“It’s kind of like a fifty-fifty”: Participant ambivalence and the queer(ed) potential of the focus group method

Abstract

This paper explores the queer(ed) possibilities of the focus group method through analyzing the ambivalent responses provided by participants in a series of focus groups around their experiences with pornography. I argue that these ambivalences reflect participants’ tendencies to attach themselves to “happy affects” as they emerged within the sociality of the focus group encounter and therefore offer glimpses into the situated and relational nature of subjectivity. To the extent that sociality is a key feature of the focus group method, I suggest that focus groups might be utilized to queer the field of sex research more broadly.

Keywords

focus groups queer theory ambivalence pornography sex research

Introduction

When I decided to conduct focus groups with undergraduate students about their experiences with pornography for my dissertation research, I assumed that the content of those discussions would be the most fascinating aspect of this project. After all, what could be more titillating than frank talk between strangers about something so taboo? And yet while the themes and narratives that emerged from the focus groups were certainly captivating, it was the experience of being in that talk that lingered with me long after the focus groups ended, and the dissertation was defended. I was struck by the fluidity of those conversations, as participants navigated the difficult terrain of talking publicly about porn. I was also struck by the fluidity of participants’ own positionalities, as they attached to different affects circulating at different moments during the focus groups, belying deep ambivalences about pornography along the way. It is these ambivalences—and their intimate connection to the focus group methodology—that will be the central focus of this paper. While many qualitative pornography researchers have noted a tendency toward participant ambivalence in their research (Bohm et al., 2015; Mattebo et al., 2012; Parvez, 2006), here I read ambivalence not for what it indicates about pornography, but rather for what it indicates about subjectivity. I ask: to the extent that focus groups highlight the situatedness and contextuality of subjectivity, can this method be used to queer sex research?

To answer this question, I first outline how focus groups have historically been used, and their data interpreted, within sex research. Sex researchers using focus groups typically present results by simply grouping together individual narratives by theme. Rarely is the interactivity and intersubjectivity of the focus group encounter considered worthy of analytical attention. However, as I discuss in this paper, it is the very sociality of the focus group method, and the messy nature of focus group data, that differentiates this method from others typically used in sex research, and that gives focus groups their queer(ed) methodological potential. Through examining the ambivalent narratives provided by participants in my own focus group study, I suggest that focus groups represent a methodological approach that could be better utilized in sex research; not because they can make visible any particular truths about sex, but precisely because they highlight the impossibility of ever adequately doing so.

