Special Issue Article: Unsettling Vulnerabilities

Feminism & Psychology

2023, Vol. 33(3) 357–375
Am I vulnerable? © The Author(s) 2023

Researcher positionality Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions
and affect in research on DOI: 10.1177/09593535231171694
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gendered vulnerabilities

Satu Venäläinen
University of Helsinki

Abstract
In this article, I draw on arts-based approaches and new materialist affect theory in
order to explore possibilities to attune research outputs to researcher vulnerability.
These approaches and theorisations challenge conventional research practices geared
toward creating distance between the researcher and their research, and work towards
dissolving hierarchical distinctions between assumedly invulnerable researchers and vul-
nerable participants. In doing so, they pave the way for attuning research work to the
complex interplay of difference and sameness as it unfolds and surfaces in the process
of researching gendered vulnerabilities. By presenting a piece of poetic writing that
engages with research encounters within a project on sexual harassment and young peo-
ple, I tap into the troubled affect, the constant interplay of difference, shifting alignments,
and ultimate entwinements between the researcher, the phenomenon of sexual harass-
ment, and the research participants and other involved actors. Based on my inquiry,
I propose attending to vulnerability through affect theory as an encompassing and
dynamic state of being affected and affecting others, both in violent ways and in ways
that aim to build solidarity and empathy.

Keywords
affect, arts-based research, feminist knowledge, new materialism, sexual harassment,
vulnerability

Corresponding author:
Satu Venäläinen, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 54 00014, Finland.
Email: satu.venalainen@helsinki.fi
358 Feminism & Psychology 33(3)

I was affectively pulled toward this call for papers for a Special Issue on “unsettling vul-
nerabilities.” It seemed to speak directly to my recent engagements with vulnerability,
both as a characterisation of my state of being and doing and as the topic of my
current inquiry—sexual harassment among young people. Such an affective pull, and
more broadly the role of affect as a vulnerabilising force in research, is what I focus
on in this paper. I specifically discuss researcher vulnerability and argue that attending
to it is vital for research on vulnerabilities, such as gendered patterns in sexual harassment
and violence. To illustrate this, I use poetic writing that taps into my researcher experi-
ences, with a specific focus on the challenges I encountered in my attempts to collect
research materials for the aforementioned research on sexual harassment and young
people in Finland. I attune to these vulnerabilities as a woman researcher who inhabits
several privileged positions, being for instance cisgendered, able-bodied, White, and
highly educated. These privileged positions make reflexive engagements with researcher
vulnerability and positionality all the more important, I suggest, because they tend to be
associated with invulnerability, and thus may lead to ignorance regarding vulnerability.
Gendered vulnerabilities produced, sustained, and exacerbated through sexual harass-
ment constitute a contested issue that has been highlighted in both public discourse and
research around the globe in recent years. The #MeToo movement and several other
social media campaigns have made sexual harassment increasingly visible, yet simultan-
eously it has been noted that the vulnerabilities recognised with the help of such cam-
paigns tend to be those of already privileged groups of women—such as celebrities
and White, middle-class women (Mendes et al., 2018). Furthermore, feminist efforts to
expose and resist women’s vulnerability regarding sexual harassment continue to face
opposition, which, in turn, works to silence and dispute it. Such opposition constitutes
what has become known as rape culture (Sills et al., 2016), based on the minimisation,
normalisation, and justification of gendered patterns of sexual harassment and violence
(Gavey, 2019). Other parallel discourses and practices that draw attention away from a
consideration of gendered patterns in vulnerability and power include individualistic
and pathologising trauma discourses used for making sense of the effects of sexual har-
assment and violence (Gavey & Schmidt, 2011; Thompson, 2021). Postfeminism, as a
widely adopted set of contemporary assumptions that highlight women’s empowerment
at the cost of downplaying the significance of remaining gendered and intersectional
power imbalances, has also been noted to powerfully work against sensitive engagements
with gendered vulnerability (Baker, 2010; Jackson, 2018).
According to Lisa Lazard (2020), dichotomous understandings of agency and
empowerment on the one hand, and victimhood and vulnerability on the other, have
often prevailed in discourses on sexual harassment. Feminist views and resistance of
sexual harassment have often highlighted the copresence of agency and vulnerability,
instead of viewing them as mutually exclusive (Lazard, 2020). This article builds on a
similar view that highlights complexity in understandings and experiences of vulnerabil-
ity both regarding sexual harassment and social relations in general. My purpose is to
extend the field of application for these views by specifically focusing on researcher vul-
nerability, which frequently has played a lesser role in discussions on both sexual harass-
ment as well as gendered vulnerability and violence in a broader sense. My focus on
Venäläinen 359

