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''F**k Rape!'': Exploring Affective Intensities in a Feminist Research Assemblage
Jessica Ringrose and Emma Renold
Qualitative Inquiry published online 28 April 2014
DOI: 10.1177/1077800414530261
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QIXXXX10.1177/1077800414530261Qualitative InquiryRingrose and Renold
research-article2014
Article
“F**k Rape!”: Exploring Affective
Intensities in a Feminist Research
Assemblage
Qualitative Inquiry
1–9
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DOI: 10.1177/1077800414530261
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Jessica Ringrose1 and Emma Renold2
Abstract
The aim of this article is to demystify what we think we are doing when we engage in qualitative analysis. We illustrate the
centrality of affect in meaning making, showing how interpretation is always already entangled in complex affective ethical
and political relationalities that circulate in, through, and outside empirical research. We explore research processes
as “intra-acting” drawing upon Barad, and develop Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “assemblages,” “intensities,”
“territorialization,” and “lines of flight” to analyze research encounters. Taking inspiration from MacLure’s notions of data
“hot spots” that “glow,” we explore methodological processes of working with “affective intensities.” In particular, we
draw upon our research with teen girls, mapping out how the discursive-embodied category “slut” works as an affective
intensity that propels our feminist research assemblage––from the co-creation of “data” in the field to the “data” analysis
and beyond.
Keywords
intra-action, data hot spots, lines of flight, territorialization, teen girls, slut
Introduction: Foregrounding Affect
and Ethico-Political Relationalities of
Meaning Making in Social Research
In the call for papers for this special issue, Jackson and St.
Pierre noted that “coding can be quite a positivist approach
to analysis and that we probably teach coding in classes and
textbooks because it’s teachable. On the other hand, it’s difficult to teach someone how to think with theory (analysis).”
Our first response to this was instant recognition, and the
feeling that it remains quite difficult to accessibly outline
different approaches to qualitative data analysis, particularly
to anxious students who sometimes desire “how to” strategies, not dissimilar to those found in some social science and
educational research textbooks which posit a discernible
split between theory and methodology, researcher and
researched. Within such conceptualizations of research, coding, and indeed analysis, is often understood as a distinct
phase in the research process that is objectively applied to
make meaning of data in ways that can decipher themes and
categories that render data classifiable (e.g., Saldana, 2009).
The affective, inter-, and intra-subjective nature of qualitative research, from the co-creation of “data” to the ways in
which qualitative analysis is an ongoing practice, entangled
in all aspects of the research process, can be minimized or,
when it is acknowledged, is rarely made transparent to the
novice researcher reading these general textbooks.
There is, however, a longstanding critique of methodological positivism within the social sciences, and new
methodological discussions about the need for thinking creatively and “inventively” with and about our data (Lury &
Wakeford, 2012). This direction is informed by postmodern, poststructural, posthumanist, feminist, and psychosocial1 approaches and involves attending to how affect and
researcher “subjectivity” permeate the research process at
every stage, from our research questions through to our
research design, conference papers, publications, and wider
forms of communication (e.g., Walkerdine, Lucey, &
Melody, 2002). Like many feminist scholars who foreground subjective and psychical relations as central to
meaning making, “situated knowledge” is foregrounded
(Haraway, 1988), and the search for validity and “truth” is
overturned through an interrogation of “belief” in the
research process (Britzman, 2000). Moreover, “bias” is
reclaimed as an ethico-political2 commitment where the
production of knowledge is about making a difference in
the world and understanding the what, where, when, how,
1
University of London, UK
Cardiff University, UK
2
Corresponding Author:
Jessica Ringrose, Institute of Education, University of London,
20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK.
Email: J.Ringrose@ioe.ac.uk
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and for whom differences matter (Barad, 2007). “Coding”
and “analysis” are entangled in this process, not at a distance, but always folded inside research relations, so that
the making of meaning and the production of knowledge
are always in process––a becoming (Jackson & Mazzei,
2012).
