How We Do the Work Is the Work: Building an Intersectional Queer Praxis for Critical Feminist Scholarship

Slowing Down

Current writing on Slow scholarship focuses primarily on slowing down as resistance/pushing back on the drive for productivity and efficiency within a fast-paced neoliberal university context (see for example Mountz et al., 2015; Shahjahan, 2015; Ulmer, 2017). Slowing down our pace then makes more time for the process, reflection, dialog, and relationships, which is also consistent with feminist and other critical epistemologies that emphasize collectivism and relationality as ways of knowing (Lawson, 2007; Mountz et al., 2015; Shahjahan, 2015). Slowing down also allows time for delays in the research process that may emerge due to personal needs, community dynamics, or other unexpected circumstances. Slowing down accounts for different ways of processing information, access needs, and natural paces of work among a team and also supports the well-being of academics and the valuing of different types of labor (Mountz et al., 2015).

Slowing down is an antidote to the sense of “urgency” that is often promoted in academic institutions and that has been noted by Tema Okun et al. (n.d.) as a characteristic of White Supremacy Culture. This urgency and relationship to time are also based on Western, dominant culture conceptualizations of time (see Smith, 2012). It is important to remember that this sense of urgency is socially constructed but also rewarded in our institutions and systems. Slowing down is an act of resistance to neoliberal norms and the false sense of urgency that has been institutionally created and allows for a regrounding in one's own priorities and values.

Slow scholarship attends not only to pace but also to the duration of a project. For example, one recent project that I worked on with a group of colleagues took us over five years as it grew iteratively and organically and in tandem with each of our capacities, lives, and needs. This project focused on how macro forces of professionalization, neoliberalism, and criminalization impact domestic violence advocacy training. adrienne maree brown (2017) in her principles of emergent strategy calls on us to “move at the speed of trust” (p. 42). Similar to the principles of Slow scholarship, in this formulation, there is space for iterating ideas and processes as well as attending to relationships and connections. How fast you can move on a project is determined by how much trust you have in yourself and others. In this project I mentioned, we had a highly collaborative five-person research team, and upon reflection on our process, we articulated that we moved at the speed of trust in the integrity of our ideas. Working with an ethos of slow scholarship in this project allowed for a more generative process, deeper engagement with ideas, better ability to navigate complexities in the research (both in regard to process and findings), greater respect for how our diverse institutional and social positionalities impacted our work, and stronger collaboration overall.

Similarly, I am now working on a small project with two other queer people—all of us at different stages of our academic trajectories. We started this project at the beginning of the pandemic as we were interested in exploring the published literature on queer and trans identity and experience and social work education. We have been in an incredibly slow process—building relationships with each other, navigating dynamics of institutional power and positionality and also iterating our ideas and process. We also had to slow down our pace because of the realities of institutional demands and pandemic circumstances. In this project, we started by acknowledging that we were not on a fixed timeline and that the study itself would be emergent and iterative given that it is a new area of work and methodology for some of us on the research team. It has required patience and flexibility from us all individually to hold this process as a team but also we are moving at the speed of trust in each other and in the integrity of our ideas. As a result, our process has allowed greater space for learning and mentorship, ability to grapple with tensions in a more meaningful way, and a sense of care for one another as whole people during a very difficult time period.

Related to brown's concept of moving at the speed of trust, the current moment and the times we have been living in also have necessitated a slowing down. The past few years have been full of disruptions—collective trauma, loss, and various levels of change and upheaval. Institutions that we are a part of have been continuing business as usual for the most part, demonstrating the primacy of capitalism and the corporate nature of the University. However, the need at this time has been to slow down—to allow for processing, rest, and reflection and also to be able to respond in a meaningful way to the crises that are continuously unfolding. During this time, I have seen slowing down and resting as an act of resistance and also necessary to be able to sustain the work.

In his blog, Bayo Akomolafe, notes an African proverb that says: “The times are urgent; let us slow down.” He goes on to name that in our constant state of rushing, we often lose sight of the abundance of resources that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises (Akomolafe, n.d.). We rush into our familiar patterns, reactions, and responses. Slowing down allows us to deliberate and generate new ideas to respond to our given context. I would further assert that the call to slow down gives us the opportunity to practice new ways of being and doing in relation to our political commitments and the urgency of our times.

Queer Time

The last piece I want to offer in regard to reimagining time is the idea of queer time and the ways that as queer people, we already have varied and often non-normative relationships to time. Queer theorists have talked about the concept of queer time—and specifically the ways that queer time and space develop in opposition to normative life markers such as marriage or even identity development. Our queer lives have the potential to disrupt time-normativity, even sometimes from young age. Halberstam (2005) writes that queerness allows for alternative relations to time and space and that queerness itself is “an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules” and that queer “refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time” (p. 4). Jaffe (2018) expands on this by noting that queer times are inflected by “time-warping experiences as diverse as coming out, gender transitions, and generation-defining tragedies such as the AIDS epidemic. That is, queerness is constituted by its difference from conventional imperatives of time.”

