Being and Doing LGBTQ+ Research
By Rosie Nelson, Lecturer in Gender at the University of Bristol
Over the years, I have spoken to many different researchers about what they choose to research. Within the social sciences, in particular, it is quite common to see someone researching a topic that is personally important to them. That tendency has been reflected in my own research career to date, where I have spent a lot of time studying bisexuality[1]. This was something I wanted to research because I am bisexual, and I wanted to understand if people experienced similar or different barriers in their own lived experience of being bisexual. However, in embarking in this research, I was naively surprised at how much I would be impacted by researching a very central part of my own identity.
When completing qualitative research, it is important that the researcher reflects on their own identity, biases, and beliefs throughout the research process. Consequently, in studying bisexuality, it was important that I interrogated the different beliefs I had regarding what it meant to be bisexual. This level of self-reflection was both incredibly challenging, and incredibly uplifting, and I chose to detail this experience in a recent article Questioning Identities/Shifting Identities: The Impact of Researching Sex and Gender on a Researcher’s LGBT+ Identity.
Primarily, throughout the research process I often felt euphoric because I was talking to people who understood me, who were similar to me, and who had experienced common things to me. At that point in my life, I did not know many bisexual people, and the fieldwork was an amazing opportunity to hear about a diverse range of bisexual experiences. However, this opened up the door to an interesting dynamic with participants, who would sometimes ask me for flirting tips, or where they might find more support relating to their own bisexual identities. Sometimes, participants chose to ask me about my own identity, which led to me confessing things I had never spoken about before – such as my insecure relationship to womanhood.
A difficult part of the research was when I heard the difficult and sensitive stories of other people, sometimes relating to their difficulties in ‘coming out’ and sometimes related to sexual trauma. This had the effect of making me think of the difficult things that had happened in my own journey to being proudly bisexual, and feeling a little helpless at the continuous struggles that people needed to engage with in their own approach to feeling good about their sexualities. There were also some things that people discussed that I could not understand fully – experiences of gender-based discrimination, classism, racism, and more. The inability to understand the complexity of some of these experiences was both frustrating, because I thought I would understand wholly the experience of being bisexual, but also enlightening in terms of recognising intersecting systems of oppression.
Perhaps the most significant impact of this research was the fact that it changed my gender identity. I had started the project identifying as a cis woman, and concluded it as a non binary person. Whilst I am still exploring the limits of this identity, and how it fits in with my expression and identity, this has persisted past the point of the PhD. Whilst I may have reached this point without the research process, it’s certain that the research was a catalyst that made it happen sooner rather than later.
In my experience, researching something so close to my heart required a huge emotional investment, and took its toll at various points. Consequently, I recommend having a supportive researcher peer group, working closely with supervisors/line managers, making the most of field diaries, and trying to create a small degree of emotional distance from the research itself. Being/doing LGBT+ research is difficult, but is the most rewarding project I’ve completed to date.
[1] Terminology is difficult here. Here, I am using bisexuality as an umbrella term to include other multigender attracted identities, including pansexuality, queer people, and others. There are differences between these identities which are significant, but it is beyond the scope of this blog to go into this.
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