researcher vulnerability is motivated by an attempt to disrupt positionings of researchers

as unaffected by the gendered vulnerabilities into which they inquire. I claim that disrupt-
ing such positionings is a useful and even necessary move that troubles prevailing tenden-
cies to devalue vulnerability and enact hierarchical distinctions between vulnerability and
agency both in general cultural imaginaries as well as in research encounters.

Weaving a web of connections across fields to approach

vulnerability
Attending to researcher vulnerability is by no means new for feminist research. Several
feminist scholars have highlighted the roles of vulnerability and affects in the personal
and epistemological paths into feminist research (e.g., Ahmed, 2018; Hemmings,
2012). Sara Ahmed (2018) has written about experiences that expose one’s vulnerability
as often forming a basis for a feminist orientation in research and activism. This is a form
of situated and embodied knowing (Haraway, 1998) through vulnerability that may
makes us, feminists, more adept at recognising the effects of structures and their
power to sustain inequalities. According to Ahmed (2018), such knowledge emerges
in unison with a sense of wrongness evoked in encounters that have generated knowledge
on vulnerability and its structural patterns. Living through institutionalised forms of
inequalising practices therefore creates experiences of vulnerability, which in turn
allow for insight into the workings of structures, such as those maintaining the relative
legitimacy and invisibility of gender-based violence (see also Thompson, 2021).
On a partially different note, some feminist researchers have also written about vulner-
ability as a constructive condition for ethical research. Here, vulnerability means remain-
ing open and receptive when conducting research on gender and power (Koivunen et al.,
2008; Page, 2017). As I elaborate in the following section, this notion is in line with the
emphasis on relationality in new materialist and affect theorisations that I draw upon in
this paper (e.g., Ringrose & Renold, 2014). Vulnerability in the sense of relationality and
openness plays a key role particularly in the work of Bronwyn Davies (2010, 2014,
2016), which has in many ways revolutionalised my thinking about human relationality.
In addition to influences from new materialist and affect theory, in this paper I draw on
methodological literature on autoethnography (Ellington & Ellis, 2008; Lapadat, 2017),
creative writing as a means of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005), and arts-based
research (e.g., Chamberlain et al., 2018; Leavy, 2015). Arts-based research encompasses
a broad array of approaches that combine research and creative arts “to create new ways to
see, think, and communicate” (Leavy, 2017, p. 3). This also applies to autoethnography, an
approach that engages with researcher experience by drawing on arts such as creative writing,
and in doing so “bridges the creative arts—most notably, literary and experimental writing—
with the social and cultural in order to teach us about the work of life” (Adams & Holman
Jones, 2017, p. 142). In this article, I enter the field of autoethnographic arts-based research
by experimenting with and taking inspiration from poetic inquiry, which, according to Sandra
L. Faulkner (2018, p. 210), uses poetry “as/in/for inquiry; poetic inquiry is both a method and
product of research activity.”
360 Feminism & Psychology 33(3)