As part of this critical movement in qualitative research
methodologies, Maggie MacLure (2013) has outlined a useful critique of methodological techniques such as coding,
which position the researcher at arms-length to the data, and
in ways that try to neatly categorize and subsume difference
into schemas of representation. She argues that understanding “coding” in this way can neglect singularity, texture,
and affective complexities of qualitative data. MacLure
(2013) argues that we should not rush for solid meaning and
definitive interpretation of data, suggesting the value of an
“affective” approach that can help slow us down and sit
with what in the data sparks “fascination or exhilaration . . .
incipience, suspense or intensity” (pp. 169, 173). MacLure
(2013, pp. 172-173) suggests that qualitative researchers
spend more time considering data “hot spots”––those affective relations to data that both “disconcert” and create a
sense of “wonder”––where data “glows” for the researcher
in various moments of fieldwork, analysis, and beyond.
Our article seeks to contribute to these critical engagements with qualitative research methodology, responding
directly to the call for contributors “to offer examples of
what qualitative researchers do, other than code, when they
do something they think is ‘analysis.’” Divided into three
sections, we illustrate the ways that our theory not only
informs but is also always already entangled in our methodology. Our first section illustrates how our feminist DeleuzoGuattarian framework brings affect to the forefront of our
approach, outlining key concepts, such as “affective intensities,” “assemblage,” “territories,” and “lines of flight.”
Rather than conceptualizing analysis as something that
occurs postfieldwork, we foreground how meaning making
emerges over time: before “research” begins, during live
research encounters, and afterward. The second two sections then identify research processes as “intra-acting” (see
also Lenz Taguchi, 2013), exploring affective intensities in
research encounters.
Affective Intensities, Assemblages,
Territorialization, and Lines of Flight
We think any society is defined not so much by its contradictions
as by its lines of flight, it flees all over the place, and it’s very
interesting to try and follow the lines of flight taking shape at
some particular moment or other. (Deleuze in conversation
with Toni Negri, 1990)
As noted in our introduction, there has been a growing
discussion of the “affective” in the social sciences in what
has been termed the “affective turn” (Clough & Halley,
2007). The importance of foregrounding “ordinary affects”
in re-thinking materiality, embodiment, and possibilities for
understanding social and subjective change has emerged
strongly from this new research tradition (Stewart, 2007).
The work of Deleuze and Guattari has been key to this shift,
given their attention to affect as “life force” (Coleman &
Ringrose, 2013; Hickey-Moody & Malins, 2007).
In his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand
Plateaus, Brian Massumi (1987/2004, p. xvii) explains that
for these theorists, affect is not “a personal feeling”; it is “an
ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity
corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of
the body to another and implying an augmentation of diminution in that body’s capacity to act.” Affect thus presents a
way of thinking about energy, “libidinal flows,” and “life
force,” not restricted or contained within a human subject
and discursive meaning making, but flowing and impacting
the social.3 Affect is, thus, the capacity of things and bodies
in social space to affect one another (Massumi, 1987/2004).
It is about intensities––that is, time/motion, speed, and heat.
As Colebrook (2002) suggests, affect is not simply “extensive” or external to us:
Affect is intensive because it happens to us, across us; it is not
objectifiable and quantifiable as a thing that we then perceive
or of which we are conscious. Affect operates on us in divergent
ways, differing in kind––the light that causes our eye to flinch,
the sound that makes us start, the image of violence which
raises our body temperature. Deleuze therefore refers to
intensities. (p. 39)
The methodological question, of course, is how can we
work with the concepts of affect and intensity methodologically, and actually “operationalize” them to find ways of
understanding how affect works in the social, particularly, if
from the armchair of the philosopher, it is viewed as nonquantifiable (Mazzei & McCoy, 2010)? Responding to
MacLure’s (2013) reflections about data that provoke and
glow, we want to create analytic practices that can capture
and work with different modes of what we call “affective
intensities,” exploring how they operate throughout the
entire research process, not only within the discrete, objectified data bits and clusters that we select/construct.
To better understand this Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of
affective intensities, it is important to underscore the relationality of affect, that is, how it happens in and between
and through bodies and things. To assist us here, we take up
and work with another crucial concept they develop––that
of assemblage. They argue that “machinic assemblages” are
complex social configurations through which energy flows
and is directed, where parts plug in and out of each other
(Malins, 2004). The idea of assemblages illustrates the connectivities between objects and bodies. Assemblage theory
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Ringrose and Renold
(De Landa, 2006) is, therefore, a way of mapping the ways
things are coming together, the directions, speeds, and
spaces of connections, and what the assembled relations
enable to become or also block from becoming.
