurring of ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’, with ‘sex’ including ‘the array of acts, expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledges’ (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 29). For Foucault (1998), these terms have distinct meanings, with sex representing the physical act that is a ‘family matter’ and sexuality representing individual desire and fantasies (Danaher et al., 2006, p. 135). Cyberspace may be seen as more of a forum for sexuality than sex; yet this Foucauldian dichotomy too is queered by cyberspace, with new fluid conceptions of ‘family’ brought forward and the personal individual desire becoming a family desire for however momentary a period.

Foucault's analysis of panoptic surveillance is also useful in the cyberspace context. Elmer (2003) noted that Foucault, drawing upon Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic prison plans, in which the few observe the many, have been inverted by the emergence of the Internet. Sex in the virtual environment may be discussed and engaged in by the minority but now the majority are able to look in, lurk, and observe the behaviours of these groups.

The virtual ethnographer may form one of ‘the many’ looking in upon a particular discussion board or reading an online profile but the way in which an individual is observing is more important than the mere act of observance in cyberspace. While users may increasingly realise that the illusion of anonymity is precisely that, an illusion, there are variable degrees of visibility within these spaces. For example, if a site requires registration and you appear in a list of ‘who's online’, then you are impacting upon the virtual space in a way that participation in a non-member area discussion board may not. In these spaces, the body may be displayed to a restricted group or a wider audience and this positioning may form part of the virtual display of sex.

For Sedgwick (1994, p. 8), queer can refer to ‘the open mesh of possibilities. Gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically.’ The environment of cyberspace enables a queering of ‘sex’ or ‘sexuality’ and as noted above, the Foucauldian dichotomy between the two becomes less helpful as the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ lives collide.

Cooper et al. (1999) describe the role of the Internet on ‘real life’ sex lives, for example as a way of seeking information on alternative sexual activities, for instance where one partner wishes to find out more information relating to the BDSM or leather scene before exploring it as part of their sex life. Tikkanen and Ross (2000) have noted the role of the gay chat room as a means of supporting ‘real world’ sexual encounters, and so, within the space of the virtual sex environment, the ‘virtual’ can shape a new reality, reflect the Foucauldian ‘sex’ or ‘sexuality’ and queer such categories.

The virtual sex environment is one specific forum in which cyber-sex and these cyber-sexualities can be explored.

Virtual sex environments

Sex environments, and their intersection with law, whether it be in the areas of sex work or non-commercial public sex that I have explored, or other sites such as bathhouses and phenomena such as barebacking, have been traditionally difficult to access and study. The Internet has offered a valuable new tool to explore these locations and it has also been an important tool for these groups in the creation of ‘new space’ (Coomber, 1997). Developing approaches to this e-research, and the observation of virtual environments, remains an area of rapid development as researchers develop and explore new approaches to this social phenomenon (DiMarco & DiMarco, 2003; Hamman, 1997; Kanayama, 2003; Livingstone, 2003; Ward, 1999).

Riggle et al. (2005) have pointed to the growing popularity of online surveys and the need for an examination of issues specific to conducting online research in relation to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans virtual communities. Although recent years have seen a number of online studies published that do examine specific LGBTQ issues (see for example Ashford, 2007, 2008, 2009), many of these surveys, including my own, often continue to operate within what I would term the ‘heteronoramative straightjacket’.

This ‘heteronormative straightjacket’ should be viewed in the light of Fine's (1993) work which pointed to a series of lies within ethnography that are widely disseminated in print, but known by ‘insiders’ to be false. Fine described these illusions as ‘essential to maintain an occupational reputation’. This may take the form of an absence of information rather than an outright lie but may be an element of the researcher that continues to be shielded from wider view. While Campbell's (2004) assertion that ‘I am less an academic gone native than a native gone academic’ is unusual in that it is in print, it is a statement that researchers may be more familiar with privately. The gay male academic who will use Gaydar or Craigslist in order to meet other men socially or sexually may appear ‘normal’ within the conference community but not within the published academic community. The queer academic almost goes through a process of castration as the words pass from an author's brain and on to the screen or page. Goode (1999) describes ‘thousands of ethnographers who have spent uncountable hours in close proximity with the people whose lives they shared and behaviour they observed, engaging in almost every imaginable activity with them, only a few dozen have had the courage to step forward and tell the world about their more intimate moments’.