Arts-based, reflexive forms of creating and sharing knowledge have the capacity to
evoke embodied, affective knowing in ways that undermine the dichotomy between
rationality and knowledge versus irrationality and affect. Furthermore, arts-based
methods allow for tapping into vulnerability in ways that disrupt the common tendencies
to keep it at bay by associating it merely with others, such as research participants (cf.
Rice et al., 2021). In this article, then, engaging with researcher vulnerability is closely
connected with embracing affect as an inherent part of reflexive and methodologically
creative feminist knowledge production (cf. Lazard & McAvoy, 2020).
With these theoretical and epistemological engagements, the paper aligns with recent
efforts in qualitative and critical psychology to draw influences from outside (critical, quali-
tative, and feminist) psychology for the purpose of developing new ways of attending ana-
lytically to affect, embodiment, and experience (Martinussen & Wetherell, 2019;
Moreno-Gabriel & Johnson, 2020; Wetherell, 2012), and to forge dialogues with research
streams such as postqualitative approaches (Gough, 2021; Monforte & Smith, 2021; for an
introduction to postqualitative approaches, see e.g., St. Pierre, 2011). In many of these dialo-
gues, the more conventional approaches are not abandoned but rather complemented with a
plurality of perspectives that may challenge but also resonate with the approaches more com-
monly adopted within feminist and critical psychologies. This is similar to my efforts; the
paper works in between the approaches mentioned above—a space imbued with potential
for new forms of thinking and doing. This involves working with the tension between auto-
ethnographic engagement with researcher experience on one hand, and feminist post-
structural, and postqualitative efforts to decenter individual subjectivities and to trouble
assumptions of the researcher as a coherent subject of knowledge referred to with the
pronoun “I,” on the other (e.g., Davies, 2010; Gannon, 2006; Ringrose & Zarabadi, 2018).
I see such tension as productively enabling a double move toward engaging with the situat-
edness of experiences and knowing while simultaneously embracing fluidity, multiplicity,
and movement in any subjects’ positionings (cf. Tseris, 2015).
In the next section, I provide an overview of the theoretical premises the paper builds on,
with a focus on how these perspectives enable engagements with vulnerability and affect. I
then put these ideas into practice by first discussing how they enable tracing affect in my
efforts to enter the field in the research project on sexual harassment. This is followed by
a piece of poetic (or, as I will discuss later, poem-like, i.e., poemish) writing that aims to
mobilise affect in research encounters, and hence make researcher vulnerability more tan-
gible. This is then followed by a reflection on the possibilities and challenges in recognising
researcher vulnerability. I conclude by suggesting that recognising researcher vulnerability
should be seen and adopted as resistant practice that disrupts the reification of hierarchical
differences between invulnerable researchers and vulnerable research participants and topics.

The affected and affecting researcher as a part of research

assemblages
In this section, I elaborate on what it means to view researcher vulnerability as an onto-
logical and epistemological status and as a part of research practices. To do this, I draw on
Venäläinen 361

new materialist and affect theorisation, with a particular focus on discussions regarding
their applicability in social science research. New materialism can be considered as an
extension of feminist poststructuralism which draws heavily on the thinking of theorists
such as Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari (Davies, 2018). In the following
quote, Davies (2020, p. 1) succinctly describes the key aspects in new materialist thinking
that are relevant for research practices and their ontological and epistemological
premises:

New materialisms bring ethics, ontology and epistemology together in such a way that the
concept–matter mix is never free of questions of responsibility and response ability.
Being is relational and never fixed; our responses matter; they have material affects and
effects. Discourse and bodies affect each other, not in the sense of one shaping the other,
but in intra-action; discourse and materiality each contribute to the conditions of possibility
of the other.

Hence, new materialism emphasises relationality both in terms of ontology and epistemology.
The reality and ways of knowing, or matter and discourse, are seen as inseparable; they are
constantly taking shape in relational processes where each component influences the shaping
of the other. Such thinking guides researchers towards the recognition of all actors’—human
and inhuman, the latter including for instance ideas and conceptualisations—capacity to have
an impact on each other. In an approach labelled by Davies (2016) as emergent listening, this
idea forms the basis for ethical research practices that are attentive to “responsibility and
response ability,” referring to the importance of considering the impact of our responses
and actions on others. The approach emphasises openness in research encounters, based
on suspending a reliance on predetermined knowledge on a phenomenon or the identities
of the groups one studies. Instead, the researcher is encouraged to attend sensitively—that
is, with all their senses—to what appears to emerge in various research encounters. This
includes both the patterns one might expect for instance on the basis of feminist knowledge
on structures of domination and the fissures and particularities in such patterns. Due to these
emphases, the approach also has affinity with what has been labelled a reparative reading
based on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work (Moreno-Gabriel & Johnson, 2020).
New materialist conceptualisation of affect refers precisely to these relational dynam-
ics that Davies encourages researchers to notice. Affect is seen as an intensity that crosses
embodied boundaries and undermines notions of separate individuals by highlighting
humans’ (and nonhumans’) capacity to affect and be affected by each other (Blackman &
Cromby, 2007; Ringrose & Renold, 2014). Blackman and Cromby (2007, p. 6) have elabo-
rated on this by noting that “affects do not refer to a ‘thing’ or substance, but rather the pro-
cesses that produce bodies as always open to others, human and non-human, and as
unfinished rather than stable entities.” This description highlights the key feature in new
materialist and affect theorisations’ ontology: the nature of being and beings are not seen
as fixed, but the world and its more-than-human and human actors, such as researchers,
are seen as mutable in entwined interaction with each other. Attending analytically to
affect understood through these lenses is an effort to trace what appear as intangible elements
362 Feminism & Psychology 33(3)