What does it mean to identify when energy is free flowing, when it is trapped, when things heat up and congeal,
and when they cool down and dissipate? Deleuze and
Guattari also offer theoretical tools that we can put to work
for conceptualizing how affect flows through our research
assemblages and when and where it intensifies (Ringrose,
2011). They argue that lines of energy are continually
becoming within “territorialized” social space, segmented
through relations of power (gender norms could be one territory; Jackson, 2010). These relational lines can conform to
molar norms or break off of the normative line, through a
molecular, micro-line, what Deleuze and Guattari call a
“line of flight.” Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2004) argue
that we need to map when lines “deterritorialize” the social
space, suggesting that there are “lines of flight” (see header
quote above), which must be mapped at the level of their
“every move” (p. 338) as they form assemblages––we must
“pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body”
(Foucault, 1984/2004, p. xv). Mapping is a process of deciphering striations and lines that are “life destroying” (territorializing) and “life affirming” (deterritorializing; Bonta &
Protevi, 2004, p. 10). To perceive and map these flows is
part of Deleuze and Guattari’s project of “transcendental
empiricism”––research that seeks to intervene and change
the social (Hickey-Moody & Malins, 2007).4 Bringing these
terms together, then, in what follows, we will explore how
“affective intensities” might work through what we conceptualize as our feminist assemblage where we as researchers
“plug in and out” of various relations (Jackson & Mazzei,
2012) in this case with school participants.
Intra-Acting Feminist Research
Assemblages: SlutWalk as War
Machine
“Intra-action” signifies the mutual constitution of entangled
agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which
assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede
their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that
distinct agencies do not precede their interaction, but rather
emerge through their intra-action. (Barad, 2007, p. 33)
In addition to Deleuze and Guattari, Karen Barad’s
(2007) work has been influential in breaking down ontological and epistemological binaries, including subject/
object, researcher/researched divides. Her development of
Haraway’s concept of intra-action works well with Deleuze
and Guattari’s idea of assemblages to think about how
research works as a process of plugging in and out of various physical relationships but also conceptual and
methodological apparatuses. In this section, we explore
how intra-acting forces in research processes can be transformative in terms of producing new knowledge.
We began thinking and writing together in 2006, an
assemblage that emerged from a series of chance and organized encounters where we discovered a shared research
interest in how children and young people negotiate gender
and sexual norms in school-based peer cultures. We tried
unsuccessfully for 2 years running to secure funding for a
joint research project to collect new data together, and during this time, we began a series of theoretical and analytic
entanglements as we explored the intra-connections
between our research findings and our readings of Butler,
Braidotti, and Deleuze and Guattari. Eventually, we decided
to bring our respective data sets into dialogue with each
other––forming an assemblage to enable new questions and
meanings to emerge.
For the purposes of this article, we focus specifically on
the interrogation of “slut” as a discursive and material category that endures as an affective intensity across our
research. Slut is a signifier that has powerful affective, often
violent force in a wider socio-historical assemblage of
classed and raced sexual meanings of femininity, discussed
at length in feminist research accounts (e.g., Cowie & Lees,
1981; Tolman, 2002). We became specifically interested in
mapping how girls are sexually regulated (by boys and each
other) through “slut,” and how these regulations could
break down. We were using Butler’s (1990) theories of performativity exploring the possibilities and limitations of
what she terms discursive “re-signification” where discourses that (hetero)sexually regulate subjects, such as
potentially injurious discursive categories like gay, queer,
and slut can be reclaimed to disrupt and possibly transform
the injurious norm. As empirical social researchers, our
interest was to explore through our research data how a visceral signifier like “slut” could be re-signified (or not) by
young people.
Our previous writing on girls’ explorations and experiments with “slut subjectivities” revealed complex negotiations and re-significations of “slut” within local peer sexual
cultures (Renold & Ringrose, 2008, 2011; Ringrose &
Renold, 2010, 2012a, 2012b). Take for instance, Natalia
and Sadie, two 15-year-old girls who digitally adopted
“slut” and “whore” as their usernames on their social networking site (SNS) profiles in response to “slut shaming” at
school. As Natalia said, when older girls “insulted” them by
calling them “sluts” and “slags,” they decided to take on the
labels “whore” and “slut” as their SNS profile names,
recounting, “She’s my whore and I’m her slut. Whatever.
