Rather than focus on personal self-identification through the process of research, a method of queer ethics fosters a “politics of intimacy” in contrast to traditional practices of distance and objectivity. The resolution forecloses the option of building queer ethics.

The relationships which enabled this work began in Tapachula, a town on the Mexico-Guatemala border, and an important regional hub for migrants crossing into Mexico by land. Among the people, I have met through many encounters in the “field” were eight Central American trans women with whom I would end up developing long-term research relationships, and two of whom are the focus here. I first met Daniela back in 2014 when she was staying at a migrant shelter in Tapachula, which I was visiting once a week. We saw each other regularly through the ups and downs of her time in Tapachula over the coming months, but it was not until she had moved away to Mexico City that we sat down, over the phone, to more intentionally piece together her story up to that point. We have kept in touch since then. I met Brenda in the summer of 2016, shortly after she arrived in Tapachula from El Salvador, through Yasmin, another long-term collaborator. I saw Brenda informally a few times before one afternoon in November of that year, when she invited me to come over to where she was staying to interview her. We spent many hours chatting and were joined later on by her then partner Carlos. We saw each other a few more times before she left Tapachula quite soon after that, and have stayed in fairly regular contact since then. Brenda has been particularly proactive in how she engages with the research, for example unexpectedly sending me films of herself to use in my presentations,4 and putting me in touch with people she thinks may be of interest. In personal terms, I get the sense that she sees this process as a kind of testament to her journey, and has made it part of her future hope in terms of what she aims to be able to “report back” in the next instalment. This work is inseparable from these affective, intimate (research) relationships which could not be easily accommodated within conventional ethical frameworks. Long a central concern of feminist research practice, intimacy in the research encounter has remained an ethically thorny and complex goal, largely since it pushes against hegemonic ethical norms (of distance and objectivity), while these structures nonetheless remain intact. The queering of ethics opens up new possibilities in this regard: intimate listening, as the “compassionate queering of borders between self and other” (Heckert 2010, 51), becomes method through a new queer ethics, no longer limiting the researcher’s ability to embed themselves within the complex intimacies of human relations, but rather – after Gibson-Graham (1999, in Detamore 2010, 173) – plotting out the path to a new “rich and prolific disarray” (see also Taylor 2016). Especially given their long-term nature, I struggle to describe these relationships of on-going attachments and obligations using conventional research vocabulary (respondent, participant), and find much resonance in Detamore’s (2010, 178) suggestion that what emerges is “something unnameable and uniquely special” that “looks much more like kinship”. It is a complicated and shifting ethical and emotional assemblage of expectations, responsibilities, vulnerabilities, privileges, anxieties, that at once pushes past the distinction between researcher and researched (for example Heckert 2010), while also grounding critical research praxis in the material and emotional nuts and bolts of the everyday. To reflect in a general sense on my position as a white, British, queer, cis-gender, female, academic resident in Mexico, would not resonate with this practice, since it would assume that these positions mapped evenly and steadily onto my research encounters. Thus, as Taylor (2016) posits, reflexivity becomes less introspectively focussed on the self-positioning and experience of the researcher, and more something which is enacted though on-going practice, a kind of “politics of intimacy” (Detamore 2010). In this way, the on-going, multiple ethical issues that emerge are continually interrogated through the research itself, often in open dialogue and reflection.