In addition to these notions of queer time, if we think more specifically about the realities facing queer and trans people of color, particularly Black and Latina trans women, and queer and trans youth, many of us face the deep feeling that we are destined for premature death or that we may not live the length of the typical lifespan. How does this then impact how we think about time?

I would offer that queer time is generative, relational, multidimensional rather than linear and chronological. To consider queer time as part of how we reimagine time has the potential to impact our scholarship and our praxis.

In the spirit of slowing down and building reflection on how we do our work, I would like to invite a pause to consider some of the ideas presented thus far. I invite you to do a brief free write on the questions I’ve posed here or anything that is coming up for you in our time together so far. I suggest you give yourself at least a few minutes but feel free to take as much time as you want or need.

What would it feel like to slow down in the context of the neoliberal and white supremacist University that insists on productivity and a sense of urgency?

Embodiment

Nancy Krieger, public health scholar who has written extensively about the concept of embodiment also offers that the body tells stories (2005). Specifically, she writes that the concept of embodiment furthers three claims: (1) Bodies tell stories about and cannot be studied separately from the conditions of our existence; (2) Bodies tell stories that often but not always match people's stated accounts; (3) Bodies tell stories that people cannot or will not tell either because they are unable, forbidden or choose not to tell (Krieger, 2005). Indigenous scholars have as also offered important wisdom and scholarship about how bodies tell community-specific stories of individual and collective experiences including historical trauma (see for example Fernandez et al., 2021; Walters et al., 2011). In addition, critical disability scholars can offer a deeper understanding of the epistemology of embodiment and the potential to know in and through the body in different ways (Flynn, 2021).

As queer people, we often have complicated relationships with our bodies and embodiment. This is even more true for those who are queer women, BIPOC, fat, trans, living with disabilities, aging—our embodiment can feel dangerous, euphoric, dissonant, and thrilling at different times and in different spaces. In the queer praxis that I am suggesting, I assume that our queer and trans bodies that exist in relationship to other identities and contexts, tell stories and, ultimately, can inform our work in important ways.

In addition to embodiment making visible different ways of knowing and telling stories, attention to the body is also needed in queer praxis because of the ways our queer and gendered bodies occupy space in physical environments. The existence of our raced, gendered, sexualized bodies in the institutions we inhabit can be radical, disruptive, and even dangerous acts. In my first job out of grad school, I spent two years in a very culturally homogenous environment. As a fat, queer, middle-aged, South Asian femme, navigating embodiment in this physical environment, the classroom, and even in the larger community was a constant source of stress and questions for me. I know that many of my students had literally never seen anyone who looked like me before. On the best days, it felt like just physically existing in this context was an act of resistance; and, on the worst day, it felt unsafe to be in my body. The existence of my body in that space felt transgressive. There is no question that my body held wisdom and information and told a story that was important in that time and place.

In the spirit of attending to embodiment, I’d like to offer a grounding exercise.

If you’d like to join, I will invite you to get into a comfortable position. Notice where your body is making contact with a surface—this might be your seat on a chair, your feet on the ground—and come into your breath. Just notice what is going on w/your breath—you don‘t need to change it, but just pay attention—is it shallow, deep, fast, slow? Now I invite you to intentionally deepen your breath and take 3 deep cleansing breaths. Before opening your eyes, I want you to tune in to what is going on with your body—how does your body feel? What do you need? Is there something you can do to support your body right now? Whenever you feel ready, you can slowly open your eyes. As you come back into the room, take another 30 seconds to do something for your body—whatever you may need—a stretch break, drinking some water, or whatever else your body may be asking for.

Emotion and Grief

Slow scholarship also invites us to make space for the affective realities we are facing as part of the research process, including making space for emotion. Similar to embodiment opening up different ways of knowing, I concur with Widdowfield (2000) that “emotions have an important bearing on both how and what we know” (p. 199). Feminist scholars and activists have also called for less of a split between intellect and emotion. Though the queer praxis I am proposing calls on us to make room for all emotions in the research process, for the purposes of our conversation today, I will focus on grief as an emotion. Of course, we have all been living this as the past several years have been filled with various forms and levels of acute grief. In addition to personal level losses, we have been in the collective, macro-level grief of all of the things going on in our times, including pandemic-related losses of all kinds, ongoing colonization, anti-Black racism, anti-Asian violence, anti-trans, and queer legislation and ideologies, climate crises, and patriarchal and right-wing attacks on reproductive justice. At the same time, as queer people, we have specific forms and textures of individual and collective grief that we carry with us. We have the historical grief of losing a generation to AIDs, the collective grief of seeing the ongoing violence against trans women of color, the pain of the suicidality of queer and trans youth, the grief of losing families, cultures, and communities because of our gender and/or sexuality. There is no question that grief and loss are a form of queer affect that we inherit and inhabit. Prasad (2020) writes powerfully about queer grief and kinship:

