Erotic Ethnography: Sex,Spirituality,and Embodiment in Qualitative Research

A Kernel of Yellow Color: The Erotic and Everyday Spirituality of Ethnographic Practice

In 2018, on a research visit to Accra, Ghana, I was struck by the city’s eroticism. Everywhere I turned, I saw flirtation and invitation. Not much of this erotic energy seemed particularly serious. It was playful, fleeting, and flighty. It connected the diverse personalities in the city with one another. Suggestiveness and erotic possibility were a means of communication and commerce. I saw it between the trotro mate and his passengers, flirtatious banter with men and women alike; the koko seller as she made change for her customers. One day, getting lunch at Mawarko, a Lebanese owned fast-food restaurant in La, I found myself on the receiving end of such playful flirtation. The woman who gave me my packaged meal elicited a bigger than usual tip. Looking into my eyes, she smiled, grazed my fingertips as she accepted payment for my meal, and said, “Coca-cola is three cedis.” This simple exchange reminds me of that kernel of yellow color that Audre Lorde wrote about. This is the erotic, “a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring” that when carefully caressed, can spread through an experience to make it more colorful, exciting, approachable (2007, p. 57).

The preceding narrative captures one element of the erotic—as the potential for sexualized social exchange. This erotic is a social lubricant, one that allows for pleasure in the pursuit of everyday activities, such as making change or taking a bus ride. The erotic here is an avenue for social connection rather than a characteristic of sexual arousal or desire. In the pages below, I share three additional illustrative narratives that show how an openness to the erotic allows researchers to be more fully present in the complex matrix of feelings and ways of being that such an encounter presents. Here, manifestations of the erotic appear in the sensorial, sexual, spiritual, and familial and produce knowledge that unequivocally routes through the body.

Ethnography is an embodied practice, and as sociologist M. Jacqui Alexander (2005) teaches us, the body is a material manifestation of our sacred connection to one another. From this perspective, the ethnographic project (along with our other everyday encounters) can be understood as part of a spiritual practice. This spirituality lies in the ways that this ethnographic research creates opportunities for connection to the self, others, the divine, and the everyday. As an ethnographer, I integrate lessons from decidedly non-methodological texts such as Lorde’s “Uses of the erotic” and Alexander’s “Pedagogies of the sacred” to inform my craft. These lessons are important. They challenge normative sociological approaches to ethnographic inquiry, which typically have commitments to empirical representations and thick descriptions that can at times suppress the ephemeral. Precisely because ethnography relies on the sensorial, which is experienced through our bodies, understanding the spiritual weight of this practice opens us up to an oft discounted element of ethnographic research, which can best be addressed through the erotic.

It was Gloria Wekker’s (2006) Politics of Passion that first opened me up to what it means to navigate and embrace all the dimensions of the erotic when doing ethnographic research. The book’s careful study of mati ¹ demonstrates an erotic ethos. Mati, understood as an activity, indeed as work, refuses to confine erotic subjectivity to sexual experiences. Instead, mati work is about relationships and mutual obligation to another person and their expansive community. Mati refuses the notion of sexuality as identity and instead emphasizes relationality, genderless and gender expansive spirituality. An important element of mati work is its rootedness in Winti, an Afro-diasporic spiritual practice. Winti, like other Afro-diasporic spiritual practices, opens up space for an engagement with gender beyond binaries and embodiment (see also Beliso-De Jesus, 2015, on Santeria, and Tinsley, 2018, on Vodun). The erotic as rooted in the divine and the pedestrian allows for a different kind of encounter with another. Here, as Wekker shows, the relationship between one’s self and one’s spirit world, another and their spirit worlds generates new modalities of knowing and being with one another. These modalities include navigating trickster spirits who confound knowledge, articulating a self that is not static, enacting ritual cultures, and resisting domination.

The erotic ethos in Wekker’s (2006) work also included sexual relationships between the researcher and some of her interlocutors. This sex was not useful or instrumental. In fact, it turned out to be messy and initially difficult to navigate. However, as Wekker writes, her embeddedness in these relationships produced deep insight into mati work and the care, mutual exchange, and tenderness that it delivered to the women involved. Wekker’s book offers foundational lessons for navigating the erotic itineraries of ethnographic research and ethical ways to write about them. I call this approach to research an erotic ethnography because it affirms the reality of shifting insights through an engagement with the political, sensual, and spiritual.

