| Abstract |
My journey began at Plage Naturiste du Cap D’Agde in Southern France, which is a public beach used for public nudity and diverse public sexual practices (from BDSM to sex with multiple partners and voyeurism). The mapping of my journey into this space began with an intimate expression my troubled relationship between my research project and my own sexuality and personal relationships. This volatile mixture of my troubled sexual life as a researcher, and a project exploring sexual freedom produced a powerful argument for the occupation of academic space and a challenge to how the sexual body is legally defined and ethically determined. As a female autoethnographer in the field of sexuality, I encountered unique challenges in relation to my participatory research methodology. The project brought me into confrontation with conservative ethical regimes in relation to such research, as well as conservative ‘personal’ ethical regimes in my own sexual life. This unique confluence of the personal and objective regimes produced a potentially powerful confrontational methodological ‘movement’ in the academic context.
My work accesses and expresses my fraught and inextricably entwined academic and personal journey through an ‘autoethnographic’ method. I claim that this expressive method bridges the chasm between both personal and collective concerns relating to gender identity and sexuality. At the core of my findings was the need for a ‘radically orgasmic research ethic’ as forming the basis of a radical methodological strategy for ‘fucking’ law. This ‘fucking’ is not simply profane, and not simply resistance, but a softly sexy and bravely confrontational methodological tool and radical form of research practice in the field of sexuality. Fucking is a tool for occupying academic space and facilitating radical questioning unethical framings of sexual identity. The use of the word ‘fuck’ tends to provoke, and the results of this provocation in an academic context (fear, exclusion, silencing and so on) are symptoms of the kind of academic space which guards inhibiting ethical frameworks and thresholds relating to radical participatory research.
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