Messing up research: A dialogical account of gender, reflexivity and governance in auto-ethnography

This paper aims to contribute to a growing critical and reflexive awareness of the implications of gendered assumptions about ontology, epistemology and ethics in academic research governance and practice. It provides a retrospective account of the authors’ shared experiences of an autoethnographic study of lap dancing clubs, focusing on critical or ‘sticky moments’ (Riach, 2009) encountered, and considering the implications of these for research more widely. It does so by highlighting the gendered power relations shaping academic research, showing how Judith Butler’s (1990/2000) critique of the heterosexual matrix can be applied to a critical, reflexive understanding of the impact of binary, hierarchical gender power relations. The analysis provides insight into some of the ways in which autoethnographic research on sexualised work may become messy, dirty and sticky in ways that accentuate power inequalities, but which also open up moments of opportunity for gender binaries and hierarchies to be revealed, challenged and resisted. Using a Butlerian lens to reflect on our experiences, we contribute to understanding how heteronormative assumptions shape perceptions of what makes ‘good’, ‘clean’ and ethically (formally) approved of research that conforms to the governmental norms of the heterosexual matrix, and by implication, those contaminating forms of research that disrupt or resist its disciplinary effects. As ethnographic research is often messy by its very nature, and particularly so when situated within sex/sexualised work, we aim to show how gendered assumptions can inhibit reflexivity in academic knowledge production, resulting in research processes that are (paradoxically) unethical. In response, we suggest three ways in which gender reflexive research might be pursued, by: (i) identifying gendered assumptions reflexively and dialogically, (ii) adopting an anti-essentialist approach that foregrounds experiential, embodied knowledge, and (iii) developing an anti-hierarchical methodology. We do so in the hope of opening up ways that might enable others to avoid heteronormative assumptions having potentially detrimental consequences for their research, and to offer a starting point for developing gender reflexive knowledge production in the future.