Feminism & Psychology

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Queer(y)ing the Straight Researcher: The Relationship(?) between

Researcher Identity and Anti-Normative Knowledge
Louisa Allen
Feminism & Psychology 2010 20: 147
DOI: 10.1177/0959353509355146

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 Louisa ALLEN

Queer(y)ing the Straight Researcher: The Relationship(?)

between Researcher Identity and Anti-Normative
Knowledge

This article considers whether ‘straight’ identified researchers can produce anti-normative
knowledge. This question derives from debates around what (if any) contribution ‘straight’
researchers can make to queer theory/research. While recognizing that political and ethi-
cal decisions are integral to this discussion, I focus on the epistemological implications
of straight researchers’ participation in queer theory/research. This discussion grapples
with a wider issue within identity politics around the participation of researchers who are
regarded as representing the ‘norm’. I trouble the relationship between identity and know­
ledge by arguing that sexual identity does not determine the production of anti-­normative
knowledge. Insights from queer theory are employed to interrogate the power of hetero­
normativity in generating ‘normative’ knowledge, and elucidating whether these practices
are invested in particular sexual identities.

Key Words: anti-normative knowledge, heteronormativity, identity politics, ‘queer

straight’, subjectification

The influence of a researcher’s biography on their choice of object(s) of investi­

gation and subsequent production of knowledge has occupied social science
researchers for the past twenty years. Traditionally, those features of a research-
er’s biography scrutinized for effect have been ‘ethnicity’, ‘gender’ and ‘class’.
These investigations have stimulated debate around whether for example, men
can be feminists (Digby, 1998; Schacht and Ewing, 1998) and the place of white
researchers in antiracist studies (Hill, 1997; Jensen, 2005). By comparison,
there has been less attention to how a researcher’s sexual identity impacts on the
research process (for exceptions see Braun, 2000; La Pastina, 2006; Peel, 2001;
and Rhoads, 1997) although some disciplines like geography (Hubbard, Matthews
and Scoular, 2008; Valentine, 2002; Vanderbeck, 2005) and anthropology (Kulick,

Feminism & Psychology © 2010 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and
Washington DC) http://fap.sagepub.com, Vol. 20(2): 147–165; 0959-3535
DOI: 10.1177/0959353509355146

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148 Feminism & Psychology 20(2)

1995; Lewin and Leap, 1996; Markowitz and Ashkenazi, 1999; Wade, 1993) have
given more consideration to this issue. Many of those who have written about the
impact of their sexuality on research have identified as gay, ­lesbian or bisexual
(e.g. Gardner Honeychurch, 1996; Heapy, Weeks and Donovan, 1998; Jensen,
1997; Luff, 1999; Paulin, 1996; Valentine, 2002; and Weston, 2004). Feminists
have also grappled with the impact of a researcher’s sexuality on the produc-
tion of knowledge. These researchers have offered fieldwork accounts of sexual
harassment and how female researchers negotiate moments in which their sexual
identities are invoked (Coffey, 2002; Hutchinson et al., 2002; Lee, 1997; Pascoe,
2007). The emergence of queer theory1 has helped broaden this discussion to
a consideration of the place and contribution of ‘straight’ researchers in queer
research. As its title suggests, this article enters this debate by querying the place
of the straight researcher in queer scholarship by applying a ‘queer’ interrogation
of the identity/knowledge relation.
Although I focus on ‘straight’ researchers working with queer scholarship I
address a wider issue within identity politics: how to ‘assess the epistemologi-
cal, political and ethical implications of the participation of those critics who are
regarded as representative of the norm’ (Schlichter, 2004: 548). Others have
concentrated on the political and ethical implications of straight researchers’
working with queer theory/subjects (Thomas, 2000). While recognizing political
and ethical decisions are integral to this discussion, I focus on the epistemologi-
cal implications of straight researchers’ participation in queer scholarship. This
debate provides an example of the complexities of accounting for multiple, fluid
and contradictory subjectivities in research/theory in the post-modern moment.
At the centre of this investigation are questions about the relationship between
identity and knowledge relevant to all social scientists. While concentrating
on the specific, this critique troubles wider assumptions about the relationship
between identity and knowledge production.
The issue of ‘straight’ theorists in queer scholarship is often structured in terms
of their right to this field and what contribution if any, they could make. Calvin
Thomas’ (2000) book Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of
Heterosexuality offers this approach. Illuminating the central concern of this
book, Thomas poses ‘to what extent could an otherwise “straight” subject elabo-
rate a queer criticism’? (Thomas, 2000: 11). I am not interested in conceptualizing
the debate in terms of establishing or de-establishing the legitimacy of ‘straight’
researchers’ contribution to queer research. Such a construction has been useful
in relation to political and ethical justifications for straight researchers’ exclusion
from and/or presence in the field. In concentrating on epistemological concerns,
I argue for a different framing where the relationship between knowledge and
identity is more complexly drawn. Thomas’s question above assumes a relation-
ship between identity and the ability to be critically queer, with straight identity
perceived as inhibitive. In another important contribution to this field, Schlichter
(2004) proposes that ‘queer straights’’ claims to a transgressive queer identity are
problematic for their presence in queer scholarship. Schlichter argues this claim

