A Personal Reflection on Negotiating Fear, Compassion and Self-Care in Research

Abstract

With this paper, I discuss the unexpected, the corporeal and the emotional. I attend not only to the issues of fear and integrity in research of the ex-gay movement in North America, but also to related issues of compassion, self-care and violence. I explore my commitment to communicate empathically with and think compassionately about a group of people who are politically and ideologically quite different from me. In the process of shifting my approach, I began to doubt my ability to write critically about the topics at hand. I faced significant cognitive dissonance as I shared moments of celebration with people who had found relief in the movement. Finally, as I internalized the thousands of pages of ex-gay literature, the dozens of face-to-face interviews and the countless email and instant message exchanges, I began to seriously ponder the violence I had done to myself in the name of research.

Keywords:

• Emotional risk
• qualitative methodology
• social movements
• ex-gay
• ethics

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Avery Brooks Thompkins, Allison Huber, Jennifer Dunn, Robert Benford, Kevin Gillan and anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback at various stages of the writing of this essay.