in various encounters (Ringrose & Zarabadi, 2018), elements that connect and run through
both human bodies and their environments, and which therefore are not properties of
either, but rather forces that arrange their ways of relating to and affecting each other. This
can be done, for instance, by attending to researchers’ emotions and embodied sensations,
even though affect in new materialist thinking is a much broader and more abstract
concept than emotions (see Wetherell, 2012).
Given the divisive intensities (in the sense of affect theory) that circulate among dis-
cussions on affect and its relations with discourse (for an extensive account, see
Wetherell, 2012), it is important to note that even though affect is seen in these
approaches as intensities or flows of energy, its capacity to move humans is not concep-
tualised (at least need not be) as separate from discourses. These approaches do, however,
differ from discursively oriented ones because they do not give empirical priority to dis-
cursive practices or meanings but rather conceptualise them as one of the many elements
that come together in the onto-epistemological entanglements that emerge in research
processes. Davies (2014, p. 735) encapsulates this idea, for instance, with these words:
“we, as researchers, are part of, and encounter, already entangled matter and meanings
that affect us and that we affect in an ongoing, always changing set of movements.”
Hence, meanings and matter are seen as entwined, and it is their entwinements that
create affect.
In sum, the positions opened up for researchers in new materialist and affect perspec-
tives, such as Davies’s work, are based on vulnerability and its recognition. Researchers
are not separate from the world their inquiries attempt to shed light on, rather they are
equally impacted by that world as they themselves contribute to shaping it.
Furthermore, instead of attempting to fit the world into preexisting frames, researchers
are encouraged to open up to epistemological vulnerability by adopting sensitive and
open-ended practices of knowing such as emergent listening. In essence, this means
letting go of attempts to occupy positions of security and authority that we, as researchers,
tend to try so hard to gain.
In Davies’s (2000) work, methodology is understood as thinking and doing enabled by
certain theorisations and concepts, such as those made available by new materialism. This
is a view also shared in postqualitative approaches (e.g., St. Pierre, 2011), where the
inseparability of theory and methodology guides toward the development of creative
research practices, including creative forms of writing (Davies, 2020, p. 3). In the
latter parts of this paper, I gradually translate these ideas into practice by first engaging
in reflections on my research encounters from an affect perspective, followed by a
piece of poetic writing.

Is the “I” getting lost (enough)? Obstructed entering into the

field
The reflections on researcher vulnerability I engage with next are a part of a research
project that focuses on ways in which intersecting differences and positionalities, and
shifting discursive and material sociocultural practices, shape the meanings of sexual
Venäläinen 363