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ALLEN: Queer(y)ing the Straight Researcher 149

to heterosexual identity reinscribes heterosexuality’s normative status, failing to

subvert a hegemonic identity. In Schlichter and Thomas’s conceptualization of
the debate, how one identifies, ‘queerly’ or ‘as straight with a twist’, is understood
as integral to any knowledge claim or contribution a researcher can make.
I attempt to elucidate the limits of framing this issue in terms of ‘legitimacy’
or ‘claims’ to queer projects based exclusively on identity. While not wishing to
dismiss the influence of identity altogether (as it illuminates a subject’s location
within particular overarching structures), I do want to interrogate the notion that
one’s identity determines how one produces knowledge. This critique is theoreti-
cal, employing Butler’s (1990, 2004) ideas about performativity and subjectifi-
cation to examine whether heterosexual identity is essentially ‘normative’ (i.e.
bound always to produce normative locations/thoughts/acts). As a theoretical
discussion, the article interweaves and critically addresses important insights
from Thomas’s (2000) and Schlichter’s (2004) seminal texts.
The motivation for this theoretical exploration is derived from my own frus-
tration and musings about how to dislodge heteronormativity. Despite a com-
mitment to sexual/social justice in education (my disciplinary area), there have
been moments when heteronormativity has ensnared me in spite of my will. This
article is an attempt to understand with recourse to queer theory the mechanisms
by which this might happen, and involves reflecting on one such moment while
conducting research with gay, lesbian and bisexual students in New Zealand
secondary schools. This moment is not offered as ‘evidence’ of an ambiguous
identity/knowledge relation in the traditional empirical sense. Instead, it provides
the ‘materially-lived’ point of departure for my theoretical analysis. Another
research instance works similarly, as a moment that provokes theoretical delib-
eration rather than exemplifying a ‘truth’ about identity and knowledge. Through
this theoretical discussion my aim is to demonstrate that an active desire to disas-
sociate from heterosexual identity and not re-inscribe heterosexuality as ‘normal’
does not guarantee escape from participation in heteronormative practices. I
argue with reference to the work of Warner (1993) and Butler (1990, 2004) that
what mediates the production of (hetero)normative knowledge is heteronormativ-
ity and that this is not bound to particular identity categories.
In an article dedicated to disrupting the implied connection between who we
are (our identity) and what knowledge we can produce, it may seem incongruent
to declare one’s identity. For some readers, however, this article would be unin-
telligible and lack authenticity without this ‘disclosure’. While many researchers
have historically employed the term ‘heterosexual’ to describe their sexual iden-
tity in academic writing (Braun, 2000; Du Plessis, 2004; Hollway, 1993; Segal,
1994), here I utilize the word ‘straight’. This descriptor is employed by lesbian,
bisexual and queer researchers to reference heterosexuals and it is this aspect
of ascription which attracts me (Ingraham, 2005; Rodriguez and Pinar, 2007).
My embodiment of this concept means a woman in a monogamous, long-term
sexual/emotional relationship with a man with whom I have a child. Rodriguez
and Pinar (2007: ix) explain that in the 1960s ‘we used the term [straight] not in

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150 Feminism & Psychology 20(2)

a sexually specific sense but to refer to anyone who was not “hip”, that is, any-
one who accepted uncritically the official, cultural and political “curriculum”’.
As a researcher and educator I seek critical engagement with (hegemonic) het-
erosexuality and so do not take up ‘straight’ as an uncritical position in the way
Rodriquez describes. What ‘straight’ identity encapsulates for me is recognition
of a normative heterosexual social and institutional order by which I benefit, and
that I simultaneously seek to change.

THE POLITICS OF POSITION: THE LANDSCAPE OF IDENTITY POLITICS

Identity’s importance in relation to the production of knowledge is an issue which

emerged out of a critique of positivist methodologies characteristic of the natural
sciences. Positivist researchers constitute social reality as objectively knowable
and comprising essential truths that exist beyond the researcher (Davidson and
Tolich, 2003). Critiquing this standpoint, interpretive social scientists have dis-
puted the possibility that ‘truths’ about the world can be objectively accessed
by researchers (Flick, 2006). This assumption is premised on a view of social
reality as contextually contingent and subsequently contestable. Researchers
are perceived to actively make meaning from the world rather than seeking to
uncover a pre-determined reality (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000). This production
of meaning is influenced by their own social location and shaped by structures
such as class, gender, ethnicity, physical ability and age. Such intersecting social
structures influence how researchers perceive phenomena, rendering knowledge
necessarily subjective.
Knowledge that researchers produce is also understood as contingent upon
features of context such as the researcher/researched relationship. A significant
literature has emerged from the qualitative social sciences explicating the opera-
tion of power relations in this setting and their effect on knowledge production
(Conti and O’Neill, 2007; hooks, 1992; Stanley and Wise, 1993; Wilkinson and
Kitzinger, 1996). How researcher and participant are located within overarch-
ing social structures and their perception of this positioning impacts upon data
production. Cain (1993: 88) explains that ‘anyone producing knowledge occu-
pies a relational and historical site in the social world which is likely to shape
and set limits to the knowledge formulations produced’. Predominantly this
literature depicts a dynamic where researchers exercise greater authority over the
research process than participants. This situation is accentuated when researcher
and participant correspond to categories of adult/child, white/of colour, middle
class/poor, man/woman and disabled/non-disabled, etc. From this perspective,
knowledge is always ‘specific and contextual and located in relation to the subject
positions of its producers’ (Watts, 2006: 401).
Associated with issues of positioning are debates concerning whether there
is greater advantage in being an ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ in relation to fieldwork
communities (Pitman, 2002). A perceived advantage of being an ‘outsider’ in