Perhaps an earlier example of such can be found in John Alan Lee's 1978 text, Getting sex. The text sought to both explore and celebrate a range of sex locations from the disco and classified advert through to the bathhouse and tearoom/public lavatory, yet it was written with a degree of voyeuristic objectivity to the descriptions of the dynamics of the sex locations. As noted earlier, the later publication of Lee's diary online reveals his academic and personal lives and the inter-connectivity of the two.

Today's ‘cyber-ethnographies’ (Davis, 2009, p. 52) offer an opportunity to explore ‘sex’ and/or ‘sexuality’ at close quarters without engaging in corporeal acts of sex. Queering the body in cyberspace has become routinised and yet our responses to that and wider ‘cyber-ethnography’ issues remain under-explored.

Another such issue is the anonymity afforded by the Internet. Such anonymity may have been believed to enable users to create ‘false’ identities with perhaps the most extreme example being in the arena of inter-generational sex (Simpson, 2005) where people may lie about their age so as to enable them to interact with a group who would ordinarily reject them. More often though, the Internet is a medium of play through which identity can be explored (Turkle, 1995), or ‘queered’ beyond the bounds of the corporeal ‘reality’.

It is perhaps therefore, unsurprising that this anonymity can create dangers in terms of the accuracy of gathered data. Correll's (1995) study of bulletin boards was triangulated through follow up interviews on the phone or in person with many of her respondents but some respondents refused to take part in the follow up via either of these methods. There is a danger that such methods of triangulation, however well accepted by the research ‘community’, may be an attempt to force queer identity into orthodox moulds. ‘Truth’ in the virtual world is established by researchers through seeking to understand the ‘real’ or corporeal dimension to the space rather than appreciating the ‘truth(s)’ that may be grounded within the virtual space.

For the researcher, who may be constrained by their own ‘real world’ gendered or sexual identity (see for example, Berliner, 2008), the virtual space can offer an opportunity to queer their own identity, to create a ‘false’ identity or explore a dimension of their hidden self through the course of their research, yet this may be falsely viewed as ‘masking’ or a ‘smoke screen’ rather than an identity of equal ‘value’ or ‘worth’. Nor is the research limited by ‘real world’ assumptions and definitions of gender and/or sexuality.

The Internet also offers a range of advantages for the researcher in terms of the ‘intimacy’ of the Internet environment (McKenna et al., 2002) and the greater self-disclosure given to strangers outside one's own social circle (Derlega & Chaikin, 1977). This perhaps reflects the ‘liberation’ that can be found in overcoming the bounds of the corporeal and the perceived ‘safety’ that such an apparent separation of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ identities may allow.

This space also offers an opportunity to overcome ‘gating features’ that may be present in the physical space, whether it be on the basis of appearance, visible shyness or social anxiety (McKenna et al., 2002), although virtual sex communities, threatened by the intrusion of the legal ‘real’ world are developing online strategies to ensure that only perceived ‘true’ members of a community, for example, the dogging/public sex community, can discover more sensitive information such as the corporeal identities of online users or the location of the corporeal meeting space.

These virtual sex environments also afford an ease with which to seek out and find those with similar interests and desires or indeed those interested in knowing about people's interests and desires. The use of these spaces by the police and other parties beyond the traditional player is arguably distorting the operation of the space. The presence of these lurkers creates challenges for the researcher in considering the precise nature of their impact on the active participants (Lindlof & Shatzer, 1998) and wider notions of privacy (see more generally Fenwick, 2000; McCullagh, 2008; O'Brien, 2008). The policing of some legal phenomena has already resulted in the use of websites as sites of surveillance for law enforcement officials where groups might otherwise be hidden (Ashford, 2007).

Ethics and virtual sex

Bolton re-states the four ‘fundamental principles’ of assessing ‘ethical’ research: freedom from coercion; protection from psychological or physical harm; the risk-benefit principle; respect for persons and informed consent (Bolton, 1995, pp. 153–156). These ‘principles’ are arguably totemic for those bodies that govern research ethics, both inside and outside individual higher education institutions. Yet, such principles remain rooted in liberal conceptions of harm and consent, creating challenges for the postmodern, feminist and queer researcher who may be seeking to challenge those very assumptions, rendering research that combines these theories with ethnographic or qualitative research less common.