I hold in folds of my particular grief, space for those whose traumatic breaks from family are far more violent than mine …. Because as queer people, we know loss as an inevitable part of becoming queer …. We hold each other in relation not because we know the detailed contours of each other's pain, but because we see in them an interstitial quality that mirrors our own. Perhaps that is why, when we face loss and grief, our chosen family can grieve with us without having had the same attachments or traumas. I share with my queer family, forms of grief that remain veiled; ….I think of queer grief as a response not just to death, but also to the violence of relational endings.

In the midst of my own grief a few weeks ago of processing a queer friend who passed away, losing an aunt and uncle in India to COVID, and navigating family homophobia in real time—a trusted senior colleague of mine gave me the wise advice to think about what it would mean to write/teach/speak/work from this place of grief. I have sat with this often, this question of how to harness grief, queer diasporic grief, in the space of the neoliberal, white supremacist, a heteropatriarchal institution that has so little space and time for it. And yet I am also reminded that queer artists, poets, filmmakers, and cultural workers have always theorized, embodied, and created about our affective lives as queer people. Queer ancestor Audre Lorde explicitly saw emotion as part of our political and intellectual project as a queer feminist; she famously stated that “feeling are our most genuine path to knowledge.”

How can we make space for queer grief as a dimension of our queer scholarly praxis?

Emotional Labor

In regard to emotion, I also want to lift up the need to understand and account for emotional labor as part of the research process (see also Mehrotra, 2014). I would suggest that emotional labor in our research process may include emotional regulation/management in various research settings, holding and processing participants’ experiences or difficult content, and navigating dynamics of power and positionality in the research context. Emotional labor can also be heightened in circumstances where we have a personal connection to the subject being studied, which often we do as queer scholars. Seeing emotional labor as part of the research labor that we do necessitates that we make meaningful space for it.

Gutierrez-Perez (2020) in his writing on the Pulse massacre shares a beautiful example of queer praxis in action:

After I completed the first two essays, one for a special issue on queer autoethnography and the other for a special forum on the massacre at Pulse nightclub, I could not handle the emotional and spiritual labor alone anymore. It had gotten to the point where I was crying every time I sat down to work on that third and final essay. It was in that moment that I reached out to a colleague of mine for help, and he agreed to take up the labor of first author and together we finished that labor of love and care together. In this work, we danced with the shadows of grief, anger, and violence by interrogating and vulnerably sharing the back-and-forth text messages sent to each other in the days and weeks after forty-nine people were mowed down in an act of violence and hate. (pp. 1–2)

What is so striking about this example is that it embodies various elements of the queer praxis I have laid out in this discussion. The first is the presence of emotion and the acknowledgment of the deep grief that was felt while writing about the Pulse massacre as a queer Latinx person. Also, emotional and spiritual labor are acknowledged as part of the scholarly work that the author is doing. The author also centers on relationship and community care as he reaches out to a colleague for help and together they navigate collective queer grief and their scholarly project.

Pleasure in the Work

Lastly, I want to also talk about an intersectional queer praxis as one that embodies joy and pleasure as part of the emotional experience of our work. Slow scholarship invites us to savor the aspects of the work that are joyful, generative, and rewarding and therefore has the potential to (re)connect us with our satisfaction in the work beyond the production pressures often put onto us in higher education. I can honestly say for myself that the pressures and culture of academia have often made me feel very disconnected from the pleasure of the work. However, I believe that reclaiming pleasure and joy as part of our scholarly efforts is critical to it being nourishing, transformative, and sustainable.

adrienne maree brown (2019) posits that pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation truly pleasurable experiences and that it is the work we do to reclaim our whole selves from the impacts and limitations of oppression. For us in queer communities and as critical feminist scholars, this is necessary for our survival as people and as scholars. Taking up the kind of queer scholarly praxis that I am proposing makes space for and insists on joy and pleasure as part of our work.

Honan et al. (2015) write:

There are moments, cracks and fissures, tiny spaces where we produce pleasure, when desire is released from the restricted codes of the academy, when the transformative production of desire moves us beyond and away. While these moments may be small, an analysis of the assemblages that produce these moments can provide some illustration of ways to bring about change, to move beyond, to create anew, a different and productive way of being and becoming academic. (p. 52)

As queer people and critical feminists we have claimed and reclaimed pleasure and joy as resistance in our lives and in the world. It is my hope that we can also do this in our scholarly work and move into different ways of “being and becoming academic.”