Understanding processes of marginalizing geographies of sexualities inside, outside and a-side academia

During a lunch break with some of my colleagues, a (rather sceptically looking) colleague asked me: ‘but you are not advocating that researchers should have sex with their respondents, right?’ I had just been talking about my ongoing doctoral research, in which I talked about being surprised that the sexual body of researchers is often absent from research outputs, including in geographies of sexualities (and human geography more broadly). I had explained how I felt this was rather odd, given the omnipresence of the reflexive turn in geographies of sexualities, and earlier, prominent geographers working on sexualities had called for the inclusion of the researcher’s sexual embodiment (Bell 1995, 2007; Binnie 1997; Cupples 2002). However, until that moment, accounts where researchers included their erotic subjectivities beyond static or abstract identifiers and markers (Lerum 2001) remained scarce, and I wondered why that was. The question my colleague asked me therefore resonated with me, also long after that lunch break, because – based on the words and tone of the question – it was clear that my colleague considered this a no go. And while my answer to the question is indeed no, I do not think researchers should have sex with their respondents, I also do not want to argue that we by definition should not.