Exploring these sex environments can present some significant challenges for researchers examining socio-legal issues (see for example Sanders, 2006). Nosek et al. (2002) noted that the Internet offers the opportunity to study individuals and groups within a ‘naturalistic setting without the presence of an intrusive researcher’. This is in contrast to covert, ‘real world’, ethnography in which the presence of the ethnographer may be prohibited by ethics committees in a bid to ‘protect’ the group or ‘subject’ under surveillance. This may, however, have the opposite effect and keep harms, injustices and phenomena hidden from view (Pearson, 2009). Nosek et al. (2002) also noted the need for new modes of ethics around e-research. These focused on informed consent, protection of children and protecting participants, and in doing so, reflect existing ethics frameworks designed for the corporeal world, in the same way as the ‘fundamental principles’ restated by Bolton.

Stern (2003) argues that more dialogue is needed among researchers on the subject of encountering ‘distressing information’. Stern defines this specifically as ‘disclosure indicating that online communicants are considering harming themselves or others’. Stern sets out a scenario that fictionalises similar events to the Columbine massacre but these notions of distressing information can and should perhaps be considered in relation to the more ‘grey’ areas of Internet research. In other words, if we knew a ‘greater’ harm was about to be conducted in the corporeal ‘real’ world, would that justify inflicting ‘harm’ upon the ‘virtual’ self?

Stern's Columbine scenario brings into focus the role of the non-participant observation. The ethics of observation through the Internet remains unresolved (Sanders, 2005), with a range of competing views that vary between an application of ‘traditional’ ethnographic methods and new approaches to Internet methods.

Denzin (1999) did not seek the permission of posters to one bulletin board in order to quote them after operating as passive lurking observer and Viegas (2005) has noted that, in the blogging community, there is an understanding that the posts form part of the public domain (see also Ward, 1999). Some sex based websites do have specific warnings about the media or researchers and incorporate an exclusion into their terms of service agreement of such groups. Other sites are open to the entire world to view, others partially open with membership (on payment or otherwise) to access full features and other sites fully membership based. All the sites used in the course of my investigation of public sex environments were available to all; however the ability to search, notably in the Gaydar study (Ashford, 2009), did require membership to gain full search functionality. That site includes a clause within its terms and conditions of membership requiring members to not: ‘say or do anything that would cause annoyance, inconvenience, harassment or needless anxiety to others’.

Our use of each site is a negotiation of identities but this also suggests a need for a ‘single user identity’. If we are using a site such as Gaydar for personal use and happen to stumble upon a useful event/information for our research should we discount it? When identities blur, who are we in this virtual space?

For Sharf (1999) and Murthy (2008), the virtual ethnographer or researcher should be guided by two questions; first, the potential harms that may be caused and secondly, the benefits, for example the ‘legitimization of the group’. Legitimisation may of course be a harm dependent upon one's own perspective and even this supposedly simple starting point on virtual ethics is fraught with difficulties, particularly for queer scholars.

Detailed frameworks for ‘virtual ethics’ do exist. The most frequently requested document of the Association of Internet Researchers is their 2002 statement on ethical decision-making in Internet research. This document sets out in some detail some of the questions that it considers important for researchers to ask themselves in undertaking ‘ethical’ Internet research.

While academics have been vigorously engaged in these debates, journalists have not. Along with the police and other agencies, public sex postings in particular have been observed and published in the UK and North America (see Ashford, 2007). Local newspapers can quickly create storms of protest around particular beauty spots, recreational spaces and tourist traps as sites that also host illicit sexual activity. This has already led to many individuals engaged in the practice of dogging refusing to publish details of specific locations on listings boards for fear that they will suffer from increased police attention or be ‘swamped’ by men. Although a similar awareness of being observed is evident on cruising and cottaging spaces, listings continue to be posted, at least for now. Interestingly, a similar pattern does not yet appear to have emerged in relation to sex workers online, although sex worker bloggers on both sides of the Atlantic have been ‘revealed’.

These journalism stories highlight the dangers of listing specific locations in our research, but the revelation of the voluminous nature of these locations could have acted as a catalyst of ‘legitimisation’; a recognition that these activities are more common than people may expect, are not just engaged in by the fringes of society and, in an echo of gay and lesbian activism, provide evidence that ‘we are everywhere’. Although there is clearly evidence of an awareness of being observed, to further that awareness by revealing one's own presence to the virtual community may further distort that space (Sanders, 2005).