Focus groups and sex research

While the focus group method first became popularized in the fields of communications and marketing research (Stewart & Shamdasani, 2015), focus groups have since been taken up more broadly within social science and health research as a method that is particularly adept at capturing the experiences of historically silenced or marginalized populations and exploring sensitive or personal topics (Frith, 2000; Overlien et al., 2005; Wellings et al., 2000); at making visible the ways in which social meanings are reproduced and contested through interactions (Belzile and Oberg, 2012; Kitzinger, 1994); at disrupting power relationships within research (Wilkinson, 1998); and at revealing the language used by niche groups of individuals to explain their lived experiences (McKee et al., 2014). Within the field of sex research, focus groups have been used to examine topics ranging from the sexual experiences of women with disabilities (Vaughn et al., 2015), to individuals’ experiences with being diagnosed with HIV during the COVID-19 pandemic (Ogueji, 2021), to heterosexual women’s experiences with anal sex (McBride, 2019). More narrowly, focus groups have also been utilized as a method within the emerging field of pornography research to explore topics such as LGBTQ youths’ perspectives on heterosexual mainstream porn (Harvey, 2020) and straight women’s engagements with gay male pornography (Neville, 2015), to name but a few. Yet despite the seemingly radical possibilities of the focus group method to explore novel or taboo sex-related topics and/or the experiences of diverse or marginalized populations, I want to suggest that the common methods used to examine and present the data from these studies may in fact reproduce normative assumptions around sexuality and subjectivity that are not so radical after all. To start, focus group data is often presented as reflecting the static beliefs of individual participants. This is evident, for instance, in the “cut and slice” approach that is typically used within articles outlining the results of focus group research (Hyde et al., 2005). In this approach, individual narratives are divorced from the context in which they originally appeared and are instead grouped together with a range of other individualized narratives according to theme. Considerations of the conditions under which these narratives were produced in the focus group encounter are typically elided (Wilkinson, 1998). Focus groups appear, then, as valuable for sex researchers primarily for their ability to collect many individual voices at once (Belzile & Oberg, 2012). Indeed, many sex and pornography studies drawing on focus groups use this “cut and slice” thematic analysis method to present their results (Bohm et al., 2015; Doornwaard et al., 2017; Goldey et al., 2016; McBride, 2019; Neville, 2015; Ogueji, 2021; Vaughn et al., 2015). The use of thematic analyses in sex research certainly makes for clear and organized papers that can help outline the field of discourse around and range of experiences related to a topic like pornography. However, the common presentation of focus group data as reflecting the static beliefs of individual participants negates a key feature of the focus group method; namely, the social interactions generated between participants. While notable exceptions exist (Allen 2006, 2010; Frith, 2000; Kitzinger, 1994; Scarcelli, 2015), across most focus group sex research, reflections on the sociality of the focus group encounter—and sociality as its own form of data, different from individual accounts—remains absent. Yet, as many methodological thinkers have noted, it is the reproduction of sociality itself that is the unique strength of the focus group method. For instance, Goss and Leinbach (1996) argue that through the sociality inherent to focus groups, “the focus group provides the researcher with an opportunity to observe the formation of a temporary social structure that is a microcosm of the larger context” (p. 118). Focus groups therefore demonstrate the ways power and authority operate in and through differently situated subjects. Sue Wilkinson (1998) argues that focus groups align with the social constructionist approach to culture central to feminist theorizing, in that they highlight “the extent to which what people say is actually constructed in specific social contexts” (p. 120). Furthermore, she notes the generative nature of the focus group, which can act as a hermeneutic in ways that align with other forms of consciousness-raising (Wilkinson, 1998) and can deepen learning and lead to the co-construction of new meanings (Freeman, 2006). Warr (2005) too considers the interactivity of the focus group method and argues that it ought to be analyzed as distinct from the content of focus group discussions. She contends that focus group data should be considered for what it can indicate about how “participants are producing explanations of the everyday self in public arenas” (p. 204) and suggests that focus groups act as spaces where the personal and the public intersect. Frith (2000) too notes that within sex research, focus groups may enable the expression of more and different narratives about sexuality through the interactive nature of the discussion, or even through disagreements between participants (p. 281). That so few focus group sex researchers actively take the social nature of the focus group study into account in their analysis perhaps points to the mandate of much sex research more broadly; namely, to take part in what Foucault so famously described as the “complex machinery for producing true discourses on sex” (p. 68). As sex researchers, we are compelled to undertake research that will allow us to “discover” and share new information about an unknown or understudied sexual phenomenon, behavior, sub-culture, or demographic cohort, and to be among the first to do so. Contextualizing the narratives shared by participants in focus groups as socially produced, rather than as enduringly true, may be seen to undermine the validity of one’s data, and therefore one’s value as a sex researcher.

