Qualitative Inquiry http://qix.sagepub.com/ ''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 The online version of this article can be found at: http://qix.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/28/1077800414530261 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Qualitative Inquiry can be found at: Email Alerts: http://qix.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://qix.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://qix.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/28/1077800414530261.refs.html >> OnlineFirst Version of Record - Apr 28, 2014 What is This? Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com by guest on April 29, 2014 530261 QIXXXX10.1177/1077800414530261Qualitative InquiryRingrose and Renold research-article2014 Article “F**k Rape!”: Exploring Affective Intensities in a Feminist Research Assemblage Qualitative Inquiry 1–9 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1077800414530261 qix.sagepub.com 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 Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com by guest on April 29, 2014 2 Qualitative Inquiry 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 Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com by guest on April 29, 2014 3 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, Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com by guest on April 29, 2014 4 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 Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com by guest on April 29, 2014 5 Ringrose and Renold 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 Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com by guest on April 29, 2014 6 Qualitative Inquiry 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 Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com by guest on April 29, 2014 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). Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com by guest on April 29, 2014 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. References Barad, K. (2007). 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Guattari (Eds.), A thousand plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1987) Mazzei, L. A., & McCoy, K. (2010). Thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23, 503-509. Olsson, L. M. (2009). Movement and experimentation in young children’s learning: Deleuze and Guattari in early childhood education. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Renold, E. (2006). “They won’t let us play unless you’re going out with one of them”: Girls, boys and Butler’s “heterosexual matrix” in the primary years. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27, 489-509. Renold, E., & Ringrose, J. (2008). Regulation and rupture: Mapping tween and teenage girls’ “resistance” to the heterosexual matrix. Feminist Theory: An International Interdisciplinary Journal, 9, 335-360. Renold, E., & Ringrose, J. (2011). Schizoid subjectivities? Re-theorising teen-girls’ sexual cultures in an era of “sexualisation.” Journal of Sociology, 47, 389-409. Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com by guest on April 29, 2014 9 Ringrose and Renold Ringrose, J. (2011). Beyond discourse? Using Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis to explore affective assemblages, heterosexually striated space, and lines of flight online and at school. Educational Philosophy & Theory, 43, 598-618. Ringrose, J., & Renold, E. (2010). Normative cruelties and gender deviants: The performative effects of bully discourses for girls and boys in school. British Educational Research Journal, 36, 573-596. Ringrose, J., & Renold, E. (2012a). Slut-shaming, girl power and “sexualisation”: Thinking through the politics of the international SlutWalks with teen girls. Gender and Education, 24, 333-343. Ringrose, J., & Renold, E. (2012b). Teen girls, working class femininity and resistance: Re-theorizing fantasy and desire in educational contexts of heterosexualized violence. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 16, 461-477. Saldana, J. (2009). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. London, England: SAGE. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tolman, D. M. (2002). Dilemmas of desire: Teenage girls talk about sexuality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walkerdine, V., Lucey, H., & Melody, J. (2002). Subjectivity and qualitative method. In T. May (Ed.), Qualitative research in action (pp. 179-196). London, England: SAGE. 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. Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com by guest on April 29, 2014