Queering the field

Markham (1998, p. 120) has described the ‘reality’ of this ‘virtual’ environment as: ‘real becomes a double negative; simply put, when experiences are experienced, they cannot be “not real”’. This is significant for the virtual ethnographer or virtual researcher who may believe that their virtual self is a mere virtual construction and less ‘real’ than their real world constructed self. Yet, each is merely a different construction with different values ascribed to them by ourselves. If we so view our virtual self as less real in some way, it is perfectly possible to consider virtual deviant behaviour to be less of a taboo. For example, an individual in a monogamous relationship may consider themselves loyal to their partner, but would a partner consider their regular sexual activities with a string of strangers through chat rooms or avatar programmes such as Second Life as something that breaks that contract of monogamy?

Just such a situation was catapulted into the world media in November 2008 when the story of David and Amy Taylor was revealed. The couple divided their lives between two separate homes in Newquay, England, and a virtual life led through their avatars in cyberspace. They had originally met in an Internet chat room and both came to extensively use the avatar-based programme Second Life (SL). In SL, Taylor became a club DJ and Pollard a nightclub owner. In ‘real life’, both were ‘unemployed and obese’, making the juxtaposition with their ‘virtual’ slim and successful lives an apparently ready source for media satirisation (see Green, 2008; Morris, 2008; Salkeld, 2008). When Taylor discovered her husband avatar was having an affair with a sex worker in Second Life, she decided to end their real life marriage. Such was the real world shyness of the couple that reporters were forced to enter Second Life to talk to the virtual alter egos of the couple. This development in the couple's virtual life represented a major impact on their real lives. As one report commented, ‘this was no virtual quickie’ (Leith, 2008).

This scenario represented a clash of values, between two constructions of the self. Identity itself becomes queered, (de)constructed and re-defined by sexual desire or the appearance of sexual desire. Queer theory perceives identity as fluid constructions rather than fixed notions of the self that may be ‘masked’ or hidden behind smoke screens.

Such fluidity of identity creates a non-determinality of self and a concomitant unease for our society and its singular construction of self. Butler (1993, p. 230) has argued that unease about the fluidity of queer is unnecessary, and that queer may take on new meanings that may not now be anticipated:

That [queer] can become such a discursive site whose uses are not fully constrained in advance ought to be safeguarded not only for the purposes of continuing to democratize queer politics, but also to expose, affirm, and rework the specific historicity of the term.

In seeking to consider queer in the course of online research, we must therefore accept not only the fluidity of ‘reality’ that queer presents, but queer's very fluidity as an idea at any given point in time.

Kemp (2009) notes that, in a sense, ‘there is nothing new about queer’, commenting that as long as the ‘homosexual’ has existed as an entity, questions as to what an identity is have followed. While this may be a fair observation, queer offers us an opportunity to move beyond notions of sexuality and sex, beyond a feeling and act dichotomy. It is a theory that may or may not possess boundaries, to be defined or otherwise by the future, or indeed, the past. Such is its uncertainty that there are those who dismiss the value of queer. Such is the power of this uncertainty, however, that we can also gain new and exciting insights.

As Phillips and Cunningham (2007, p. 35) have noted, the unrealisability of cyberspace is ‘part of the queer ideal. Identity positions are always to be contingent, adaptable, strategic’. This in turn raises significant questions about the orthodoxy of triangulation for instance. Law (2004) has also noted that we must move beyond ‘certainty’ in our research, recognising the textured nature of the world (see also Davies & Dwyer, 2007). This once again highlights a clash between seeking to transpose the perceived ‘truths’ of the corporeal world on to the ‘virtual’ one.

Kibby and Costello (2001) have also noted that the use of these technologies ‘allows for the possibility of rewriting gendered codes of sexuality, in that it blurs the distinction between the subject and the object, the consumer and the consumed, the image and the act’. While it is recognised that this offers the possibility for a radical potential for the construction of gender and sexuality (Attwood, 2009), the role of this technology for a radical reconstruction of the researcher is less often explored.

Holliday's (1999) video diary studies from a number of people in ‘queer communities’ captured a range of performativities and recognised a range of subcultural constructions of the self. Nonetheless, this continued to be analysed by Holliday in terms of identities formed in different times and spaces, what she called ‘work, rest and play’, concepts that only have meaning within the corporeal ‘reality’. For researchers seeking to find meaning, answers and certainties, it appears necessary to impose the corporeal on to the virtual.