However, I see the tendency within focus group sex research to ignore the sociality of the focus group encounter as also reflecting a more fundamental assumption about subjectivity; namely, that there exists a coherent subject who possesses an inherent and internal sexual self that can be revealed through the research process at all. This assumption is certainly evident within the typical presentation of focus group data as a series of individualized narratives, with little consideration for their social production. However, even within much of the more nuanced writing on the sociality inherent to the focus group method, there appears to be a concern with the degree to which this sociality might inhibit expressions of truth. For instance, Frith (2000) suggests that the common occurrence of participants changing their minds within focus groups, “highlights the difficulty of using the individual as the unit of analysis when looking at focus group data” (Frith 2000, p. 289). Warr (2005) too contends that focus group interactions should be examined as distinct from focus group content, as interactions “tend to be oriented toward persuading the group rather than expressing ‘true’ opinions” (p. 203). Hyde et al. (2005) also argue that “although focus groups offer, on the one hand, opportunities to witness group dynamics of the sub-culture at work, they frustrate the analyst trying to distinguish when reports should be taken as truthful or untruthful” (p. 2592). Implicit even within much constructionist writing on the focus group method, then, is a latent notion that focus group interactivity might inhibit the revelation of individual beliefs, suggesting again that there is potentially something true that participants may be hiding about themselves when engaged in focus group research.

This concern with whether participants are expressing or hiding some form of truth reflects, as many queer theorists have argued, a fantasy of both subjectivity and of sex research more broadly (Browne and Nash, 2016). Although queer theory is an umbrella term for a range of epistemological and ontological modes of thinking critically about normativity—what Edelman called a “zone of possibilities” (1994, p. 114)—it offers a critique of the assumption of a stable, coherent, and rational self who is in possession of a fixed and innate sexual and gender identity. Indeed, Foucault (1990) famously outlined the ways in which dominant notions of sexuality have evolved throughout history in tandem with changing relations of power, such that current understandings of sexuality and gender as innate must be understood as discursively produced and deployed, rather than as inherently true. In a queer understanding of the subject, the self is not stable, nor fixed, but is compelled to appear to be so, and to appear so in ways that align with normative understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. To that end, queer theory posits a relational subjectivity that is not wholly individuated but that is always “contingent, multiple and unstable; constituted within historically, geographically and socially specific social relations” (Browne and Nash, 2016, p. 4). Starting from a queer understanding of subjectivity requires a different approach to conducting and/or interpreting the findings from sex research; an approach that, at the very least troubles the quest for definitive answers about a topic like porn. Instead, as Browne and Nash (2016) argue, queer research complicates the meanings that can be drawn from its findings, and even seeks to undermine “the supposed coherence, reliability and generalisability regarded as a central concern to some social scientists” (Browne and Nash, 2016, p. 11). Queer research is, therefore, different from research conducted with individuals who identify (or have been identified) in some way as queer. As Ghaziani and Brim (2019) explain, there is no method that is queer full stop; rather “methods are queered when we use the tenets of queer theory to tweak or explode what is possible with our existing procedures” (p. 15). Queered research therefore deliberately attends in some way to the relational, the positional, the intersubjective and affective aspects of research and of being in this world; it embraces “the mess” (Ghaziani and Brim (2019), p. 13) of sociality, without seeking to clean it up. In practice, queered research has looked like many things: a consideration of the “emotional provocations” of teaching queer pedagogies in a sex education classroom (Quinlivan, 2012); a reflection on the racialized erotics of conducting participatory action research with incarcerated women (Fields, 2019); even a queered deconstruction of sexual identity categories in the UK census (Browne, 2010). However, a scan of recent literature contemplating queer(ed) research reveals few studies using focus groups as the central method. For instance, in Browne and Nash’s (2016) recent collection on Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, focus groups do not appear as the central methodology in any of the research featured in the chapters, and do not appear as a topic in the index at all. Ghaziani and Brim (2019) collection titled Imagining Queer Methods similarly does not include any studies or essays centering focus group research. On the other hand, very few focus group researchers appear to draw on queer theory to deconstruct and destabilize their data or to make sense of the affects and erotics of the research moment itself, with Louisa Allen’s work (2006; 2010) presenting a notable exception. Where queerness does appear in focus group research, it is typically in descriptions of the identity categories of participants (Dimberg et al., 2021; Goldey et al., 2016; Tindall and Waters, 2012). These studies therefore reflect a kind of research about queerness that nevertheless reaffirms those notions of bounded subjectivity that queer theory seeks to disrupt. The dearth of queered research drawing on the focus group method is perhaps a function of the primacy given to other qualitative methods such as interviews and ethnographies, which are seen as capable of going in-depth with participants and of producing those erotic entanglements and intersubjective relations that highlight the relationality and instability of subjectivity (Fields, 2019; Rooke, 2009; Tweedy, 2016). However, rather than making a case for focus groups’ capacity to also go “in-depth” with research subjects, in the remainder of this paper, I suggest that it may in fact be the focus group encounter’s tendency toward superficiality, toward the reproduction of a temporary and unstable sociality, that gives this method its queer methodological potency. In particular, I consider the queer(ed) possibilities of focus groups through an analysis of the ambivalences and inconsistences that arose within a focus group study I conducted with undergraduate students around their experiences with online pornography. Rather than reading these ambivalences and inconsistencies as indicating participants’ deep-rooted uncertainties about pornography, I instead reflect on how the sociality of the focus group encounter compelled participants to perform a kind of nimble subjectivity that was responsive to the changing affects of the conversation as it unfolded, and that also responded to participants’ desires to be rendered intelligible from moment to moment. When read queerly, I see the shifting narratives provided by focus group participants as therefore providing insights into the ways in which subjectivity is never truly fixed but is always and perpetually produced anew.