Embodiment, Politics, and Erotic Ethnography

So far, I have discussed the erotic as sensual and spiritual. A third formulation is necessary to complete the triad—the political. The political implications of erotic ethnography include an attunement to the ephemeral, which nonetheless shapes social relations, power dynamics, and what social change is possible. One of the ways we see the political implications of erotic ethnography is through a consideration of the body. The body as a site for the manifestation of the erotic means admitting my body into the project of doing erotic ethnography. I use admit here in its dual sense. I admit my body by allowing it to enter fully into the spaces and processes of doing ethnography. That means attending to the sensorial and how sensations shape what can be known—the sound of laughter or a church sermon on the street corner; the smell of sweaty trotro bodies, steamy gutters, and ocean waters; the cool evening breeze after a hot day; the proximity of too many strangers, and the desire to reach out and touch. To admit too, means to make a confession of sorts, to divulge aspects of this embodied experience that I might otherwise suppress because it feels too uncomfortable, does not quite fit, is neither normative nor conforming. Certain bodies find that space accommodates them more readily than others, perhaps because they are “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure,” the mythical norm (Lorde, 1984, p. 116). Other bodies, like freshwater fish in saltwater, feel the weight of the water on their bodies (Simmonds, 1997, p. 227). This weighty water can attune a person to salinity, the structures that allow some fish to glide through smoothly, while others must stroke faster to get to the same place, arriving out of breath. Admitting the body as a process for doing erotic ethnography is part of a reflexive practice and a commitment to unveiling the political and social structures that have affirmed some bodies as more belonging than others. And demonstrating too, how the erotic can disrupt those structures of exclusion.

Over lunch with one of my interlocutors, she asked me: “Have you ever noticed how all studies done in Ghana about Ghanaians are done by white people?” Her query struck me. For a long time, I had tried to shrug off my concerns about legitimacy and legibility as a researcher as a combination of imposter syndrome and cynicism. However, her question pushed me to think critically about what it means for someone like me, a queer Black person, to conduct ethnographic research. How was I to make sense of the ways in which I was misrecognized (as a researcher, Ghanaian, a man, or a woman) while doing this research? On other occasions, someone exclaimed with disbelief, “Anima is a Ghanaian name!” as if also implicitly asking, did you know that? The first question highlights my anomaly as a Ghanaian researcher interested in Ghanaian cultural politics, and the second calls attention to something about my embodiment that did not spell Ghanaian to my interlocutor. My body fit uncomfortably in the imagined space of both the ethnographic researcher and the Ghanaian.

At church one Sunday, I am introduced to the congregation as “Brother Anima Adjepong.” During an interview with another interlocutor, “From your name, I expected you to be a woman. Anima is my niece’s name.” Anima was my paternal grandmother’s name. It is an old woman’s name. One is not wrong to expect a woman. And yet, wei kraa, obaa anaa barima? Is this one a woman or a man? With a name rare enough to confound and a body that suggests masculinity (perhaps queered by traces of feminine affectation) admitting this body means contending with others’ confusion, curiosity, and desire to connect. What does it mean to conduct ethnographic research in this body? I have found myself navigating propositions from unexpected sources—cis men who emphasized their heterosexuality while obviously flirting with me, as both man and woman; cis women who explicitly expressed their curiosity and desire to have me in their beds. All this while asking wei kraa, obaa anaa barima? Such desire for the unknown or the possibility of satiating a gendered curiosity lubricates the erotic exchanges between my interlocutors and me, leading to an intimacy which shapes the kinds of knowledge I can retrieve in my research contexts. Admitting the body means addressing this kernel of desire as it releases itself through the ethnographic project, coloring what is knowable.

Erotic Itineraries in Qualitative Research

I am writing from a recognition that as a sociologist trained in qualitative methods, my education has been an intentional turning away from the erotic. In the classroom and in the scholarly guidance I received, I was primarily taught to suppress those moments of deep connection for the rational (in)sight of the participant observer. The participant observer/ethnographer is simultaneously deeply embedded in their research site and also detached. This detachment is supposedly the armor that makes one a good ethnographer because it ostensibly allows one to see what cannot otherwise be seen by the casual observer. Recently, sociologist Fine (2019) proposed a return to the detached ethnographer, rather than one who takes sides with their interlocutors. Fine’s detached ethnographer is only one model for conducting ethnographic research. However, he makes the case that this model has been cast to the side in favor of an ethnography that takes sides. In response to the question “whose side are we on?” Fine proposes “ours” as a legitimate response. Here, I must wonder, who “we” are and if “we” are truly on the same side, but perhaps that is a query for another moment. For now, I suggest that most ethnographers (at least those of us trained as sociologists) have always been detached to a degree, have typically been on the side of disciplinary norms and structures. This detachment is a feature of our methodological training and publishing norms, which demand objectivity even as they increasingly preach reflexivity. In other words, regardless of whether ethnographic researchers put our political commitments aside when doing our research (and are we ever truly able to do this?), in the final analysis and the last word, the work produced is often detached. An embedded detachment in our analytical models vibrates into the teaching and doing of qualitative research. At the root of this detachment is a lie—a denial of those unexpected human connections that emerge when the researcher is embedded in community and other social spaces.