Get over it!” We also outlined the slippery and recuperative
tendency around slut in the adolescent peer group, where
girls have to manage “schizoid” contradictory subjectivities
to be, for instance, both passively sexually innocent and
aggressively sexually experienced (Renold & Ringrose,
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Qualitative Inquiry
2011).5 “Slut” was, therefore, an ongoing affective intensity
within our data and research assemblage.
We were also plugging into an historical intensity,
namely, the slow burn of feminist-inspired inquiries into
sexual politics and sexual regulations of women’s bodies,6
and a pivotal activist moment in our developing research
assemblage came when we decided to follow a feminist line
of flight emerging from a consultancy project evaluating a
charity’s domestic violence educational program in schools.
We embarked upon an unfunded research project to continue working with an inspirational feminist teacher who
had developed a “girl power” group to help raise the
achievement of “disengaged” girls at her school. We made
successive field trips to the school to explore the possibilities of activating and sustaining feminism within the highly
regulated formal curriculum and disciplinary space of high
school. As a spontaneous (unfunded) research project, we
also had the rare autonomy to plug into what was happening
in the wider feminist political, affective landscape, namely,
the international SlutWalks.
The SlutWalks, much discussed in the international
media of 2011, were a viral political movement––a globalizing assemblage––that began in Toronto Canada protesting
a policeman’s comment during a personal safety visit to
York University students that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” The SlutWalks
sought to re-signify “slut” from a derogatory to a celebratory term––a banner for protesting the normalization of
male sexual violence and accepted “rape culture” (Ringrose
& Renold, 2012b).7 In a Deleuzo-Guattarian frame, the
SlutWalks were a specific form of assemblage, what they
might call a “war machine”—a feminist political movement
assembled to directly fight coercive gender norms and sexual violence.
A SlutWalk was happening in the U.K. city where the
research school was located a few weeks after our first
research visit, so we were keen to explore the girls’ views
and awareness about this upcoming “event.” During our initial meeting, we learned about the activities of the girl
power group, which included the girls delivering some curriculum at the school on issues of domestic violence and
women’s rights. Through a discussion of male sexual violence, we spontaneously raised the issue of the SlutWalks as
a movement trying to subvert and challenge the normalization of male sexualized violence. This was not an easy conversation to broach, given that despite the prolific use of
slut in teen culture, it was disciplined through strict bully
policies as a swear word at the school. We as researchers,
intra-acting with the energies of the girl power group and
the two inspiring teachers working with these girls, felt a
sudden urge (an intensity) to trouble the clear boundaries of
what could and could not be spoken of and asked the following question: “Have any of you heard about the
SlutWalks?” The word slut escaped into the air mixed with
a palpable discomfort, perhaps a mixture of our own anxiety and the teachers. “Slut” was now “out there” as an
ambivalent “event” (rather than always already “bad”). We
had created the possibility for the others to plug into our
question. What happened next was, like any intra-action, a
mixture of openings and closings. But something had
shifted and changed.
Several girls responded immediately and said that they
knew about the SlutWalks. Very quickly an energized discussion ensued, bodies were animated and alert, and they
talked freely about the main impetus behind the marches to
fight against male violence and “blaming the victim” discourses. The teachers rolled with the talk and invested their
own desire to be part of the discussion, sustaining its flow
in ways that we felt we could push for one more boundary
rupture (deterritorialization), arrived at spontaneously during the time of the encounter. We asked whether the girls
could go on the local SlutWalk as part of their activism in
the girl power group. To our suggestion, however, a re-territorialization swiftly occurred as the teachers responded
with, “No, they probably can’t go. We’ll go on the march
for them.”
This was a powerful affective moment for us. We left the
school deflated, exhausted, and disconcerted about the
boundaries/territories that were re-drawn around gender
and sexual regulation. The teachers invoked a territory of
protection and regulation around the school girls, creating a
blockage that could potentially stop the girls from connecting or plugging into a wider feminist political assemblage—
the SlutWalks. What we did not anticipate was that the line
of flight did sustain for the girls, and four of them did participate in the march.8 We returned to explore this analytic
trail energized to find out more about the regulation and
rupture of “slut” and “slut shaming.”
