On coming out and coming undone : sexualities and reflexivities in language education research

In this article, I explore issues of sexuality and reflexivity in language education research practices by revisiting a section of an interview between myself as researcher and a student research participant. The research interview was from a larger ethnographic study on cultural identities in a second language program, and the student was a 20-year-old man from Japan who was studying English at an Australian university. My analysis reflects in detail on the discourses which cluster around a moment in the interview when the student “came out” as gay. In attempting to make sense of my own mixed feelings and reactions at the time, my own “coming undone,” I examine how a number of discourses, including those of the confessional and of heteronormativity, were operating in my interviewing practices. In so doing, I highlight the limitations of modernist notions of reflexivity, which call for a thorough knowing and naming of the researcher's subjectivity and impact on the research; and I seek to enact instead an “ethical reflexivity,” which, drawing on Butler (2004), values the notion of remaining open and vulnerable, as a researcher, to what is not, or cannot, be fully known or controlled.