What makes a good ethnography? Typically, long periods embedded in the site of our research, rendered into “thick description,” and rigorously analyzed. The ethnographer must spend time reflecting on the position they take up in the field, without turning the work into an egocentric rendering of their journey into “going native,” to use an old and problematic term. Instead, as Cobb and Hoang (2015) have argued, reflexivity must be understood as a method, which ultimately centers the voices and experiences of the researchers’ interlocutors. Certainly, ethnographic research includes experiences of genuine connection, discomfort, uncertainty, and joy. Typically, the ethnographer’s task is to tidy up these frictions and present a coherent, rich narrative, smoothing over bumpy surfaces and remaining in the background.

Feminist researchers have challenged the ethnographer’s disappearance, calling for an accounting of standpoint and the researcher’s positionality (Mama, 2011; Naples, 2003). Responses to these calls have produced rich accounts of how ethnographers move through their research fields, exploiting perceptions about race and gender, and implicitly leveraging sexuality to accomplish their tasks (Cupples, 2002; Hoang, 2015). These accounts often present the ethnographer’s decisions as rational choices made in the service of the research. Rarely do we see narratives about research decisions made because the ethnographer wanted to pursue certain connections that felt good. To do so would be to do bad ethnography.

One of my first lessons in what bad ethnography can look like was an encounter with research that was both egocentric and sexually unethical. As a first-year graduate student, I learned about the infamous sociologist, Erich Goode, whose work was the subject of a special issue of Qualitative Sociology (Zussman, 2002). Goode had published an article describing his sexual exploits with the members of the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). Widely regarded as a narcissistic exercise, the manuscript was differently described as “a confused essay written by a confused person” (Manning, 2002, p. 541), “spectacularly self-indulgent” (Bell, 2002, p. 535), and “baffling in its superficiality” (Saguy, 2002, p. 549). Responses to Goode’s confessional tome highlighted the sexism and gendered entitlement he seemed to feel towards the women in his study. These responses also offered an opportunity to discuss the psychoanalysis of sex and knowledge production. In this regard, Williams (2002) noted how modes of conducting qualitative research can resemble therapeutic settings, which can lead to transference and create ripe conditions for sexual exploitation. None of the responses to Goode’s article rejected the utility of sex in a research context. Saguy (2002, p. 553) conceded that “It is plausible that a researcher might learn more or better if he or she were having sex with his or her informants,” whilst Williams (2002, p. 559) suggested that “bathhouses, tearooms, and prostitution would recommend themselves for this approach.” In these concessions, sex within the research encounter was limited to those occasions when it could be potentially “useful.” This demand for usefulness reinstates the exploitative nature of research. Sex here is devoid of the erotic, which is mutually exchanged, a sharing of feelings. Instead, sex as utility (even if, or perhaps especially if, for the sake of knowledge production) results in “pornography and obscenity” (Lorde, 2007, p. 59).

Sex, in the context of doing ethical ethnography, is often understood as the ultimate pleasure, the thing that feels good and thus should be avoided while doing research. Yet, as I will show shortly, ethnographic research offers many moments of intimacy that exceed sexual encounters. In order to avoid accusations of being unethical, silence is the predominant approach to describing researchers’ sexual encounters in sociological accounts. A recent study of classic sociological ethnographies found that researchers were loath to talk about their experiences of attraction and how they navigated this attraction (Grauerholz et al., 2013). Instead, adhering to disciplinary investment in objectivity and positivism encouraged the suppression of these feelings, and potentially other challenging emotions as well. Ultimately, attraction and desire amongst other emotions are excised from analysis. The implication of such suppression is that researchers get to present themselves as objective while dismissing a range of complex emotions that inevitably appear when doing qualitative research.

Despite the prevailing silence on the role of sexuality in qualitative research, other sociologists have offered important insights into how to engage this topic. For example, reflecting on the role of sexual arousal and desire in their choice of research topics, Thomas and Williams (2016) suggest that engaging with and disclosing these desires can offer additional necessary methodological information. In Thomas and Williams’ context, the information one might glean from their sharing gestures towards some level of self-serving sexual exploitation. Waling’s (2018) reflection on the mix of feelings including jealousy, inadequacy, and desire that she had to navigate while doing research at a men’s strip club demonstrates the deep knowledge that can be attained when the political and sensual are engaged. Likewise, Orne (2017) and Jones (2020) provide important lessons on taking sex and what Jones calls the pornographic imagination seriously when doing qualitative research. The above examples of deep reflection on sexuality and attraction are exceptions in a sociological landscape devoid of a connection to the erotic. Furthermore, existing sociological accounts of sensual intimacies have largely focused on sex as the ultimate expression of erotic subjectivity. Yet, the emotional tenor of qualitative research is not only present when sex is a possibility. Silence around sexuality, therefore, can be understood to extend to silence around other erotic aspects of the experience of doing ethnographic research.