Mapping Data “Hot Spots” and
Affective Intensities: Lines of Flight
and Re-Territorialization in Live
Research Encounters
So far, we have provided the reader with an (albeit reconstructed) narrative that makes visible not only this particular research assemblage as a line of flight (as unfunded,
spontaneous, unstructured) but also as an example of slow
burning intensities that propel the creation and generation
of research encounters and data to provide the reader with a
glimpse into how “analysis” and meaning making have
strong affective ties and relations to the historical legacies
of feminist research. In this section, we explore interview
data with teen girls documenting their experiences of intraacting with the political assemblage of the globalized
SlutWalks. We will work with examples from two focus
group interviews: The first highlights (one of many) lines of
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flight that in the moment (and in ways that linger) a pure,
albeit temporary, surge of energy (intensity) that ruptures
contemporary and historical affective resonances of sexual
regulation and violence. The second example follows this
analytic trail as this line of flight (for us and them) is reterritorialized by the schizoid contradictions of sexual regulation and desire operative within the “girl power” group.
Methodologically, we illustrate how affective intensities
happen and are made meaning of in live research encounters, and 1 year later as we sit with these data attempting to
address the intra-acting intensities (of sexual regulation and
potential rupture) that “glow” for us.
“Fuck Rape!”: Deterritorializing, Freeing Lines of
Flight
Territorialities then, are shot through with lines of flight
testifying to the presence within them of movements of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization . . . the strata are
continually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and
rupture. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004, p. 62)
Above, we illustrated how introducing the SlutWalk in
school created affective uncertainty for the teachers, operating as it did, as a deterritorialization, swiftly re-territorialized by the teachers as a site of potential “risk.” However,
several of the girls had actually managed to go on the
SlutWalk with one of the mothers, a researcher at the local
University who advocated women’s rights.9 And true to
their word, the two feminist teachers went on the march
separately, in some ways bridging the public space of political marching and the institutional fortress of pedagogization through their attendance. Eager to understand the girls’
experiences of going on the SlutWalks better, we conducted
four further group interviews several weeks later. One
group interview included the friendship group of those few
girls who had attended the march, while the second group
included the girls who had not attended the march. We consider the interview with girls who did participate first:
Seren:
Sian:
Carry:
Sian:
Seren:
Rachel:
Elin:
Seren:
It was really, it was quite exciting.
I was really excited . . . What was my sign saying? We’re humans not meat or something.
Mmm, yeah
I was so proud, like, “Yes!” Really proud.
One (banner) was like . . . whatever we wear,
wherever we go, yes means yes and no means
no . . .
What was that banner?
What was that one sign that was really funny
and we took a photo of it?
There was one that just like put it out there, like
“Fuck Rape!”
Elin, Sian, and Carry: Yeah!
Sian:
Carry:
Sian:
Carry:
Seren:
Sian:
Sian:
Seren:
(All laugh)
I think that was my favorite one!
(Laughter)
Elin, Carry, and Seren: Yeah!
And like, and there was like, you know, it’s like,
you know, they were saying like, sex is good,
rape isn’t, like . . .
No, no, no! Rape is bad, sex is great!
Yeah that’s it.
Sian and Elin: Yeah!
I really enjoyed like, going on it and seeing like,
and like, hearing the speeches as well at the
end. Teresa’s mum was really good.
Yeah and as well to, like, know that like, like we
were like the only girls around our age, and like,
I felt really proud.
Seren, Carry, and Elin: Yeah . . .
I’m standing up for like, what I think’s right . . .
Yeah, like standing up for our rights . . . I think
it’s really important.
The sexual regulation of girls’ bodies is endemic and
strongly felt by these girls. Going on the SlutWalk was a
way of feeling connected to and potentially rupturing this.