harassment among young people. In my project, I approach young people’s views and
experiences from the position of an outsider, separated from them specifically due to
representing a different generation. However, as I illustrate below, the research process
has also led me to view my positionality as more complexly connected to the vulnerabil-
ities that the project aims to shed light on.
The process of collecting research materials for the project began in the autumn of
2020, and coincided with the deterioration of the Covid-19 situation, resulting in a
period of lockdown. This change disrupted my plans to collect materials by visiting
the facilities of various municipal youth services, and led to delays in all the phases of
the process, starting from attaining research permits and establishing contacts for data
collection. In the end, it made me turn to social media as a key channel for finding parti-
cipants and to use an anonymous online form to enable an alternative way for young
people to participate. Despite this, finding participants for the research proved
challenging.
These challenges took me partially by surprise, even though I had prepared for a
potentially long and winding process. Far from complete silence around sexual harass-
ment, in recent years it has been raised on several occasions as a topic for public discus-
sion in Finland. In addition to the more or less sustained attention given to the global
#MeToo movement, local social media campaigns, such as an Instagram campaign
#PunksToo that addressed sexual harassment specifically within the punk music scene
in the summer of 2021, have periodically revitalised public discussion on sexual harass-
ment both in traditional and social media. The results of a nation-wide school health pro-
motion study also gained vast media attention in the autumn of 2021. The study indicated
high prevalence of sexual harassment among young people, with approximately 50% of
girls and 8% of boys (15 to 16 years old) reporting experiences of harassment (Helakorpi
& Kivimäki, 2021). Similar results from the same survey 2 years before were also brought
up by many representatives of youth organisations as a rationale for viewing the topic of
my study as important.
Simultaneously, however, these potentialities for addressing the issue of sexual har-
assment meet up with a long history of silencing gender-based violence. In Finland,
such silencing is routinely accomplished through circulating notions of high levels of
gender equality having been already reached in comparison to many other countries
(Ronkainen & Näre, 2008). Such notions of equality work on multiple levels, including
diminishing young people’s possibilities to name their experiences as sexual harassment
and, as such, as an issue of social justice (Aaltonen, 2017; Baker, 2010). This history of
silencing may also diminish possibilities to successfully study the topic, and in doing so
may add another layer of vulnerability to the position of a feminist researcher aspiring to
inquire into the topic, such as myself.
From the theoretical perspectives on affect outlined in the previous section, these
dynamics can be conceptualised as affective forces attached to sexual harassment that
tie together the past, present, and future both in terms of collective cultures and personal
life trajectories. The interplay of normative and resistant discourses on sexual harassment
participates in the intensification of affect around the issue. This can create ambivalent
views and experiences around it for all parties. Both researchers and other actors might
364 Feminism & Psychology 33(3)

get caught up in the ambivalent mixture of a conviction in the political imperative of

attending to the issue on one hand, and uncertainty, fear, and discomfort with rocking
the boat by exposing the related injustices and vulnerabilities on the other. In my
reading, such ambivalences appear to be present, for instance, in the responses I often
received from representatives of organisations working with young people to my requests
to distribute information about my study. The responses frequently included utterances
following the format “the topic is important, but…,” and ended with the contact
person declining my invitation to collaborate. Here, two opposing discourses (at least)
are at play: the one recognising the imperative and the current force of the momentum
created by social mobilisation around the phenomenon of sexual harassment (such as
via #MeToo) on the one hand, and the more traditional, diminishing, and distancing dis-
courses that lean away from addressing the issue on the other.
Having come face to face with various forms of normalised sexual harassment during
my lifetime—the kinds that have not been seen as worthy of attention but rather treated as
part of typical everyday life—the way my invitations to collaborate were responded to
resonated with my knowledge on the mundane workings of social practices that
silence harassment and suppress efforts to tackle it. This reinforced, accumulated, and
embodied knowledge emerged inseparably from the affective flows of energy that
ambivalently strengthened my connectedness to the study and the phenomenon it
addresses while also throwing in doubt, desperation, and worry over my chances of
seeing it through. Looking at the process of data collection with an even broader view
on the material forces at play, the affective landscape shaping these interactions can be
also seen as affected by the ongoing ebb and flow of the Covid-19 situation getting
more and less severe, its isolating and exhausting effects, and the sense of uncertainty
it created, likely for all actors involved. My own experiences with these affective inten-
sities included a touch of desperation present in research encounters such as those
described above, and the underlining frustration created through what appeared as
repeated obstructions to entering the field and the difficulties in reaching out to young
people.
Ahmed’s (2018) views on resistance toward feminist exposures of vulnerability enable
a further reading of these felt obstructions, where I as a researcher of sexual harassment
come to stand for the problem itself due to being associated with it. By giving presence to
the problem of sexual harassment and inviting others to enact openings for addressing it,
it can be argued that I become subject to the routine practices of silence. In terms of my
responses to this potentiality, the positions of familiarity with such silencing that I had
already inhabited in my life resonate with and shape the affective force of this troubled
positioning. This is where histories, both personal and cultural, meet and entwine, and
shape the present and future trajectories and emotional experiences in all their multiplicity
and open-endedness (Walkerdine et al., 2013).
In line with postqualitative critiques directed at traditional, rather limited notions of
what constitutes “data” in qualitative research (Koro-Ljungberg & MacLure, 2013;
Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005; St. Pierre, 2011), the research encounters reflected on
above can be seen as sources of “data.” By enabling insight into the conditions of possi-
bility to address the topic of sexual harassment, and especially their limiting effects,
Venäläinen 365