Suppression of the erotic—as spiritual, political, and sensual—in ethnographic accounts can produce a kind of “awkward surplus.” Typically, awkward surplus refers to those uncomfortable moments that are edited out of the final research account. These accounts are excised because they might be overly revealing about the kinds of private decisions the researcher makes about their embodied safety, egoistic concerns, and personal comfort (Hanson & Richards, 2019). In as much as awkward surplus is initially understood as decisions about sexualized violence, attention to the erotic opens space to confront the patriarchal realities that transform embodied interactions into violence. When discussions of consensual erotic exchange are suppressed for the sake of objectivity and professionalism, disembodied modes of knowing remain entrenched. This is the case even when researchers dutifully attend to feminist interventions around reflexivity and positionality. Attending to the erotic as an awkward surplus that must also be intentionally and ethically incorporated into ethnographic analyses provides for a more honest admission of the body. This awkward surplus is the inverse of violence and harassment, instead leaning into possibility, empowerment, shared pleasure, and fulfillment.

Ring the Alarms: A Novice Encounter with Sex in a Research Context

Nothing in my sociological training had prepared me for an encounter with eroticism and ethnographic fieldwork as generative. Instead, my education focused on the dangers and ethical abuses that lurk when sex is possible. In other words, rather than a focus on the erotic as possibility, my training instigated a kind of sex panic around such exchanges. Fieldnotes from previous research projects are riddled with both anxieties and guilty pleasure about the erotic play between my interlocutors and me. To be clear, this erotic play was not always about the possibility of sex but rather was tapping into different modalities of exchange and communion, none of which were sanctioned by formal manuals for doing field research. These emotive responses index the shortcomings of my methodological training, which saw such exchanges primarily as sources of unethical behavior and abuse. Given the context in which I first encountered sex in a research setting, it is no wonder that my field notes were such an anxious mess. Rather than offering erotic possibility alongside the dangers of sexual abuse and harassment, such training maintained a disconnect between the pleasures of our embodiment and the task of knowledge production. As an aside, few top sociology programs require more than one semester of qualitative methods training, leaving students ill-prepared for the various itineraries of the field, erotic or otherwise. In the rest of my formal training to be a sociologist, the possibility of erotic exchange between researcher and interlocutors rarely came up again except as whispers and judgmental asides.

My first book, Afropolitan Projects (Adjepong, 2021) examines the cultural politics of class-privileged Ghanaians living in the Houston, Texas and Accra, Ghana. This years-long ethnographic project began in 2014 and found me hanging out with interlocutors in various settings. Such hangouts elicited the kinds of erotic moments that are often suppressed in ethnographic research—flirtation, uncertainty, attraction, naughty jokes, and laughter. One frequent hangout activity I participated in was attending parties. At these events, my interlocutors would be dressed exquisitely, showing off their Afropolitan fashions and articulating their class positionality. It was through these parties that I met Agatha. At first, Agatha was like any of the other aunties I met over the course of my fieldwork. A woman in her late 40s, she was married to a man and had two adolescent children. Agatha was outgoing, fashionable, and welcoming. This was not a unique quality, nor was the particular interest she took in me. Yet over time, the tenor of our interactions increasingly moved into the realm of erotic possibility. This trajectory alarmed me. For example, one day after a church service, Agatha rushed over to me, threw her arms around my shoulder, kissed me on the cheek and said, “I missed you.” Her greeting drew the attention of a nearby churchgoer, who scrunched up her face as she looked at us. These touches and flirtatious interactions caught me off guard, as I had not anticipated such encounters while doing research.

The alarm bells raised by Agatha’s flirtation were the outcome of my methods training, which failed to alert me to the fact that I was still a sexual being even when I was an ethnographer. In any other context, her flirtatious attention might have left me feeling flattered and curious. I might have played with the energy she sent my way and navigated it according to my own interests and personal boundaries. However, everything I had learned about being a good, ethical researcher left me stressed about how to navigate this attention. It was as if, all of a sudden, I had lost my social skills. Those same skills that allowed me to navigate the traffic of eroticism in any other context evaded me whilst doing ethnographic research. As per my training, there was not supposed to be any such play during research and should I encounter it, I was courting danger by putting myself or my interlocutors at risk. The evacuation of erotic possibility from methodological training robs both researcher and the communities we study of the agency and empowerment that can come with such exchange.