In contrast, Magnet (2007) noted the way in which one website queered the identity of women constructing female identity so as to ‘alter oppressive photographic practices which rely on the objectification of women for the male gaze’, and, in doing so, moved the construction of the female identity beyond the bounds of the corporeal. Despite these contrasting positions, seeking a single view of a queer methodology that can be advanced and applied is an impossible task.

Warner (2004) agrees, suggesting that ‘there can be no one queer research methodology, but many methodologies’. Despite this, he also sets out a series of heuristics for which a queer methodology should account. These ‘guidelines’ include: queer research methodology should be reflexively aware of the way it constitutes the object it investigates; that it must qualitatively account for its object of inquiry; remembering research is based on the good faith submission of queer individuals; and finally to abandon ‘the Quixotic search for an aetiology of homosexuality’. Although these principles make an interesting starting point, they are not without flaws. Warner's first assertion is perhaps the most pertinent to an assessment of queering online fields/ethnographies. As noted earlier, in encountering the legal phenomena of sex work or virtual public sex spaces, our own notions of the self become (de)constructed. In entering the virtual space, we are as much a silent lurker, viewing and evaluating data like other virtual users. Our analysis is conducted through our own prisms of enquiry as anyone else's. Yet, as academics, we often continue to construct distinctions between the various identities we may inhabit in the course of our research.

Warner's second assertion that only qualitative research is appropriate for the ‘queer subject’ is much more problematic. Quoting Kidder and Fine (1997), Warner argues that it is ‘not simply that they are “not numbers”, but that they are analysed with an eye on pre-determined categories and hypotheses’. Yet, just as our quantitative categories are pre-determined, so too are the images that the eyes may view. In the same way that after working on a piece of writing for many months we need a ‘fresh set of eyes’ to spot our own errors and typographic mistakes, so too do we become pre-determined in our viewing of data, qualitative or otherwise.

The third assertion by Warner, that research is based on the good faith of the queer community, is perhaps noble but again problematic. If we are surveying a discussion board involving those discussing criminal activity, do we owe the same good faith to that group as we would a ‘legal’ group? Would we distinguish between one site supporting illegal sex work and another supporting illegal inter-generational sex?

Warner's final aim, ending the ‘Quixotic search for the aetiology of homosexuality’ is however, perhaps an appropriate one to hold. Homo or hetero identities in cyberspace are more evidently fluid than in the corporeal ‘reality’. Nonetheless, our experience in cyberspace can reshape our imagination(s) relating to sex and/or sexuality. It could equally, and perhaps should, queer our own approach to research.

It is by queering the field that we can recognise the ‘ethnographic unknowability’ of the subjects (Talburt, 1999) and challenge binary constructions of the self and notions of the knowable self.

Conclusion

In the place of academics have come the queer journalists and writers who remain fully in possession of their metaphorical genitals. Award winning journalist and broadcaster Joseph Couture romps his way around a series of public sex venues in his 2008 text Peek: Inside the private world of public sex, but you won't find a single academic reference within its 204 pages beyond the forward by Gary Kinsman. Although less personal than Lee's Getting sex (1978), it has the feel of another age in the context of modern academic sex writing.

Time Dean's Unlimited intimacy: Reflections on the subculture of barebacking, discussed earlier, is a rare example of an academic still in possession of his metaphorical genitals and we read how Dean uses them in a range of virtual and corporeal spaces. This sort of text remains the exception rather than the norm, although its reference to ‘virtual’ spaces and the use of technology to commission sexual acts is perhaps a little more common.

Technology heightens our awareness of the fluidity of identity as never before. Attempts to triangulate identity between the ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ serve only to minimise the importance of the queer self. As we saw with David and Amy Taylor and their Second Life ‘divorce’, ‘virtual’ lives can hold equal, if not greater, value for individuals as a means of expressing a version of the self that they highly value.

Like other researchers who have raised some of these questions (see Browne, 2008), I recognise the value of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans research, but I also recognise the potential for queer to transform both how we see our subjects and ourselves. Even this dichotomy, between the research subject and our self(s) is arguably a false one, with technology enabling us to consider socio-legal phenomena through a fluid concept of the self.

The virtual sex environment readily displays the fluid self and queer offers us a useful tool to further explore these new emerging selves. This in turn should pose new questions for the academy and its organs of ethical control.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Karen Hadley and the two anonymous referees for comments on earlier drafts. I would also like to express my thanks to participants at the Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Conference at De Montfort University, Leicester in April 2009 for their comments on an earlier paper. All errors and omissions remain my own.