There was a real energy in the room––a feminist line of
flight––a freeing and lifting away from the heavy regulatory gaze. We felt it, and they seemed to feel it––temporary
but lingering––and we got a visceral flicker of the energy
that the girl power group could spark. To use MacLure’s
(2013) language, “Fuck rape” was a palpable “hot spot” in
this research encounter, as the girls released these words,
shouting them out loud into the classroom air, into the very
same sonic space where they had been warned that they
could not use the term “rape” or “slut” in their peer lessons
on “domestic violence.” There was a tangible sensation of
pleasure and rupture in this doing. It was a moment that
glowed in a particular joyous way, as the force of their articulation ruptured the boundaries of sexual regulation and
school-based censorship. Returning to and recreating these
data (in the moment and in the transcript), our analysis orients toward viewing the girls’ participation in the march as
a moment of deterritorialization––a line of flight away from
the regulative force of “slut.”
Methodologically, it is critical to note that the “hotspot”
of the “fuck rape” data did not emerge through a standardized approach to coding where we looked for incidences of
the word “rape.” The data glowed in specific ways because
it represented a moment of rupture co-constructed through
our feminist research assemblage. This flash resonated with
the slow burn of our interest in sexual regulation and slut.
Also, methodologically, it is critical we think through the
particularity and specificity of this moment in the data. The
mapping process we have been discussing means we cannot
“freeze” the data at this space/time juncture and simply
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celebrate “fuck rape” and understand it solely as powerful
evidence of the girls plugging into and living out the political resistance of the global SlutWalks, even if we might
deeply desire this as feminists. A few of the girls had been
able to go on the march because their mum was a feminist.
Because it was not an official school trip, many of the girls
had not been able to participate in the SlutWalks; they were
cut off somewhat from its potential and possibility for rupture.10 “Plugging into” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) the
SlutWalk and bringing this energy back into the school was
a rupture in time-space. But the complex stickiness, and
simultaneous allure and revulsion of “slut” lives on in a
powerful way for teen girls because of the way their bodies
are coded and assembled. The slow burn regulation of sexuality re-emerged strongly through our methodology by listening to another affective “hotspot” in the data.
“They Act More Slaggy”: Slow Burning ReTerritorializing and Disconcertation
You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still
a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify
everything ( . . . ) Groups and individuals contain microfascisms
just waiting to crystallize. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004,
p. 10)
In contrast to the lightness and freeing nature of the
moment above, the interview with the second group of girls
was weighed down with the heaviness of re-territorialization. The second group of girls comprised a different, less
popular friendship group. This hierarchy in the girls’ friendship group operated as a strong and disconcerting affective
resonance with us as researchers from the beginning of the
data collection as they had consistently sat at different
tables. Although they were being presented and initially
presented themselves as a cohesive “girl power” group,
sharing a similar gender politics, we were highly aware of
the power relations, particularly in the affective dynamic of
their physical separation. During this research visit, the
girls who attended the SlutWalks sat with their friends and
the “popular” boys around one table, talking only to one
another, thereby creating a noticeable divide between “in”
and “out” groups. We picked up on this split between the
popular and more normatively or “intelligibly” attractive
girls, and those whose bodies would be othered inside of
contemporary ideals of heterosexual feminine embodiment
(Renold, 2006). However, we worked with our awareness
of the hierarchies and tensions between the girls, taking our
lead from the girls’ own groupings, arranging the group
interviews with girls who would feel more able to speak
freely with each other. Our methodological strategy did
seem to create a space for the girls, where they could discuss what it meant to negotiate hierarchical gendered and
sexual power relations inside a project that promoted
gender and sexual equalities. Of particular resonance were
the “out” group’s perceptions of the “in” group’s relations
with boys:
Bethan:
Some of the friends . . . they act so much
different around boys . . . and then around
me they’re just like normal and it’s like,
why do you do that?
. . . Danni: Like, personally to me the way I seen it, they
[the other girls in the group] act more slaggy
when they’re [the boys] around cos they’re
sort, they’re like the typical boys that um
always have girls with them, they’re funny
they’re good looking.
Emma:
These boys they were sat with . . . ?
. . . Danni: Yeah and then that’s why they dress and they
act a certain way around boys and I don’t
get it I don’t get what’s with, if you’re going
to act like that either act like it all the time or
not at all.
Rhianon: They’re not seeing the real you, like who
you are.
Bethan:
I don’t get why they act like that . . . It’s split
personalities!
Jessica:
So . . . what it’s like to be in the girl power
group then, with the other girls?