March 5, 2017. We returned to her table where she simultaneously introduced me as her friend, her daughter’s teacher, and her daughter. Serena Dankwa (2009) makes the point that “The ways in which kinship relationships also inform women’s access to doing supi is important so that a woman may refer to her lover as her sister, mother, daughter, but never her friend because friend has the potential to connote sexual intimacy.” Agatha kept asking me throughout the night if she looked alright, about her hair, which she said she’d done herself, and I tried to be complimentary. In retrospect I wonder if I was too complimentary and indicated interest in any way…. When I got ready to leave, she walked me out the door, holding my hand. I found this irritating but tried not to read anything into it. It is common to see Ghanaian men and women holding hands with people of the same gender. I interpreted her hand holding as such. She walked me to my car and tried to kiss me. I went in for a hug, but she gave me her face, so I went for a cheek-to-cheek, but she turned towards me to kiss my lips. I touched my cheek to hers again. She called out, “I love you.” Horrified, I responded, “love you too.”

Supi is a West African term used to describe intimate friendships between women. In its earliest uses, supi did not necessarily connote sexual intimacy, although it did not deny its possibility either. Instead, as Dankwa (2021) has shown, like doing mati work, doing supi (rather than being a supi and not unlike making zami ² ) describes a range of political, sensual, and spiritual relationships amongst women. The increasing reach of evangelical Christianity in the Ghanaian context narrowed the meanings of doing supi to lesbian identity.

Although I was initially upset by our encounter, I did not avoid Agatha afterwards. I felt anxious about the possibilities of what had happened and racked my brain about how to proceed with her. After all, before I began fieldwork for this project, I was interested in the imagined lives of African immigrant women. And this incident felt rich with potential. At the same time, I felt overwhelmed by the ambiguity of our interactions. Up until the point that Agatha tried to kiss me, and perhaps even beyond that, everything she did could be interpreted as non-sexual. In her book about women’s same-sex intimacies in Ghana, Dankwa (2021) describes the ambiguity of such interactions as indirection. As she explains, “although it seems obvious that a gendered or erotic ‘play’ of sorts is taking place, the women can pretend not to understand and not to feel interpellated by what has not been explicitly articulated” (Dankwa, 2021, p. 64). The cultural resonance of indirection and tacit sexual intimacy is rich with potential. It offers opportunities to refuse the constraints of labels and identities in favor of what feels right and brings pleasure. In order to fulfill this potential, however, one must be attuned to the erotic economy that makes doing supi possible. Confined by an orientation to ethnographic research that suppressed the erotic, it took an unexpected kiss to call my attention to what was swirling between Agatha and me. Had I been more attuned to how eroticism characterized our interactions, some of my preliminary research questions could have been explored.

The social context in which Agatha courted me made it difficult for me to decipher some of her advances. My understanding of the Ghanaian community and its codes of conduct was dominated by a hegemonic narrative of evangelical Christianity and its attendant patriarchy and homophobia. As such, I did not anticipate the possibility that any of the respectable, Christian women amongst my interlocutors would flirt with me. Furthermore, I was not prepared to be an object of desire or sexual interest, focusing rather on being a professional ethnographer. Any concerns about sex I had were around the possibility that my queer gender and sexuality would ultimately result in my ejection from the field site and therefore the early end of research. Instead, I confronted other erotic circuits, which I was poorly equipped to navigate in a research context.

My inability to be fully present to experiences of sexual desire foreclosed the possibility of knowing something else about how the community was organized. That something else is indexed by erotic possibility. In this instance, I might have learned about how Ghanaian immigrant women did supi under the gaze of Christian heteropatriarchy. Attention to and awareness of how the erotic empowered women to be present for one another in the midst of structural constraints could also have offered insights into other kinship arrangements and gendered relationships besides what was evident on the surface.