Study details

The excerpts discussed below are drawn from a larger study involving focus groups with undergraduate university students primarily between the ages of 18–25 around their experiences with and thinking on pornography and sex education. This study took place at a large, suburban university on the outskirts of a major Canadian city. Four focus groups were conducted by the author (a cis, white, female in her 30s) for this study, involving a total of 27 participants. One focus group involved eight female-identified participants and one involved four male-identified students (male participants were hard to come by, as I have explained elsewhere—see Goldstein, 2018). The other two focus groups were mixed-gender, involving eight and seven participants, respectively. Of the mixed-gender participants, three identified as trans/non-binary. Overall, participants’ self-identifications reflected a wide range of ethnic, cultural, and racial diversity, with 22% of participants identifying as Black, 33% as White, 25.5% as Asian/Middle Eastern, 7% as Latinx and 12% as mixed race/ethnicity. Each of the focus group sessions lasted 1.5 h and followed a semi-structured protocol that asked participants to reflect on the discourses in circulation around young people and pornography, to consider their own pornography experiences, and to share their thoughts on how pornography could be incorporated in sex education curricula. Focus groups were video-recorded and transcriptions were then initially analyzed using “narrative thematic analysis” methods (Riessman, 2008), which takes the basics of thematic analysis as identified by Braun and Clarke (2006) but extends it to look for relevant narratives and conversations, rather than coding only for keywords and phrases.

Through the narrative thematic analysis process, I identified two primary ways in which participants talked about pornography: 1) as a problematic object that causes harm for young people, for society, and for those involved in the pornography industry; and 2) as a beneficial object that teaches young people about sex and/or that helps them understand their own sexuality and/or that they use for pleasure. These two general modes of talking about pornography, and the ambivalence about porn that they indicate, are congruent with other qualitative studies that have been conducted with young people around pornography (Bohm et al., 2015; Parvez, 2006; Setty, 2021). However, in these and other studies, ambivalence as a phenomenon remains under-theorized. In the next section, I outline how I make sense of participant ambivalence around porn, and how I see this ambivalence as intimately connected to the queer potential of the focus group method. I then provide some specific examples of what this queer(ed) ambivalence looked like as it played out within and across my focus group study.

