Dis-comfort as method in queer migration research

Abstract

This article reflects on unresolved affective tensions in the field, not as failures or impasses but as analytical tools for (un)doing research. Shifting from a distant and detached analysis of my interlocutors’ narratives towards a decentred account of myself, I trace my disorientations, discomforts and troubles in encounters with queer refugees and asylum seekers. Through this ephemeral self-accounting, I approach the self as an aporetic, political and theoretical space of (un)becoming, examining how (non-)normativities emerged in my PhD research and how I navigated them while oscillating between affirmation and resistance. From this autotheoretical standpoint, and in confronting the inescapability of discursivity, I write through uncertainties, ambivalences and affective conflicts, approaching writing not as closure or as a constraint to ‘write what we already know’ but as an invitation to relate and (un)learn through the performative act of writing itself.