How assumptions about gender and sexuality manifest in the erotic economy of ethnographic research is important and often downplayed. Yet, such libidinal exchanges provide generative fodder for a deeper analysis of any social field. Furthermore, these exchanges refuse the lie of objectivity and scholarly detachment. For example, the interactions I shared with Agatha highlighted a universal clumsiness around navigating consent, flirtation, “professionalism,” and other community codes of conduct. What desires did my queer presence inspire in Agatha? How had she managed these desires prior to my arrival? These questions are inspired by another exchange outside of a research context. Here, my friend said to me, “You’ve brought up these feelings for me and now you’re just going to leave.” Desire unexpectedly arises. I was not supposed to be there. Qualitative researchers are often attuned to how our prodding might trigger difficult memories and old demons. We are trained to identify resources to share with our interlocutors that can mitigate some of these difficult emotions. But what resources do we offer for eliciting desire, which may sometimes be suppressed or feel dangerous to our interlocutors? Our training is silent on this and yet our presence in the field can violate certain boundaries about which we might not even be mindful. How do you seek consent in a context that denies embodiment and the erotic as political, sensual, and spiritual? Meditating on erotic exchange and possibility provides avenues to address this aspect of qualitative field work and navigate these encounters in more ethical ways for researchers and interlocutors alike.

Although rarely acknowledged, the researcher does not hold all the power in the field. The exchanges between Agatha and me also demonstrated the power that our interlocutors can hold over us. This power is not the kind of abusive power that methods classes teach nascent researchers to beware of. Instead, it is a power that turns around how the erotic, in its many forms, is expressed within the various niches of community space. Although I entered the space knowledgeable about many of the social codes amongst Ghanaians, I was not attuned to how sexuality could manifest in the space. Aspects of this erotic economy were mysterious to me in part because they were shrouded by the prominent rules of Christian heteropatriarchy. As such, navigating between what I had learned about the dangers of sex in fieldwork and embedding myself in my research context proved to be cumbersome and anxiety-raising. Other moments of misunderstanding and clumsiness during fieldwork are typically less difficult to navigate, examine, and analyze in our research reports. However, careful assessment of the power and potential of intimate sexual exchange, even when it is unexpected, can reveal so much more about the human and social condition.

Unable to fully tap into the erotic, my reflexivity lingered on the chafing experiences of my transmasculine body in a conservative Christian immigrant context. I explored how attention to such uncomfortable rubbings provides important insights into how bodies take up space and which bodies seem able to do so without many barriers. Focusing on translating this experience of being a body out of place, I argued that performing this discomfort textually could rupture normative ethnographic practice by putting “the researcher’s history and body in conversation with research participants’ and thereby [opening] up possibilities for connections that may not have previously been imagined” (Adjepong, 2019, p. 43). Although in “invading ethnography” erotic possibility is nascent, it is not fully realized because the analytical focus is on the embodiment of gender and sexuality rather than the full scope of what the erotic can entail. Furthermore, concerns about being a good ethnographer shrouded an honest engagement with the complex emotions of shame and uncertainty that came up as a Black queer researcher. Consequently, invading ethnography is only a first step in embracing the erotic as a tool of ethnographic research. For example, my initial response to Agatha was shaped by alarm and concerns about boundary violations. My discomfort ultimately prevented me from deeper interactions with her because I did not want to be a bad researcher. Yet with a renewed lens, I now see how a curious presence and an openness to the erotic could have allowed me to learn more about women’s intimate friendships within the community.

Erotic Ethnography as Mindful Ethics

In a discussion of ethics in qualitative research, sociologist Gloria González-López makes an argument for mindful ethics. Mindful ethics is about being “keenly aware of and present in the social contexts and circumstances surrounding the everyday life experiences of the people who participate in my research” (González-López, 2011, p. 448). Mindfulness is a spiritual practice. It opens us up to our deepest connections with one another and teaches us how to be, in González-López’s (2011, p. 458) words, “the sociologist who is also a human being.” This humanness is what I refer to when I argue for an erotic ethnography. To be a researcher who is a human being means attending to our own vulnerabilities as well as those of our interlocutors. It means being present to the various ways and levels at which we communicate and engage one another while doing research. It also means considering when detachment is useful and to what ends. My lenses have changed. Perhaps it is because I am older; more mature as an ethnographer; more mindful in my practice. There is space within me now to pursue an erotic ethnography. Yet despite this awareness of the possibility that an openness to eroticism—as political, sensual, and spiritual—can offer to the ethnographic project, I must admit some anxiety all the same. This is where mindfulness can help still those tremors about the depths of intimacy that can occur while doing ethnographic research.

