Public Seminar: "Productive challenges in sexual biographical interviewing" with Ráhel Katalin Turai (Budapest)

Productive challenges in sexual biographical interviewing
Ráhel Katalin Turai, PhD Candidate in Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

Public Seminar on Thursday, June 16th, 10:15-11:45, Room VG 4.104

Life story interviewing raises particular methodological-theoretical questions when it focuses on the respondents? changing sexual lives. In this seminar, I highlight those through examples from my recent research on biographical bisexual experiences in Hungary. Discussing some perplexing interview situations, I argue that a queer-feminist focus on linguistic performativity assures that the processes of sexual subjectivity construction unfold in the biographies exactly as processes. These processes are always embedded in the specific social context, including gendered interactions.

• How can we address the complex interplay between sexual desire, practice, and identity in sampling, as well as in analysis?
• Is desire social at all? Even if so, how do we get access to it?
• How do (global and local) time and temporal changes of sexuality appear in interviewing?
• How to tackle gender relations in sexual stories?
• What to do with the eroticization of the interview situation? What role does the researcher play in the interviewee's subjectivity construction?