Shuttling Between Worlds: Quandaries of Performing Queered Research in Asian American Contexts

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the tensions that grow out of being a researcher in my community of queer Asian Americans lead to the formulation of a different kind of ethnographic approach. A hybrid notion of identity can require and inform a hybrid or poststructural ethnographic practice. This hybridized research method draws upon theoretical strands from queer theory, discourse analysis, and feminist psychoanalysis. This author highlights some thorny and contradictory challenges for queer researchers doing work in their own communities. The article concludes with an approach to the writing of research data and analyses that attempts to undercut coherent realist representations in an effort to make visible the contradictions, gaps, and inconsistencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian Americans
• ethnography
• hybrid methods
• poststructural research
• queer theory
• research methodology

Joan Ariki Varney received her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Race, Class and Gender Studies in Curriculum Theory. She is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. She thanks Elizabeth Ellsworth for her dedicated support and commitment throughout the research and writing process ([email protected])

Notes

1. I use “queer” here as an overarching elastic term that includes gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning sexual identifications.