An erotic ethnography extends mindful ethics to accommodate the possibility of sexual intimacy between the researcher and their interlocutor, and to understand that intimacy as part of a complex trinity—political, sensual, and spiritual. An engagement with (the possibility of) sexual intimacy in a research context from a stance of erotic ethnography challenges the researcher to consider the levels of interaction at which such intimacy can occur. The political implications of sexual intimacy with our interlocutors during research include adequately navigating and procuring consent, deflecting sexual harassment either as advanced by the researcher or interlocutors, and taking responsibility for experiences of arousal and desire. All of these possibilities are collated through the inherent power dynamics of the research enterprise, including how race, gender, sexuality, age, geography, ability, and other structures of social organization shape interactions. The sensual implications of sexual intimacy in a research context are perhaps more obvious with harmful consequences receiving great attention (Hanson & Richards, 2019) and efforts being made to recover the benefits of such intimacy. The spiritual implications of sexual and sensual intimacy in a research context are still unfolding. Alexander (2005), Wekker (2006), Gill (2018), and Lara (2020, 2021) offer us some paths forward in this regard. They show us how openness to deep connection, perhaps especially in those places where we are taught not to go, can orient us towards liberation. This is because, the erotic acts as a tie that binds us across vast and diverse experiences, calling attention to both what is present and visible in the material realm, as well as other ways of being with and knowing one another.

It feels especially necessary right now to orient myself to the uses of the erotic in ethnographic research. Currently, I am conducting a study about women’s football (soccer) and gendered nationalism in Ghana. Sports are sites rich with erotic possibility. There is a sheer pleasure of play, bodies in concerted motion, and collective effervescence that permeates the stadium, viewing room, and playing field. All of these offer an opportunity for deep relation and shared feeling. These feelings manifest off the playing field as well, allowing for intimate relationships to form in diverse contexts. This project is ripe with possibility and presents a chance to reflect on the uses of the erotic in ethnographic fieldwork.

March 1, 2018. Blessing was a thin, light-skinned woman with long brown locs. When we met, she wore an ntuma skirt and a white graphic tee-shirt, over which she put a green apron. She was going to re-twist my locs and the apron would protect her street clothes. After washing my hair, she gently massaged my scalp and shoulders. Her hands moved down my chest as she asked me what I liked to do. “Everything,” I said, and she laughed, grabbing my shoulders, ostensibly to steady herself. Later on, she invited me to take a walk in Asomdwee Park. As we sat on the only bench with shade, Blessing continued to share some of her concerns with me. In particular, she worried that there were so many transgender people in the United States, where she knew I lived. Part of Blessing’s concern about transgender people was because she suspected I was one. But the other part was because of her experiences with her former teammates. She told me about how she used to play for one of the 12 teams in Ghana’s women’s premier league. She explained that one of the reasons why she quit was because so many of her teammates wanted to have sex with her. Although she was curious and even began a romantic relationship with one teammate, she felt that the teammate was too much like a man. After all, she said, if she wanted to be with a man why not just be with one? She asked, while a hand brushed against my thigh.

My interaction with Blessing was a foreshadowing of what I could expect once I started to hang out with footballers. Curiosity, attraction, indirection. There was an obvious flirtatious quality to our conversation and our walk in the park. Perhaps because I was not officially doing research, I found myself fully present to what was going on. We had met on the recommendation of a friend because I needed someone to do my hair. I wrote the fieldnotes reproduced above only because Blessing mentioned she was a footballer. At the time, although I was already exploring my current study on football and gendered nationalism, my attention was primarily on the cultural politics of class-privileged Ghanaians. These notes were thus written as an aside, something to come back to at a later time. The opportunity to reflect on my exchange with Blessing, to notice the comfort and ease that an ostensibly non-research context allowed in this sensual exchange highlights how a “serious” ethnographic lens can foreclose certain kinds of connections at the level of (potential) sexual intimacy. What if I had a similar orientation to Agatha as I did with Blessing? How might that flirtation have offered something else in our interaction? In other words, how could I have been more present and ethical with Agatha, holding space for her openness and vulnerability, while also asserting my own boundaries in a mindful way? Whereas the preceding questions feel urgent in a sexualized context, other moments of intimacy can feel less charged and easier to navigate. They are erotic all the same. My interview with Mr D. is an example of this eroticism. I met Mr D. while conducting interviews with Ghanaian women’s football pioneers. A retired civil servant, he became involved in organizing the first women’s national team in the late 1980s. From our first greeting, I could tell that the 76-year-old had taken a liking to me. He told me he liked people born on Tuesdays and just had a feeling about me. He shared his birthday as part of his introductions and I told him he and my father were born on the same day, albeit about a decade apart. Excited, he sent my father his “best wishes” and described himself as my father too. This initial connection formed the basis of an intimate interview between Mr D and me, which culminated in a shared meal and the recipe for some special fruit juices he created.

March 12, 2021. About an hour into our interview, Mr D insisted on cooking us lunch. He ushered me into the kitchen where I watched him peel and slice yams to serve with a garden egg stew that he told me he prepared the night before. “I must have anticipated your arrival,” he said jokingly. By the time the meal was ready, our interview had ended, and we ate together on his front patio.