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ALLEN: Queer(y)ing the Straight Researcher 151

sexuality research is that participants may be more willing to recount intimate

or personal details to someone they have no enduring association with. In
these situations fear of negative repercussions resulting from shared intimacies
may be reduced. A general argument for ‘insider’ status concerns participants’
greater propensity to share information which might otherwise be censored from
‘non-group’ members (Lambevski, 1999; Weston, 2004). Group membership is
thought to afford deeper understanding of associated politics, enhancing rapport
and exchange of information.
‘Insider status’ is often perceived as beneficial in research involving gay, les-
bian and bisexual participants. Working with gay and lesbian youth, Herdt and
Boxer (1993) maintained that, ‘being gay made it possible for us, both by social
identity and sensitivity to the issues, to gain entry into the gay and lesbian com-
munity’ (pp. xvii–xviii). Such rationalizations for gay researchers are premised
on a history of research which has conceptualized gay, lesbian and bisexual
attractions negatively as ‘deviance’ (Seidman, 2000). Serving as a tool for mar-
ginalizing these identities, such deficit studies represent a form of heteronormal-
izing practice (see discussion of this term below). Critique of pathologizing work
proposed that gay, lesbian and bisexual researchers can produce better accounts
of participants’ experience as their ‘shared sexual identity’ helps illuminate sexual
injustice (Griffin, 1996). This argument reveals an assumed relationship between
‘shared identity’ and the generation of ‘better’ knowledge. The assertion of ‘bet-
ter’ rests on these researchers being closely acquainted with the material realities
of gay, lesbian and bisexual lived experience and their subsequent identification
and empathy with associated discrimination (Valentine, 2002). Implicit within
these critiques is that gay, lesbian and bisexual identity precludes implication in
heteronormative practices while heterosexuality virtually ensures it.
While strong political reasons for researchers being ‘insiders’ exist, the slip-
periness of this location highlights some caveats. The complexities of ‘insider’
status have been noted by researchers documenting the fluid and shifting nature
of this positioning (Bolak, 1997). Lesbian, gay and bisexual researchers have
signalled that a shared element of identity does not necessarily translate into
common understandings and empathies. Reflecting on their research experiences,
Kennedy and Davis (1996) identified that ‘the common bond of lesbianism and
familiarity with the social context did not make positioning ourselves in relation
to the complex and powerful forces of class, race and gender oppression – not
to mention homophobia – easy’ (p. 173). Similarly, reflecting on this issue of
‘insider status’, Rasmussen (2006) argues:

A shared sexual identity does not automatically make researchers more sensi-
tive. Sexual and gender identities are only one factor mediating relationships
between researcher and participants, and if these are shared, they do not neces-
sarily produce more empathetic or inclusive effects. Other elements of research-
ers’ and participants’ biographies will inevitably influence the research process;
therefore, it may be prudent not to assume shared knowledge or interests, regard-
less of the biography of those involved. (Rasmussen, 2006: 47)

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152 Feminism & Psychology 20(2)

When identity categories are an emergent feature of on-going negotiation in

research, ‘insider’ status can be fractured/fleeting (Best, 2003). These insights
foreground the difficulty in asserting that particular identities necessarily afford
a specified way of viewing the world and subsequent relationship to knowledge.
For those who see identity as at least contextually stable, subject positions create
limits to what we can know. From this perspective there is a relationship (often
perceived as causal) between identity and knowledge. A problem with asserting
this causal relationship emerges when identity is understood as a constellation
of multiple and unstable positions, as it is conceptualized within post-structural-
ism (Beasley, 2005). If identity is a perpetually moving target, that is repeatedly
negotiated and fluid, how can a relationship with knowledge be characterized or
even affirmed? This argument does not refute the notion of situated and partial
knowledge contingent on the social location of researchers. The structural and
material conditions of existence position subjects in particular ways which medi-
ate access to knowledge and its production. What I want to trouble is the sense
that this positioning is stable and unambiguous enough to claim that identity (that
is, being gay, straight, female, male, black, white) dictates a particular relation-
ship to knowledge. Before explicating this thinking with reference to the work of
Butler (1995) and Warner (1993), I want to canvas how ‘straight’ researchers have
endeavoured to place themselves within queer scholarship.