Pornography and ambivalence

Within qualitative pornography research, participant ambivalences are typically read at face-value and interpreted as reflecting participants’ feeling two ways about pornography; torn between their enjoyment of pornography and their understanding of porn’s potentially problematic social effects. In the absence of any deeper consideration of the psycho-social nature of ambivalence, ambivalence is presented, then, as a conscious state of being that may eventually be reconciled in time. This understanding of ambivalence aligns with modernist understandings of subjectivity. Schramme (2014) writes that, under conditions of modernity, “to be ambivalent arguably means, at least in one important sense, to be undecided about oneself…Ambivalence is a sign of some form of division of our will, and in that respect a division of our self” (p. 28). Ambivalence is, therefore, at odds with a liberal, rational order, as it “undermines autonomy by undermining the possibility of identification” (Schramme, 2014, p. 30). Ambivalence appears as a discomfiting problem in need of a solution – ostensibly the provision of more information or further education-- so that the divided, irrational subject can be sutured and returned to their whole, rational, decisive self.

However, in seeking to queer my analysis of the ambivalences that arose within my focus group study, I am taking a different approach to understanding the meanings of participants’ ambivalences as they appeared across and within the focus groups. Rather than viewing the ambivalent subject as consciously undecided, queering ambivalence means centering the instability of the subject and attending to the impossibility of ever truly naming our ambivalences for what they are. As Smelser (1998) argues, “many of the dynamics of ambivalence occur beyond the range of consciousness and calculation” (p. 6). This is to say that we cannot and do not always know what forces are pulling us between love and hate, attraction, and repulsion. However, ambivalence as it appears within the focus group setting must also be understood as reflecting the tensions inherent in our (unconscious or semi-conscious) desires to be and be read in certain normative ways. This is particularly true in relation to an object such as porn, which holds a contentious position in what Sara Ahmed (2010) calls the “affective economy” of contemporary society. For Ahmed, we do not produce our affective relations to an object independent of the value already afforded that object, and, not inconsequentially, those objects valued as “happy” are the ones that reaffirm and secure hegemonic relations of power in place, while “unhappy” objects are those that threaten to disrupt the status quo.

Within contemporary society, pornography circulates under signs of unhappiness, associated as it is with the corruption of youth, heterosexuality, and family stability. Indeed, a wide array of media effects research has sought to demonstrate correlations between pornography use and a range of negative social and sexual outcomes, particularly for young people (Massey et al., 2021), while many anti-pornography feminists have critiqued pornography as eroticizing violence against women (Dines et al., 2013). Concerns about young people’s pornography use also circulate widely in mainstream media and public discourse (Attwood, 2007). Pornography, it can almost certainly be said, is an unhappy object par excellence. However, as pornography use has increased over the past two decades and become more normalized, particularly within the lives of young people (Mulholland, 2013), the narratives surrounding pornography’s uses and meanings have become more complex. Recent research points to the erotic and educative value of pornography, particularly for LGBTQ+ young people (Arrington-Sanders et a., 2015; Kubicek et al., 2010), while feminist and queer pornographies explicitly challenge the heterosexism and misogyny of much mainstream porn (Taormino et al., 2013). Furthermore, representations of young people’s normalized pornography use are also increasingly common in the media (Goldstein, 2021). While notions of porn as leading to pain and harm endure, associations of pornography with sex-positivity, liberation, and pleasure are also gaining traction, leading to the possibility for a panoply of affects to attach themselves both to porn and to the porn-viewing subject.

As the excerpts below show, for those tasked with discussing pornography in a public research setting, navigating the complex affective economy that now exists around pornography inevitably leads to the production of expressions of ambivalence. This ambivalence manifested in two ways. Firstly, ambivalence appeared when participants made conflicting and contradictory statements about pornography at different points in time across the focus groups. To make sense of these ambivalences, I offer a queered analysis of participant narratives through explicitly considering the affective context in which these narratives emerged. However, ambivalence also appeared in a different way: in the form of participants at times losing their ability to express a single, cogent thought about pornography at all. Participants within focus groups are in the position of having to produce and perform their desired subjectivity in real time. Expressions of embodied ambivalence therefore demonstrate the hard-fought work involved in performing that subjectivity, and the ways in which this performance is inevitably doomed to come up short.