It is productive to understand the intimacy between Mr D and myself as an erotic exchange—political, sensual, spiritual. The eroticism between us included an articulation of kinship (I am your father), cooking, and eating together. This intimacy, developed over the course of a two-hour interview, generated a relaxed atmosphere and mutual pleasure. In this exchange, the politics of kinship and the hierarchies embedded therein, the sensual embodied experience of cooking and eating together, and the spirituality of pedestrian connection all manifest. Understanding our encounter as erotic emphasizes the ephemeral trinity of our connection (sensual, political, spiritual) and reorients the landscape of our interaction into one where we can build community, even if only momentarily. Such moments also attune me to other moments of shared pleasure that structure the sporting landscape. I use the example of my interactions with Mr D to emphasize that the erotic is not simply about sexual intimacy, but also about arousing other kinds of feelings in our encounters with one another.

Without a willingness to embrace the erotic, including the breadth of sensuality and spirituality, as a necessary dimension of conducting research, so much knowledge would be foreclosed. In the case of my current research on women’s football and gendered nationalism, conducting an erotic ethnography means being present to the loving interactions amongst men and women that challenge the dominant narratives about gendered relationships. I have seen and heard stories of transmasculine players embraced and supported by their teammates and match officials despite an overarching message in Ghanaian political culture about an abhorrent so-called LGBT agenda. This embrace refutes claims about how binary gender organizes society, showing instead community and relationships amongst diverse peoples. I have observed great pleasure expressed about players’ athleticism from fans in the stands. These expressions demonstrate a willingness to connect across lines drawn by hegemony in the service of mutual feeling. They also show what is possible through the communalism that the erotic generates.

It is necessary too, to note that the erotic does not only open us up to pleasurable feelings. In fact, being present to the full range of what it means to be a human while doing research also means attending to and sitting with feelings of disgust, anxiety, stress, overwhelming sadness. To contend with these feelings and be fully present to them when they arise also constitutes erotic ethnography.

Conclusion

At base the erotic tunes us in to all the ways we are human, and the various ways that humanity manifests in our research endeavors, just as it does in the world outside of formalized intellectual production. At the conclusion of Frottage, independent scholar Keguro Macharia ends with a prose poem, a journey through the various meanings, implications, conditions, and circumstances that cause us to rub up against one another.

3.

Can we ask these questions of ourselves as ethnographers? What happens when we acknowledge a desire to be touched? By whom? Can we allow ourselves to be touched or do we alone do the touching? A commitment to erotic ethnography means permitting ourselves to be touched even as we touch our interlocutors, these people who let us into their lives and share some of their most intimate selves with us. When Agatha called out “I love you,” it could have been an invitation to be more mindful, to enter into a different space where I could allow myself to be touched. In this space, to be touched is not to consent to an experience I did not desire, but instead to be present to the fullness of the moment. However, concern about breaking sterilized institutional rules that evacuate the erotic produced terror and foreclosed deeper connection. Leaning into the erotic as a necessary modality for knowledge production overrides this sterility and its attendant concerns. As an ethnographer, understanding and tapping into the power of the erotic gives me vim when navigating the contours of doing embodied research. Attuned to the possibility for non-exploitative relationality in fieldwork, I am encouraged to be more fully present when sharing in the lived experiences of my interlocutors. Such attunement also offers new insights about similarities, differences, cultural circulation, and exchange that may be overlooked through normative ethnographic lenses. One of those circulations lies in how intimacy, vulnerability, and desire are expressed in different cultural contexts.

Methodological training that embraces the erotic opens new ways of knowing, rooted in our bodies and in our capacity for shared feeling. The suppression of the erotic within U.S. sociology’s methods training, and in turn during our fieldwork, fortifies existing hierarchies of knowledge production. Whereas we emphasize reflexivity to examine how researchers encounter the spaces we enter, this exercise can be performative, stultifying identity categories, rationalizing the ineffable, and affirming the researcher’s perceived objectivity. Yet when we tap into the erotic, new explanations arise such as the universe of gender possibilities that Wekker offers. When researchers allow ourselves permission and find the courage to embrace the erotic, greater clarity around power struggles can also be attained, offering different avenues to confront experiences of sexual harassment. To say this is not to suggest that harassment and sexual violence are mere misunderstandings. Instead, I hope that by embracing an erotic ethnography, we can identify those moments in which such harassment can be effectively diffused, and that energy channeled into more productive encounters. Of course, as we expand our sociological methods to embrace the erotic, the need to continue to attend to structural violence does not disappear. Rather, we allow ourselves the opportunity to tap into something else, something divine.