STRAIGHT, IN A QUEER WORLD

In explaining their relationship to queer scholarship, some ‘straight’ research-

ers have positioned themselves in ways which imply identity’s connection with
knowledge. Cognisant of how heterosexuality as a set of institutional practices
has subordinated and marginalized other forms of sexuality, these researchers
have endeavoured to dissociate from this identity. In an article about how
straights working in/with queer theory identify themselves, Fairyington (2004)
describes the ‘new’ phenomenon of the ‘post-straight’. This concept documents
a trend since the 1990s of heterosexuals rejecting the label of ‘straight’ in favour
of terminology such as ‘queer straight’ or ‘queer heterosexual’. Motivations
for this de-identification are variously explored by heterosexual academics that
Fairyington interviewed. Repudiating a heterosexual identity is claimed as a way
of ‘not asserting heteronormativity’. Rejection of the term ‘straight’ for one pro-
fessor is perceived as ‘challenging the binary thinking that pits straight against
gay’ (Fairyington, 2004: 33). Another tactic employed by some scholars was
practicing ‘a radical privacy as the best response to State forms of surveillance
and categorization’ (Fairyington, 2004: 33).
Straights who attempt to disavow or queer themselves believe how one identi-
fies has ramifications for one’s participation in heteronormative practices. By
refuting a heterosexual identity, the hope is to elude the clutches of heteronor-
mativity and implication in its operation. While these academics are committed

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ALLEN: Queer(y)ing the Straight Researcher 153

to anti-homophobic projects and decentring heterosexuality as ‘normal’, the

effectiveness of such naming politics might be questioned. Refusing to reveal the
heterosexual self may also act as a reassertion of a heteronormative privilege of
privacy (Schlichter, 2004: 551). Berlant and Warner (2000, cited in Schlichter,
2004: 551) describe this conspicuous straight silence on sexual matters as reflec-
tive of a ‘privatised sexual culture [that] bestows on its sexual practices a tacit
sense of rightness and normalcy and reinforces its cultural hegemony’. As the
research moments described next indicate, de-identifying with and de-centring
heterosexuality may not be enough to prevent one’s implication in heteronorma-
tivity.

TWO RESEARCH MOMENTS

The following episodes occurred during research to determine the content and
form of a sexuality education resource for students aged 16–19 years (see Allen,
2007). Focus groups comprised one data collection method2 and were employed
to gauge what young people felt sexuality education had covered well and areas
for future improvement. Ten focus groups involving a total of 81 participants3
were conducted: the participants in two groups volunteered from a community
organization dedicated to supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual and takatapui4 youth.
The two moments shared below occurred in these groups.
What interests me about the first episode is that it occurred despite my best
efforts to interrogate and disrupt normative assumptions about gender/sexuality
through my conduct as a researcher and the project design. For example, partici-
pants in all groups were asked to discuss the inclusion of resource topics relating
to a plethora of subordinated issues such as being ‘transgendered’ or ‘intersex’
and the concepts of ‘homophobia’ and ‘heterosexism’. Given schools have been
determined as predominately heteronormative spaces (Epstein, O’Flynn and
Telford, 2003; Quinlivan, 2006; Rasmussen, 2006), this discussion was ‘disrup-
tive’ for introducing discourses of gender and sexuality which questioned the
‘naturalness’ of heterosexuality and binary notions of gender.
I also sought to ‘undo’ heteronormative assumptions in my use of written
and verbal language with participants. A questionnaire which most focus group
participants also completed attempted to deconstruct binary notions of gender
by enabling them to identify as ‘female’, ‘male’ and/or ‘something else’. If par-
ticipants chose ‘the something else’ option they were asked to indicate how they
wished to name themselves with the request, ‘Please specify’. Some example
descriptors were supplied to assist in this task: ‘e.g. both male and female, neither
female nor male, transgender, transsexual’. These options were not meant to be
restrictive (i.e. the participant could reject them and employ their own terminol-
ogy) nor were they mutually exclusive (i.e. a participant could identify as male
and transgendered). This question had been designed in consultation with mem-
bers of the transgender community in New Zealand. Rather than being intended

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154 Feminism & Psychology 20(2)

to collect accurate data about transgendered youth, it was politically motivated to

question gender as a dualism (see Allen, 2005).
A further means of unsettling heterosexuality’s central conceptual status was
to position myself as ‘straight with a twist’. Influenced at the time by Thomas’s
(2000) book, I wrote the following ‘justification’ for this positioning in an earlier
publication: ‘I see myself as “straight” in terms of being (hetero)sexual, however
“the twist” is my recognition of the fluidity and diversity of sexual identities and
a political/theoretical interest and commitment to decentring (hetero)sexuality’
(Allen, 2006: 168). This statement is framed by a concern with identity as
related to knowledge production and a need to claim a space in the field through
the identity of ‘straight with a twist’. Schlichter (2004) and Thomas (2000)
might conceptualize this identification as an attempt to enact a critical straight
politics or even to assert a ‘queer straight identity’. This naming was certainly
aimed at dismantling the normative status of heterosexuality and as a means
of extricating myself from its institutional apparatus. However, these measures
of de-­identification were insufficient to prevent my implication in the practice of
heteronormativity.