Results

Ambivalence over time

One of the most striking aspects of the focus groups was that, as shown below, many participants seemed to contradict themselves over the course of the focus groups as they latched on to the different affects circulating at any given moment. For instance, participants seemed to arrive to the focus groups primed to problematize young people’s engagements with pornography. Furthermore, participants may have felt that there was an expectation that they should be critical of porn, particularly in the presence of a female researcher whom they may have assumed was anti-porn (see Goldstein, 2021). For instance, in Focus Group 4, Alisha immediately launched into a discussion of how pornography could lead to “a skewed sexual view. […] you know...a plumber walks in…and you have sex with someone.” In Focus Group 1, the discussion also started with participants’ expressing their concerns about pornography and young people, as in this excerpt from Zoey:

[Porn is] just gonna expose people at like a younger and younger age when, like, the plasticity in your brain, like it can actually, like, change like how you view women, you can't even…feel pleasure with a real person, like I think that's very, like, alarming.

By contrast, while the participants in the all-male focus group did initially suggest that porn might be problematic for young men’s sexual expectations, their concerns seemed to stem from concerns that porn use could lead to a failure to act on one’s desires in the “real” world:

Jay: So if you’re watching porn, for example, right? Then you’re getting aroused, um and that arousal is coming from...I don’t know how to say it.

Abdi: There’s no interaction, it’s just…There’s no effort.

Another participant, Omar, expressed concerns around the porn industry’s promotion of unrealistic body standards, stating that “I think with the porn industry…has created some unrealistic standards…especially when it comes to like the size of the male’s appendage.” The above excerpts all show the many and varying ways in which focus group participants initially problematized pornography. And this critique had an effect on the affect in the room, as participants seemed to take pleasure in producing themselves as savvy and critical pornography viewers. However, as the focus groups continued, and as participants began to warm up to one another and the format, an interesting thing happened: participants began to warm up to porn as well. Indeed, it was often those same participants who had critiqued porn at the outset who also discussed its potentially positive benefits for their own lives. For instance Alisha, Kim and Zhang – each of whom had critiqued various aspects of porn’s perceived influence on young people – discussed pornography as an object that has taught them about the mechanics of sex and the variations in bodies:

Alisha: My initial knowledge about guys and like how their bodies work... Zhang: Yeah. Alisha: It was gay sex, it was just totally gay porn, because like, I didn’t realize like where the prostate was, or like how--just the guy anatomy as a whole. And gay porn was where I first started to learn, I’m like, “Oh, this works a little bit differently”-- Kim: Mmm-hmm. Alisha: And then I started doing research into, like, gay sex, lesbian sex--actually, just sex in general. Like it, it shows you, like... Kim: Variations in vaginas-- Alisha: Yeah! Kim: And variations in body types

Similarly, Zoey, who had been quite vocal about pornography’s distorting effects on male sexuality, shared that she herself watched porn to learn more about male sexual desire:

“Personally, I watch porn just, like, to look at, like, what should I do, like how to please a man, like, how to give a blow job. “Cause, like, when you’re young you don’t know how to do those things and you don’t want to suck your first time [everyone laughs]. So I watched that so I could learn.”

Within the all-male focus group, a shift in tone and therefore in narratives also occurred. For instance, Omar, who had earlier suggested that pornography created unrealistic sexual standards, later suggested that pornography also served a function as a sexual outlet:

Omar: For me it allows, it allows me to focus…let's say when I'm studying and all that stuff, I feel, um, stressed or whatever? It allows me to, it allows--I do whatever, and it allows me to get back to my studying— Facilitator: A little stress relief, yeah. Omar: --stress relief, yeah. So, I think that's a benefit. should different speakers be on different lines?

