Practicing a “Love Ethic” and Academic Dissimulation as Queer Resistance

Bibliographic Data

ID17826660
AuthorsJacob W Richardson (0000-0001-9080-4026, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume15
Issue1
Pages6-31
Publication date2026-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueDepartures in Critical Qualitative Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2333-9489 • E-ISSN: 2333-9497
PublisherUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1525/dcqr.2026.15.1.6
OpenAlexW7158914583
LanguageEN
References cited33

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) use positivist/biomedical frameworks of ethics to construct a fear-based logic through discourses of risk/harm. This critical queer autoethnography explores how the fear-based logic of IRBs is experienced on an embodied and affective level by a graduate student navigating sexually precarious ethical situations in the field. Using Black feminist thought and queer of color critique, I reflect on bell hooks’s “love ethic” as a queer strategy to subvert this fear-based logic and transgress the academy by leaning into the messiness of ethnography. Doing so, I introduce “academic dissimulation” as a performative resistance tactic for navigating institutional constraints of IRBs

Autoethnography · Embodied cognition · Performative utterance · Queer · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics

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