“I’m on the hunt, I’m after you / Mouth is alive, with juices like wine / And I’m hungry like the wolf” Duran Duran – Hungry Like The Wolf (1981)

I’ve had some initial thoughts on the concept of being a researcher which I’d like to explore here: please forgive any ramblings. The title or label or identity of researcher sits uncomfortably with me for a few reasons—as I begin considering my thesis topics and methodologies for my PhD, the classist implications that being a researcher carries, the colonial power held by a researcher exploring the unknown, the underlying Christian enlightenment values in white saviourism, feels counterintuitive to the kind of work I want to do. But what intrigues me, in the dichotomy formed between researcher and researched, are the underlying queer(ed) sensibilities in the processes of research.

What does it mean to call oneself a researcher? Movements to address hierarchical imbalances in colonial, extractive, patriarchal research has resulted in a more reflexive and co-creative process whereby researchers work alongside, or with, their research participants to understand new perspectives. But I can’t help notice that to be a researcher necessarily implies that there are subjects that must be researched (just as the Occident necessarily depends upon the orient, the White on the black, the Man on the woman, the Straight on the queer)^[1]. The distinction and striation between an Other informs the hierarchy of knowledge creation, the hierarchy of ‘those over there that must be understood’. Ahmed states that “concepts reveal themselves as things to think “with” when they fail to be translated into being or action” (2006: 6). In this sense, then, the concept of researching with fails to translate into an anti-patriarchal and colonial renewal in research. Being a researcher orients us in a particular direction, pulls certain things into view and obscures certain other qualities, processes, knowledges^[2]. The power of the categorisation implies and infers a perversion of the Other, the foreign, the alien, the anarchic, the wayward^[3], the queer.

It should not be all too surprising that the etymology of the word ‘research’ traces back to the 16^th century French rechercher – to go about seeking, to search. To research is to find things, to look out for things, to explore the vast landscapes of knowledges, to (re)comprehend the ideas we share and question them for new understandings. To re-search for perspectives we supposedly must reach out, go somewhere un- or under- explored, reach those people and those perspectives that have been missed. In short, we seek. These same discourses replicate themselves in everyday discussions about sex and sexualities—to go on the prowl, to pick up, to pull. If someone says ‘tonight we’re going to get laid’ they infer a process of travel, of locating, and of obtaining. Within cultural discourses, to be queer is to be perverse, overly sexual(ised), a threat to health, a threat to the family, a threat to gender norms, sexual norms, animalistic. Gay and trans people continue to be spoken of as threats to children, bisexual men a threat to women’s health^[4], bisexual women as threats to their own health. Searching and seeking, finding and bringing, hunting and feasting. These significations are not drawn in the same way for heterosexual people and heterosexual sex, and Duran Duran’s lyrics above are a good example of this. In this discourse, the Man seek the woman like an animal seeking prey, quenching thirst or appeasing hunger—hungry like the wolf. Here the Man is actively searching, locating, finding the scent, hunting, while the woman is passively not searching, unaware, tame. The man/animal made masculine, the woman/prey made effeminate. The man can feast on its target as an unspoken logic and normality. And what about queering this perspective—men seeking men? Two animals hunting, searching, sniffing at each other—such danger, such testosterone involved in the messiness of lovemaking.

I can see the dichotomy of researcher and researched bound through understandings of the enigma that is so entrenched in heterosexual discourse. Just as the White researcher goes to live with the ‘savage’ to learn their ways, John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women from Venus (1992) embodies the discourses that opposite sexes are so incompatible that they require support in cracking each other’s codes. The Man needs the tools and the language, they must learn the ways of the Other, to crack the enigma—be that to have sex or live a ‘successful’ heteronormative monogamous marriage. The enigma of homosexualities become apparent too—the behaviours of irrationality and unnaturalness in the eyes of fundamentalist movements. Sex with the same sex becomes unimaginable, an enigma that must be studied, observed, located in the physiology of the human to understand (and perhaps extract) the so-called ‘gay gene’ as Other from the normative ways of being. Eradicating the wrong enigma (of homosexual acts) to allow for the right enigma (the binary sexes as opposite, essentially alien beings). These binary discourses creep into researching, the researcher doing the work of cracking the enigma, adequately understanding so as to replicate their researched accurately.

Researchers and academia have discussed queering research, research processes, data gathering, knowledge creation, and so on at length, and yet it seems that few have wanted to explore the potential implicit discourses bound up in and through concepts of research for queerness. It might sound as though I am complicating processes of research like insider/outsider: I am not trying to suggest that researching as an outsider is impossible or not beneficial, nor am I suggesting that the process of knowledge (re)production and sharing (I guess known as research) should not happen. Rather, I am trying to complicate how, in our understandings of these processes through historical discourses, languages, and practice, we necessarily embed an inherent binary, an inherent hierarchy, in need of subversing, orienting away from, queering, dismantling.

The language we use seems to be not fit for purpose. I do not like calling myself a researcher any more than I like calling people I work with as subjects or ‘the researched’^[5]. Practices to reimagine how research is (co)created have made significant efforts to reduce (in as much as is possible in the current research climate) hierarchical knowledge creation, prefiguring how research can be conducted to limit extractive, detached, empirical efforts. But I am confident that if we are to strive and prefigure new ways of co-producing knowledge that delimits hierarchy, encourages pluralism, and truly decolonises epistemologies (as I believe it can only do), it has to be done alongside a necessary reconceptualisation of the language used. I have seen some use concepts like ‘research assemblages’ as a way to recognise the interconnected nature of knowledge production, but it can’t seem to get around or move away from or escape the hungry wolf.

I don’t have any answers yet for how we might begin this reimagining, but I’m sure there is more to explore here. I also don’t expect an answer to necessarily come from the West either. A new concept might radically shift understandings of knowing, and with it change how we talk about things like knowledge (co)production and exchange: a move that would likely sit uncomfortably with the currently comfortable Academe. 

^[1] The labels of ‘Orient’, Black and queer and purposely non-capitalised in comparison to the Western hegemonic understanding of such constructed inverses as more superior, greater in value and quantity. See Said, 1978

^[2] See Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006)

^[3] Here I am borrowing the phrase from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2021)

^[4] During the AIDS epidemic, moral panics were created around bisexual men for ‘bringing’ HIV to the heterosexual populations (Eisner, 2013)

^[5] Even here I fall into my own argument employing with, demonstrating the difficulty in considering any other way of expressing projects as research with or on.