The excerpts above are but a few of the many, many examples of the ways in which participants seemed to contradict themselves or refute their own points over the course of the focus group, with little consideration of those contradictions. As the focus group progressed and participants became more comfortable, a few participants in each group produced a sex-positive, playful, and even raunchy subjectivity that was unashamed in its desire (see Goldstein, 2021). As some participants experimented with this orientation in the focus group, others followed suit, and soon “happy affects” began to attach to these subjects, and the few participants who remained staunchly anti-porn began to stand out as prudish, judgmental, and conservative. In this context, it is not surprising that participants made statements that seemed to contradict earlier statements they had made, both in content and in tone. This is not to say the swing was absolute; rather, the conversation, the tone, the affect, moved back and forth throughout the course of the focus group. And as the discourse was ambivalent, so too was the affect, and so too, ultimately, were the utterances made by participants.

Ambivalence in the moment

While ambivalence appeared across the focus groups in the form of contradictory statements made over time, ambivalence also appeared, at times, in the form of single, conflicting statements made by individual participants. An example of this kind of ambivalence is evident in the following statement from Bella:

When I think of porn, I think of something that is sexual and pleasurable, but yet, um, so demeaning. Um, I wouldn’t say I look at porn super negatively because some porn, like, scenes or whatever aren’t, like that degrading, they’re like actual, some people really do have those sexual experiences and they do like that, but there’s the ones that are super degrading like throwing up on a person or, you know, peeing, all that kind of stuff, so, where it, like, comes off, where it makes porn seem super bad, so, for me it’s kind of like a fifty-fifty, there’s no, like defining line for me, I think porn is bad, I think porn is good.

Here Bella exemplified ambivalence, even eventually declaring herself “fifty-fifty” on porn as both good and bad. Bella’s ambivalence manifested in the form of a series of half-thoughts, stuttering steps forward and retreats backward, qualifications, and ultimately a conclusion that belied deep uncertainty. It is evident that for Bella, her ambivalence was not merely a state of conscious indecision, but a deeply felt, semi-conscious and even embodied conflict between desire and disgust. Bella appeared compelled to orient herself in the “right” way toward the object of pornography, providing endless qualifications and clarifications around their enjoyment of and pleasure from pornography, continuously resituating it as “unhappy” and herself as therefore still “good,” within the same convoluted statement.

Discussion

What the above excerpts indicate is that young people are collectively wrestling with competing discourses around porn: the normative discourses that situate pornography as inherently problematic and the newly emerging discourses of sex-positivity that embrace it as normal and fun. At the same time, as exemplified in the narrative by Bella, they are also wrestling with their own complicated desires around who they want to be, and who they want to appear to be, in relation to porn. When read through a queer lens, these instances of both collective and individual wrestling reflect, as I have argued, the ways in which selves are dynamic, rather than fixed; responsive to others, opaque sometimes even to themselves, moving with the affects present at any given moment in time, and producing themselves anew in each encounter.

In highlighting the possibilities in reading focus group data queerly, I do not wish to discount the reality that those in a group setting do indeed face issues of silencing and safety, and that this is particularly true for participants who occupy an already marginalized social position. For instance, within my own focus group study, those few participants who were trans and/or non-binary were generally rather reticent, likely due to uncertainty around their safety within the focus group. Still, the notion that those participants were “hiding” something true about their thoughts and feelings on porn negates the possibility that the encounters within focus groups are themselves generative of a new subjectivity and can therefore be transformative, as suggested by Wilkinson (1998). While Wilkinson isn’t drawing on queer theoretical understandings of subjectivity, her consideration of the focus group as hermeneutic hints at the possibility of selves as always in flux, as “becomings” (Grosz, 1999) rather than as fixed, unmutable beings.