Moment One: Thinking ‘Straight’ While Explicitly Trying Not To

Despite my desire to de-identify with heterosexuality and associated institutional
practices, these practices structured my understanding of participant conversa-
tion in the following research moment. This narrative comes from a focus group
where a participant provides an example of the invisibility and denial of gay and
bisexual attraction at a private all-boys school.

Greg: At Totara High School it was so bad that they had, you could buy tickets
to the ball as either a double or a single.
Everyone: (Noises of recognition).
Greg: If you brought a double, say it was uhm $100 for two, for a single it was
like $60 for one so it would always be cheaper to get two friends and go
as a double. They wouldn’t let you do that if you were two guys, it’s like
that’s cheating. You’re cheating them out of money basically.
Louisa: As if they haven’t got enough anyway.
Greg: That’s not even the point you know.
Louisa: No it’s not.
Greg: … they didn’t want two guys to have the same ticket let alone what their
intentions might have been … but I guess the biggest kind of part of sec-
ondary school for me was the invisibility of it [gay and bisexuality] okay.
It’s not that necessarily there was a whole lot of stuff against it, but there
was never anything for it and there was never any mention of the word
[gay or bisexual] ever. (Community focus group, mixed gender)

At this school the rules around the purchase of ball tickets indicate the incom­
prehensibility and subsequent refusal of the gay or bisexual subject. The possibility
that two young men might want to accompany each other as partners to the ball
was unfathomable and instead manifested in a more ‘palatable’ form as trying

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ALLEN: Queer(y)ing the Straight Researcher 155

to ‘cheat’ the school out of $20. What has since worried me about this exchange
was that I did not immediately register Greg’s point about the invisibility of gay
and bisexual students. Instead, I picked up on the issue of money, and it is not
until Greg’s challenge of my response that I signal I ‘get it’ with the words ‘No
it’s not’. An aim of the fieldwork was to listen for heteronormative practices in
young people’s talk in order to identify their means of operation at school. How
could I be so determined to disrupt heteronormativity and yet slide so easily into
its perpetuation?

Moment Two: The ‘Gay’ Teacher and Heteronormativity

The second research moment involved another gay, lesbian and bisexual focus
group’s discussion around a different refusal to acknowledge the ‘gay subject’ at
school, but this time by a teacher who students knew to be ‘lesbian’.
Jemma: We had a gay health teacher and she said uhm, what happens, what feel-
ings do you get when you go through puberty and stuff and everyone was
like, ‘you start feeling attracted to the opposite sex’. And she was like
‘good’ you know and wrote it up on the board. And I was like the only
one in the class that was like [puts on a look of disbelief and others laugh]
who was going, but she’s gay and she didn’t even mention it.
Cameron: Which is pretty weak aye?
Jemma: Yeah and I thought my god why didn’t she mention attraction for the same
sex? (Focus group, not at school)

Jemma’s retelling of this incident indicates her disappointment that the teacher
failed to acknowledge same-sex attraction in her portrait of puberty. Jemma
and Cameron’s comments imply this elision was more dismaying than when
perpetuated by a heterosexual teacher because she was lesbian (something
Jemma had learned when approaching her for support around issues of sexuality).
Cameron communicates this sentiment when he judges the teacher’s actions
as ‘pretty weak’, suggesting she let ‘same-sex attracted’ students down. In the
same way that heterosexual identity is assumed to produce heteronormative
knowledge, the logic underlying these participants’ disappointment is that being
lesbian should engender the production of anti-normative knowledge.
Without access to the teacher’s justification for not challenging heteronorma-
tivity, it is not possible to determine her motivation. Work by Ferfolja (2007)
suggests that failing to acknowledge same-sex attraction might serve as a protec-
tive strategy some teachers adopt to prevent questions about their own sexual
identity. In her research with 17 self-identified lesbian teachers in Australia,
Ferfolja argues these techniques for managing sexual identity ‘do not necessarily
mean oppression, that passing does not equate to failure and that one does not
necessarily have to be “out” to have agency’ (2007: 58). Whatever the reason for
this omission, its effect was to act as a heteronormative practice which serves
to centre heterosexuality and to ‘other’ gay, lesbian and bisexual identities and
experiences.

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156 Feminism & Psychology 20(2)

In attempting to make sense of this second research moment I was left won-
dering about heteronormativity’s power to work on subjects regardless of their
sexual identity. With reference to the work of Warner (1993) and Butler (1990,
2004) I propose that the production of (hetero)normative knowledge appears to
be mediated by heteronormativity and that this is not bound to particular identity
categories. Before making this point I employ queer insights relating to subjecti-
fication as one way of explaining why straight identity may not be queered. This
discussion offers a way of thinking about why my identifying (at the time) as
‘straight with a twist’ did not work.

STRAIGHTS AND THE PRODUCTION OF ANTI-NORMATIVE KNOWLEDGE?