Danni:
Well, they have got a lot of good ideas.
Bethan:
Like when there’s no boys around like then
cos it’s just all girls in our group . . .
Rhianon: This is the first time the boys and girls have
come together.
Danni:
If the boys are here . . . I think they’d probably try and side more with the boys . . . Say
they say like . . . short skirts are ridiculous
the boys would obviously say “aw no I like
short skirts” and they might say “aw yeah I
like short skirts too” but two minutes ago
they were saying they didn’t like short
skirts!
Jessica:
So you think they change . . . if there’s boys
around?
All: Yeah.
Danni:
Aw, I feel really bitchy now!
These data complicate the narrative from the first girl
group. There is a methodological opening, in which the
affective glow around the splits and tensions between the
girls comes to our awareness and then is carefully worked
with in our unfolding method, creating interview clusters
that enable the girls to speak more freely. This move, however, leads to a re-territorialization where “slaggy” is
deployed to describe how the other girls act “differently”
when boys are around. Both the comments “slaggy” and
“split personalities” constitute a significant glowing
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7
Ringrose and Renold
moment for us during the interview as the girls signal the
very splitting we felt in the room (and at earlier moments in
the fieldwork) between the two groups of girls through their
dialogue. Working with the split by interviewing both
groups of girls separately seemed to intra-act and create
physical and discursive space, whereby the girls could talk
about what it was like trying to work with the “other girls.”
Indeed, we see the notion of a “split personality,” raised by
Bethan, entering into the discussion as a sort of psychopathologizing force that resonates with our previous work,
where we mapped the schizoid and contradictory nature of
balancing good feminine subjectivity and bad, “knowing”
sexuality (Renold & Ringrose, 2008, 2011). Here, contradictions are painfully borne out––the other girls have “good
ideas,” yet they “act slaggy.” Noting these slowly burning,
repeated re-territorializations of girls’ desire through invocation of slag or slut is something we experienced as disconcerting, and so did the girls. Danni describes how
discussing this makes her “feel really bitchy.” We felt this
tension too at the time of the encounter and this travels back
into our research assemblage as we write this up now and
work with our own contradictory feelings of creating
research environments that enable the telling of troubling
relationalities and subjectivities.
This difficulty is a form of “disconcertation,” as MacLure
(2013, p. 172) calls it, which operates as an affective intensity inside our wider feminist assemblage. The heightened
affect relates to the slow burning glow of painful despair
over sexual regulation of the female body, which cannot be
deterritorialized once and for all. This data, glowing at the
time of the research encounter, is an affective intensity that
travels through to us sitting with the data now and writing
this article. It provides the space of difficulty that signals
further methodological challenges of how to use our feminist research assemblage to continue to plug in disrupt and
potentially transform the complex micro-fascisms of gender
and sexual territorialization. Sitting with this difficulty,
bringing it to the fore of our “analysis” is part of an “ethical
refusal to take the easy exit to quick judgement, free-floating empathy, or illusions of data speaking for itself”
(MacLure, 2013, p. 164).
of girls and women’s bodies. We sought to map how our
own, the girls and the wider global disconcertation with
“slut” intra-acted to produce a research assemblage where
we could follow particular analytic trails in the field. Taken
together, these brief narrative examples from the two group
interviews (“fuck rape” and “acting slaggy”) are all intraacting bits of data. For example, when we read the “fuck
rape” interview, we feel the freeing line of flight alongside
the intensities burning through other examples in our data,
such as the re-territorializations of some of the girls saying
how the girls that participated in the SlutWalk act “slaggy.”
These affective intensities also connect with other data generated in other research projects with tween and teen girls.
Data will always exceed itself and evolve and transform as
it intra-acts with other data and research assemblages.
Indeed, working with the transcripts 1 year on from their
production, our task is to consider their meaning together as
part of our wider feminist research assemblage and as ongoing process.
The lines of research/action/intervention are always
blurry, but the task for the feminist “transcendental” empirical researcher is to try to make a difference by figuring out
what the research can “do,” what it can become, and how it
can continue to affect and transform (Barad, 2007). Thus,
attending to glowing, disconcerting data is most useful
when it propels us to do something! What we hope this article has illustrated is that taking affect seriously means that
the personal-ethico-political becomings of analysis cannot
be easily separated out into a mechanical process of coding.
