Flirting in the field: shifting positionalities and power relations in innocuous sexualisations of research encounters

In the last few decades, an engaged and sophisticated discussion about the production
of data and power relations has developed within feminist methodology. Positionality,
i.e. the set of relations constituting informants’ and researchers’ subject positions, has
been widely used as an analytical tool to account for the complicated ways in which
data are co-constructed in fieldwork. Based on our own experience of fieldwork
conducted in the city of Zurich, however, we argue that sexuality is underrepresented in
this debate. First, reflexive writing on fieldwork has been reluctant to consider sexuality
as a category in the same way, for instance, as gender or race. Second, even apparently
innocuous sexualisations have a considerable effect on the constitution of data and are
therefore worth including in the analysis. In this article, we examine how flirtation as a
part of the participant–researcher relation has re-shaped the research encounters in our
respective research projects. We discuss the complex navigations between conflicting
rationales that it entailed for us as researchers, depict the minor and major shifts in
positionalities that emerge from the flirtation and examine the reasons why we
sometimes embraced flirtation and sometimes rejected it. The objective of the article is
to further enrich feminist methodological writing, and to suggest to the reader the
potential for including various shades of sexual performances, such as apparently
harmless flirtation, into our reflections on data collection.