Queer theory offers a way of understanding identity that has implications for con-
ceptualizing straight researchers’ relationship with anti-normative knowledge. By
queer theory, I mean the body of thinking that emerged from the late 1980s and
early 1990s epitomized by Butler (1990, 2004), Sedgwick, (1990), Jagose (1996),
Halberstam (1998) and Fuss (1989). A central concern of queer theorists is desta-
bilizing all gender/sexual identities, as well as central and foundational social ideas
(Beasley, 2005). While historically lesbian and gay politics have organized around
identity as a necessary prerequisite for effective political action (Sullivan, 2003),
queer theory ‘exemplifies a more mediated relation to categories of identification’
(Jagose, 1996: 77). Part of this shift is an acknowledgement of the limitations of
identity categories, which symbolize, but do not always represent, collectivity and
unity (Piontek, 2006). Identity categories can also be exclusionary, cementing and
regulating normative modes of being. Diversity within identity categories makes it
problematic to claim that those encompassed within them act, think or even look
in certain ways as a consequence of such membership (Hall, 2003). This idea has
implications for heterosexuality, suggesting it is similarly diverse as an identity in
practice and form(s) of attraction (Segal, 1994). It also acknowledges that not all
straights need be captured by the categories ‘those who would do GLBTQ [gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, queer] folk physical and psychological harm’ or
‘those who do not go out of their way necessarily to cause harm but lack a critical
engagement with heterosexuality’ (Rodriguez, 2007).
Queer theory’s insistence on the incoherence and instability of identity also
has implications for thinking through straight researchers’ relationships to anti-
normative knowledge. Influenced by post-structural theory, queer understand-
ings refuse identity as fixed, coherent and natural and instead recognize this as
provisional and contingent (Kirsch, 2000). Queer theories work to deconstruct
identity categories in ways that disrupt gender and sexual binaries and the cultural
intelligibility they imbue. A key contribution here has been the destabilization of
­heterosexuality as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ through concepts such as the ‘hetero-
sexual matrix’ which refers to ‘that grid of cultural intelligibility through which
bodies, genders and desires are naturalized’ (Butler, 1990: 308).

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ALLEN: Queer(y)ing the Straight Researcher 157

Despite its appearance of solidity, heterosexuality’s instability makes possible

its rearticulation in ways that resist heteronormativity. Butler’s (1990) theoriza-
tion of the subject makes the mechanism by which this occurs apparent. Referring
to the category ‘gender’ Butler posits this identity as a ‘performance’ rather than
something which is individually possessed. Through everyday social and cultural
practices, gender is repeatedly ‘performed’ in order to create the illusion of being
‘natural’ or ‘fixed’. The illusory nature of ‘gender’ means no essential category
pre-exists this identity. Rather, ‘gender’ comes into being through these ‘per-
formances’ (Butler, 1990: 140–1). When applied to heterosexuality, this identity,
‘which passes itself off as natural and therefore in no need of explanation, is
reframed by Butler as a discursive production, an effect of the sex/gender system
which purports merely to describe it’ (Jagose, 1996: 84). The radical potential of
this ‘becoming’ exists in the possibility of failed repetition or one which digresses
from its predecessor. This process may occur deliberately through a calculated
violation of gender/sexuality norms or from the fissures and fractures which
occur in performances opening other ways of ‘doing gender/sexuality’.
From this perspective, the straight who attempts to deconstruct and decentre
their own sexual identity might be considered such an aberration. The incon-
sistency in heterosexuality’s rearticulation is a refusal to take this identity for
granted, and to acknowledge it as normal. Despite the potential glitch in this
‘performance’ of heterosexual identity Schlichter (2004) reminds us that such
efforts continue to reinscribe the centrality and normalcy of heterosexuality. How
is it that a transgressive act does not result in the subversion of sexual identity
norms it appears to promise?
This situation might be viewed as a necessary condition of the process of
becoming a subject (i.e. subjectification). The process of subjectification is char-
acterized by simultaneous submission and mastery and is not possible without
both. Explaining this principle, Butler writes:

The more a practice is mastered, the more fully subjection is achieved.

Submission and mastery take place simultaneously, and it is this paradoxical
simultaneity that constitutes the ambivalence of subjection. Where one might
expect submission to consist of a yielding to an externally imposed dominant
order, and to be marked by a loss of control and mastery, it is paradoxically
marked by mastery itself … the lived simultaneity of submission as mastery,
and mastery as submission, is the condition of possibility of the subject itself.
(Butler, 1995: 45–46)

If there is no subject that precedes power and the subject is brought into being as
an effect of discursive conditions, then the subject is only made possible through
its reiteration and confirmation of those conditions. In the case of ‘queer straights’,
the mastery of ‘queer’ involves a simultaneous and paradoxical submission to
heterosexuality. To claim a ‘queer straight’ identity necessitates the reinstatement
of heterosexuality which provides the discursive conditions for its existence.
Heterosexuality and its contingent relations of power are therefore seemingly