reflection on such encounters helps with generating new questions and avenues to be
explored in subsequent research encounters. Akin to the process of feminist poststructural
knowing characterised by Patti Lather (2007) as “getting lost,” this embodied knowledge
should be oriented to without an urge toward certainty and fixity. Rather, it is knowing
that emerges as a part of particular kinds of encounters that are partial and fragmented,
and so is the knowledge they enable. As I have illustrated in this section, affect can be
seen as a central component in gaining such knowledge. I elaborate further on this
with the following piece of poemish writing and a discussion on resistant and vulnerable
knowledge production.

Entering an arts-based mode of expression as a means of

plugging in (to) the researcher experience
In this section, I present a piece of poetic writing that taps into the affective forces running
through my research project. With this piece, I hope to make some of the experiences of,
and with, vulnerability in research viscerally known, thereby allowing affect to continue
to travel through bodies. This is what arts-based research approaches (e.g., Chamberlain
et al., 2018; Leavy, 2015, 2017; Rogers, 2019) fruitfully allow for. The process of writing
the piece was also intensely affective, and not premeditated but rather open-ended from
start to finish. In many ways, the piece of text seemed to write itself (actually, during
walks in a forest, for the most part), pouring down as affect that runs through my body
down to my typing hands, not beginning or ending within or from it.
As someone who (occasionally) writes poems for their own benefit and seldom
exposes them to other people’s eyes, and whose familiarity with poetic conventions is
mainly based on English philology classes more than a decade and a half ago, I hesitate
to claim having produced authentically poetic writing. While taking many liberties, what
I have produced has drawn inspiration from poetic inquiry, and is guided by a similar
pursuit of using language as a creative vehicle for affect and to tap into embodied experi-
ence through its travels (see e.g., Faulkner, 2018). Therefore, instead of referring to the
piece as a poem, it is more accurate to describe it as poemish (Lahman et al., 2019)—a
piece of creative writing inspired by poetic inquiry but which does not strictly follow
its conventions.
Writing this poemish piece was a way for me to reflect on affectively intense moments
of interaction during the research process: moments which had stuck in my mind, which
had aroused affective, embodied reactions in me, and which appeared central in my
efforts to make sense of what was going on in the research. The initial round of
writing was free in form, and this was followed by rounds of editing that aimed to con-
centrate affect in the text. I tried to do this by using words and their resonances to accen-
tuate affect and to engage imaginatively with the interplay of theory and practice related
to my research project. The writing took inspiration from poetic inquiry practices (e.g.,
Lahman et al., 2019) in the form of playing with sounds and word ordering, and by cre-
ating rhythm and emphasis with, for instance, repetition, metaphors, and punctuation. In
many places I have used line breaks specifically to give weight to words that sang to me,
366 Feminism & Psychology 33(3)

to make the reader pause and taste them. I have embedded lines from participants (who
are given pseudonyms) in the poemish piece in order to emphasise dialogicality and mul-
tivoicedness; these are in quotation marks and have been translated from Finnish to
English by me. Here we go, then.

Nothing happens
No progress
Stress. Cold sweat. Nausea.
How many messages
have I sent
How many phone calls?
I’ve lost count.
No response. You have no new messages. Not one.

I cannot take it. I cannot take it. I c-a-n-n-o-t take it any more
I
CAN NOT
TAKE
IT

and the silence continues

“Hi, this is XXX, I’m calling about my research. Did you get the message I sent? No? Oh, ok, well, I
am conducting this research on sexual harassment and –”
A sigh, a long one. A moment of silence
then click – the line is mute
Is this real? Is this really happening?
The battery in their phone must have gone dead, I need to try again, or send another message, or…

No, wait, a reply finally, and another

– The topic is important, BUT
we unfortunately cannot help you in finding the participants
we do not have the time
we cannot commit
– Oh yes, yes we want to collaborate, since after all, the recent survey, it really showed how
important this is……….
……………..thank you for getting in touch, again. It turns out that, after all, we cannot fit
this to our programme. But best of luck with your research!
NO
Venäläinen 367

ONE
WANTS
TO HEAR
And what’s wanting got to do with it?