Analysis and the knowledge produced is affectively situated; it is coming from and going somewhere whether this
is acknowledged or not (Haraway, 1988). Analysis never
stops; it is always ongoing in ways that flow through and
inside of research projects intra-acting and shaping future
research encounters as part of the complexity of the research
assemblage.
Concluding Thoughts: Analysis as
Intra-Acting and Transformative
Funding
In this article, we have taken up the call in the special issue
to outline what we think we are doing when we do something we think is “analysis” in research. We have sought to
build upon Maggie MacLure’s notions of data “hot spots”
that “glow,” elaborating a Deleuzo-Guattarian take on various meanings of “affective intensities” within a feminist
research assemblage. We illustrated how our research interests in “slut” were part of a long-term slow burning feminist
engagement with and desire to disrupt the sexual regulation
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. There is a long tradition of attending to subjectivity and
affect in the British psychosocial research tradition (particularly, feminist informed work), although this approach is not
well known outside the United Kingdom (see, for example,
an important psychosocial exploration of attending to subjectivity in qualitative interviewing in Walkerdine, Lucey, and
Melody, 2002).
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8
Qualitative Inquiry
2. In joining ethical and political, we are specifically taking
inspiration from Karen Barad (2007, pp. 89-90) who suggests
that we cannot separate ethics from epistemology and that
we must take responsibility for making a difference in the
world––all common points of reference in feminist research
methodologies.
3. Deleuze and Guattari’s use of affect is an explicit attempt to
bridge the social/subjective binary and a move away from
psychoanalytic notions of interior desire as constituted
through psychic lack (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984/2004).
4. The implications of Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” and “ontology of immanence” for process of empirical research are explored in a range of recent special issues
(see Mazzei & McCoy, 2010) and books (see Coleman &
Ringrose, 2013; Olsson, 2009).
5. Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2004) also called their approach
schizoanalysis (a play on/subversion of psychoanalysis) because
it was a refusal of the individualizing and pathologizing force
of psychoanalysis to read everything through the Oedipal logic
of “mommy, daddy, me,” and the binaries of naturalized, developmental psycho-sexual difference. See Renold and Ringrose
(2011) for a fuller discussion of “schizoid subjectivities.”
6. It is also critical to note that our research assemblage is
plugged into the international and institutional feminist
research community (in our departmental research groups,
through membership of feminist journals and associations)
and enabled through our own privileged position as “permanent” academic staff.
7. The police visit to York University was on January 24, 2011,
and first SlutWalk in Toronto was on April 3, 2011. http://
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2011/04/03/slutwalk-toronto.html
8. Emma saw and spoke with the girls at their local march.
9. Due to space constraints, we do not explore the findings from
the focus groups with the boys in this article, but for an initial
discussion, please see Ringrose and Renold (2012b).
10. Thus, because it was not an official school trip, many of the
girls had not been able to participate in the SlutWalks––they
were cut off somewhat from its potential and possibility for
rupture.
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Author Biographies
Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education
at the Institute of Education, University of London. Recent research
projects have explored how gender works in teen’s uses of mobile
digital technology, including issues related to “sexting” and “cyberbullying.” Theoretically and methodologically, her work develops
feminist poststructural, psychosocial, and new materialist
approaches to understanding subjectivity and affect. Her recent
books are Post-Feminist Education? Girls and the Sexual Politics of
Schooling, London (Routledge, 2013, research monograph);
Rethinking Gendered Regulations and Resistances in Education
(Routledge, 2012, edited); and Deleuze and Research Methodologies
(Edinburgh University Press, 2013, co-edited by Rebecca Coleman).
Emma Renold is professor in childhood studies at the School of
Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales. She is the author of
Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities (2005) and the co-founder of
youngsexualities.org. Working with feminist, queer, and postconstructionist theories, her research explores young gendered and
sexual subjectivities across diverse institutional sites and public
spaces. Her current research project is a qualitative study of pre-teen
sexualities and relationship cultures in rural and urban South Wales
(United Kingdom). She is also co-editing an edited collection
Children, Sexualities and the Sexualisation of Culture (forthcoming
2014) with Jessica Ringrose and Danielle Egan.
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