Negotiating Utopia: An Affective, Autoethnographic Framework for Reflexivity

For colonial domination, reflexive practices within qualitative methodologies encompass autoethnography and researchers using static identity categories to reflect how researchers’ social positions shape their practice and field site experiences. Yet, such approaches can maintain researchers’ position as the subjects doing colonial research rather than as researchers negotiating their positions as subject-object of research. Taking the case of a queer, trans, non-binary researcher who had to cisify themselves for an ethnography, this paper conducts an autoethnography in relation to gender conformity. The paper does so by bringing together ideas of relationality and subjectivity formation to consider faith embodiment. It offers negotiating utopia as a three-part affective, autoethnographic framework for analyzing researcher subjectivity formation, enabling researchers to account for the colonial roots of ethnography. Using the case of a trans, non-binary Sikh, negotiating utopia shows how they confronted a U.S. settler veil and developed a type of ethnographic double consciousness.