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158 Feminism & Psychology 20(2)

inescapable in this identity category. For Schlichter (2004), what is most

problem­atic about this dilemma is ‘queer straights’’ failure to deconstruct these
conditions of possibility and their implications for anti-normative knowledge.
While Schlichter (2004) conceptualizes this as an oversight in their uptake of
this identity category, it may also be an exorable element of the process of queer
straight subjectification.
These theoretical explorations offer one way of understanding the first research
moment above. This episode may imply the inescapability of my heterosexual
identity (despite my explicit wish to de-identify, as ‘straight with a twist’)
and, subsequently, the contingent (re)production of normative knowledge. In
this explanation, a lineal relationship is posited between sexual identity and
the production of knowledge. This reading assumes that my ‘heteronormative’
interpretation of Greg’s point is a consequence of an inability to cast-off hetero­
sexual identity (as a necessary consequence of ‘queer straight’ subjecthood).
From this perspective, heterosexuals who attempt to disrupt the normalization
of their identity can only ever be heterosexuals (and not queer straights) who,
even if unwittingly, (re)produce normative knowledge. However, this is not the
only way of thinking about this research moment. I turn now to the concept of
heteronormativity.

HETEROSEXUALITY AND HETERONORMATIVITY: A NECESSARY RELATION?

Another way of thinking about my initial grasping of Greg’s point as one about
money rather than the invisibility of gay and bisexual students is through the
concept of heteronormativity. Rather than being a consequence of ‘failed’ ‘queer
straight’ identity, I could read this slippage as a sign of heteronormativity’s
potency. Warner (1993: xxi–xxv) explains heteronormativity as ‘organizing all
patterns of thought, awareness, and belief around the presumption of a universal
heterosexual desire, behaviour and identity’. Heteronormativity inheres in institu-
tions, meanings and practices that render heterosexuality not only coherent but
also privileged (Berlant and Warner, 1998). This privileging occurs through a sex/
gender binary which maintains that sexual desire occurs only between women
and men. While legitimating and normalizing heterosexuality this binary simul-
taneously casts same-sex desire as ‘deviant’. Within this binary homosexuality
and heterosexuality are interdependent, only making sense in relation to each
other with ‘heterosexuality’ signifying everything the marked term ‘homosexual-
ity’ does not (Sedgwick, 1990). As Quinlivan (2004: 89) explains, ‘the norma-
tive power of heterosexuality depends on the marked nature of homosexuality
because it is only in relation to homosexuality that heterosexuality can define
itself as socially valued and normative’. Rather than symbolizing an identifiable
body of thought, heteronormativity informs a plethora of practices, institutions,
conceptual understandings and social structures (Sullivan, 2003). It constitutes
the ‘social air we breathe’.

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ALLEN: Queer(y)ing the Straight Researcher 159

The importance of heteronormativity in examining the relationship between

straight identity and anti-normative knowledge lies in its connection to hetero-
sexuality. Warner (1993: xxvi) contends that ‘“queer” defines itself against the
normal rather than the heterosexual’. Instead of signifying any specific sexual
identity, the concept of queer ‘suggests the difficulty in defining the population
whose interests are at stake in queer politics’ (Warner, 1993: xxvi). This challenge
may be a consequence of the omnipresence of heteronormativity, which means
that everyone’s interests are at stake in queer politics. Research documenting
homophobic bullying of effeminate (but not necessarily gay-identified) boys
reveals that heteronormative practices have negative repercussions beyond gay
and lesbian subjects (Pascoe, 2007).
Similarly, Butler (1990) differentiates between regulatory systems such as the
‘heterosexual matrix’ and heterosexuality as an identity. This theoretical distinc-
tion suggests the potential of heterosexual disassociation from heteronormativ-
ity, enabling the deconstruction of an individual’s implication in such practices.
This theoretical positioning refuses to bind critically queer activities to specific
sexual identities, opening the way for straight participation in queer projects. If,
as Butler (1990) and Warner (1993) propose, heteronormativity is not implied
by heterosexuality, then it should be possible (at least theoretically) for straights
to produce anti-(hetero)normative knowledge. This theorization suggests a more
complicated relationship between straight identity and normative/anti-normative
practice than one where identity dictates practice.
This theoretical positioning also offers a way of reading the gay, lesbian
and bisexual students’ frustration at their lesbian teacher for reasserting hetero­
sexuality’s normalcy in their puberty lesson. If heteronormativity is not implied
by heterosexuality, then its relationship with other identities may also be more
ambiguous. Put another way, gay, lesbian and bisexual identities are potentially
just as able to produce heteronormative knowledge. Duggan’s (2002: 179) work
around homonormativity as ‘a politics that does not contest dominant hetero-
normative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them’ suggests
this possibility. If the necessary relation between heterosexuality and normative
knowledge can be severed, might the implicit relation between gay, lesbian and
bisexual identity and the production of anti-normative knowledge also be ques-
tioned? Might this be one way of understanding why this lesbian teacher may
have perpetuated heteronormativity, despite her sexual identity?