These “becomings” may be particularly visible within focus groups that are centered around difficult topics such as pornography, which holds a contentious position both socially and in people’s own lives. As was evident within my own focus group study, the topic of pornography made the social space of the focus group encounter that much more fraught and more likely to produce moments that required participants’ ongoing and dynamic performative self-constructions. This is not to suggest that the stories or details shared by participants in these focus groups did not actually happen. However, I would argue that participants mobilized particular narratives and framed them in particular ways at different moments in response to the changing tone and affect of the focus group. A story about watching porn to learn how to give a blow job, such as that shared by Zoey, could be offered as a sad indictment of ongoing relations of misogyny that force young women to prioritize male sexual pleasure; or as an empowering anecdote of self-education in a sexually repressive culture. Zoey’s uptake and performance of the latter framing reflects the zeitgeist of the focus group in that particular moment in time, but, as I have argued, should not be reified as reflecting her singular and unchanging interpretation of that experience. Instead, it could be said that Zoey “became” pro-pornography in that moment, and likely went on to “become” anti- or pro-pornography long after the focus groups ended in different encounters with different others.

Conclusion

Focus groups have typically been used within sex research as a way to gather many voices and to make new claims about people’s sexual lives, behaviors, identities, and experiences (Frith, 2000). However, as I have argued in this paper, when operating from the position adopted by queer theorists that there is no “truth” to be discovered about sex, and that individuals instead produce the appearance of a cohesive and stable sexuality in order to unconsciously adhere to norms around subjectivity, focus groups might be differently understood; as a method that can make visible the incoherence and instability of the self. The question, of course, is why does this matter? And what value is there in an approach to sex research that rejects the notion that any particular claims can be made about its objects of study?

I want to suggest that what a queer approach to sex research offers in lieu of truths about sex is a kind of research practice rooted in hope; hope that selves and their attachments are not and need not be fixed; hope that we might produce ourselves anew in and through our encounters with others; hope in the possibilities afforded through the forging of new affinities. And hope in the recognition that we are not bounded individuals, but connected to others, moved by others, and in need of others to give our own selves meaning. Certainly focus groups are not the only method through which to engage participants and ourselves as researchers in these practices of hope. But, as I have argued here, the ambivalences that the focus group encounter engenders offer rich moments through which we might confront the fiction of stable subjectivity that underlies modernity. Of course, this can only occur if we allow the ambivalences in our research to remain, and do not seek to resolve them, whether as the research is underway, or later, in our practices of analysis or publication, even if those ambivalences make us uncomfortable (Fields, 2013). Being ‘fifty-fifty’ about contentious topics, and about our sexual selves, is in many ways, the norm and not the exception.

More broadly, holding space for ambivalence can also enliven and enrich our practice as educators, whether we work in the field of sex education or not. As Gilbert (2010) argues, ambivalence as a state of “not knowing or feeling confused” is not a problem to be solved by education but rather may be “the very grounds of learning itself” (p. 236). Making space for the ambivalences that arise in classroom discussions and pointing to them as evidence of the inevitable complexity of being in this world may enable us to move our teaching practices away from an emphasis on knowledge retention and regurgitation, and toward an ethics of generosity and hospitality that asks students to care for whoever and whatever shows up (Gilbert, 2014). Helping students (and ourselves) understand subjectivity as indeterminate and undetermined, as capable of fluidity and flux, and therefore as always undergoing transformation and change may also unburden us (even if only momentarily) from the yoke of modernity that demands intelligibility at all times. Through holding onto the ambivalences in our research and our teaching practices, then, we may do our small part in the broader queer project of “clarifying, without overdetermining, the conditions that make life livable” (Ghaziani and Brim, 2019). For it is perhaps in these moments of undoing, in the joys and terrors of being “fifty-fifty,” in the unresolvable tensions between surface and depth, self and other, individual and social, love and hate, that new selves, new ways of being and relating, and new visions for the future can emerge.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Alanna Goldstein

Dr. Alanna Goldstein’s work examines intersections of youth, sexuality, media, health, and pedagogy. She is deeply invested in conducting qualitative research with young people that attends to the stories they tell about their relational lives, and that moves beyond the tendency to construct young people as inherently at-risk. She is committed to developing sex, relationships, and health education pedagogies that are meaningful, comprehensive, and intersectional, and that center an ethics of care.

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