(UN)ENDING

I have endeavored to tease out the possible relationship between sexual identity
and knowledge in order to consider straight researchers’ contribution to queer
theory/projects. The point of my discussion has not been to make a claim for
straights or even ‘straight queers’ in this field. Such a discussion invokes ethi-
cal and political considerations which are not the focus of this article. Instead, I

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160 Feminism & Psychology 20(2)

have been interested in an epistemological concern with a possible relationship

between identity and knowledge and its potential nature. The framing of this dis-
cussion might be interpreted as an argument for identity as inconsequential for
those engaging in queer projects. This conclusion is not my intention, as identity
can be an important political and ethical category on which to exclude or include
straights within queer projects. For instance, gay/straight alliances in high schools
have operated on the premise that straight students can undertake work with other
heterosexual-identified as well as gay, lesbian and bisexual youth in combating
homophobic bullying in schools (Miceli, 2005). Conversely, there are important
moments in gay experience/politics when the presence of straights is not produc-
tive and is inhibitive (for instance, in a gay, lesbian, bisexual support group where
members do not want their presence). In these instances, identity is important on
political and ethical grounds.
The phenomenon of straights claiming a ‘queer’ identity elucidates some of the
problems of viewing identity as dictating knowledge. This practice encompasses
a ‘logic’ that queer identity produces anti-normative knowledge. Such a lineal
relationship between identity and knowledge is problematized by the example of
the lesbian teacher who reinscribed the normalcy of heterosexuality in her lesson
on puberty. One of the problems with ‘straight queerness’, according to queer
theorists like Schlichter (2004), is the way this identity necessitates an assertion
of straightness that can only be normative. This predicament is the consequence
of the inherent paradox of subjectification whereby the subject must submit to
the regulatory norms they oppose, in order to become a subject (Butler, 1990).
Through this process of becoming, ‘queer straights’ necessarily reinstate hetero-
sexuality. From this perspective, not only does the ‘queer straight’ category fail to
be critically queer, but it also contains a presumption that how one identifies has
a direct relationship to the knowledge one produces.
Following Butler (1990) and Warner (1993), I argue that there is no necessary
relation between heteronormativity and heterosexual identity. Positing such a
relationship fails to capture the complexity with which heteronormativity might
operate and the ways in which it may not be specifically invested in straight iden-
tity. In fact, it may not necessarily be associated with sexual identity at all, and
instead operate within contingent circumstances.
My attempted disassociation with heterosexual identity during research on
sexuality with young people sparked a question for me about the link between
heteronormativity and sexual identity. In line with the logic that identity is related
to knowledge, through my de-identification and expressed desire to disrupt
normalizing practices I should have been able to produce anti-heteronormative
knowledge. Rather than seeing moment one as an example of my failure to dis-
card a straight identity, I argue this phenomenon highlights the power of hetero-
normativity. This analysis is also delineated through the example of the lesbian
teacher who reinforced rather than undermined heterosexuality’s normalcy in not
challenging a heterosexist explanation of puberty. Following a traditional con-
ceptualization of the identity/knowledge relation, this teacher’s identity as ‘gay’

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ALLEN: Queer(y)ing the Straight Researcher 161

should engender anti-normative knowledge. Using these research moments as the

starting point to think theoretically about these issues, my exploration suggests
that if there is a relationship between knowledge and identity it may be a tenuous
and highly complex one.
Drawing on the tenets of queer theory I have attempted to trouble the notion
that sexual identity is linearly related to knowledge – that how one identifies
sexually dictates the production of anti-normative knowledge. This premise rests
on queer insights about identity’s incoherence and instability, the process of sub-
jectification and the operation of heteronormativity. When identity is understood
as perpetually shifting and contingent, establishing a definite relationship with
knowledge becomes increasingly difficult. The aim of this article has not been
to suggest that a researcher’s biography is inconsequential to the knowledge
they produce. Instead, I have wanted to ‘play’ with the suggestion that who we
are does not determine what knowledge we produce. The relationship between
sexual identity and anti-normative knowledge appears more complex than a
­lineal certainty that heterosexuals cannot (despite an expressed desire by some of
them) stop thinking straight. Rather than being linked to identity, the production
of heteronormative knowledge may be better understood as a consequence of the
ongoing power and pervasiveness of heteronormativity.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was made possible by a Foundation for Research Science and
Technology Post-doctoral Fellowship. I would like to thank all of the young
­people and teachers who generously gave their time and thoughts to this research.
Many thanks also to the anonymous and known reviewers of this article whose
erudite comments I enjoyed engaging with.

NOTES

1. See section on ‘Straights and the Production of Anti-normative Knowledge’ for expla-
nation of this term.
2. Student questionnaires and individual interviews with key health professionals were
also undertaken.
3. Participant numbers in focus groups ranged from four to 10 students at a time.
4. In New Zealand this word has been adopted by members of the Maori Gay, Lesbian,
Bi-sexual and Transgender community to identify as being Maori and Queer (definition
from the New Zealand AIDS Foundation, Takatapui Pamphlet).

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162 Feminism & Psychology 20(2)

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Louisa ALLEN is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University

of Auckland. Her research interests include sexuality education, masculini-
ties, sexualities, gender and theories of embodiment. Her latest book is Sexual
Subjects: Young People, Sexuality and Education (2005), published by Palgrave
Macmillan.
ADDRESS: Faculty of Education, The University of Auckland, Epsom Campus,
Private Bag 92601, Symonds Street, Auckland, New Zealand.
[email: le.allen@auckland.ac.nz]

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