Alas, we meet again

the honourable Silence, of Sexism, I presume?
we go way back.

How self-centred this

rendezvous with my sensations
relations in present past
raving about me, not you
this is not what I promised to do.

and yet there it is, already, the I

woven into the research
of its designer born.

But how to know

the fabric and the threads of today
of which the experiences are made
of young people not the same
identifying, their selves
as non-binary
as a white hetero cis-man
as a racialised young woman
as bi-sexual

On what ground
to assume similarity
and the license to know
entailed on the privileged only
uncomfortable truths

that pierce the bloated researcher ego’s surface like a thorn thrust into a balloon
its confidence evaporating into the air
shrinking, almost vanishing
368 Feminism & Psychology 33(3)

condensing in its meaning

into a seed, of ethicality, perhaps.

And I really thought it might be different now, after me too

Was I wrong?
But look,
they are coming in,
the responses, yes, there’s another one, and another!

There is Sarah, saying

“In town some old man shouted that I have good boobs”
and June, saying
“I have been pressured to have sex,
boobs and ass been groped,
shouted at inappropriately,
slapped on ass”
and Jan saying “Commenting on another person’s body is really wrong!”
and Amelia, and many others, saying
“It’s sick, every woman experiences it and it’s not talked about”
and Andy saying
“I hear too much about how men are laughed at if they have been like raped or something”

And I listen
close, intimately
to let subjectivities emerge
to spill over the frames I inevitably try to impose
And I think I hear
you
knowing filtered through me
too
shaping me
and then detached so as to see

DIFFERENCE
witnessing its torment, suffocation and impregnation
at the hands of indifference

always in dialogue, never in isolation

Venäläinen 369

connected through change

we are.

Recentering or decentering the “I”? The terrifying business of

writing my self into the research
Following new materialist thought, the poemish piece of writing above can be seen as
doing things; it is both discursive and material in its effect and nature (cf. Davies,
2020, pp. 12–13)—it is an animated and animating element in a research assemblage
that moves the process of research forward and contributes to shaping its course. It is sim-
ultaneously a form of knowing, doing, and being. As mentioned above, what the poemish
piece specifically aims to do is to make researcher vulnerability known and felt by expos-
ing its affective aspects. In doing this, it also highlights the vulnerability of knowledge
produced in research on vulnerability, that is, its affective and contingent nature. In
this section, I continue reflecting on researcher positionality in relation to vulnerability
by extending the focus to the regulatory research practices that work against recognising
vulnerability. I then relate this layer of vulnerability to its other forms and layers, and by
doing so engage with differences and connectedness in ways vulnerability shapes lives
and is manifested.
To reflect on the process of poetic reflection presented above, writing both the
poemish piece and this paper as a whole has involved not only plunging into alternative
modes of expression but also constant self-censoring. This resonates with Eva Bendix
Petersen’s (2008) description of movement forwards and backwards taking place in
writing, deleting, rewriting, editing, and, most centrally, worrying over the performance
of academic identities that one’s writing enables or hinders. It appears to me that the regu-
latory force of gendered shame—incurred through revealing one’s vulnerability—is very
much present in these moments of writing. The affect that runs through the discourses of
emotionality (see e.g., Wetherell, 2012) gives them force to restrict especially women’s,
and especially women researchers’, actions, in the fear of losing the position of a legit-
imate knower and actor in the field of science. Hence, written exposures of researcher
vulnerability can, I suggest, be also seen as political acts of resistance against the gender-
ing force of discourses that separate affect and reason and thereby work to maintain the
normative image of researchers as invulnerable, rational, and unaffected. Through an
attempt to recognise vulnerability, an attempt is also made to redirect and intervene in
the affective intensities tied to those divisive discourses.
In other words, what seems to haunt me in these moments of writing is the typical col-
lapsing of the binary rational–emotional onto the related binary objective–subjective in
not only Western thought in general but also in the hierarchies that are formed within aca-
demic scholarship (Ellington & Ellis, 2008). Overall, autoethnographic writing that taps
into researcher experience, for the purpose of showing the presence of culture in them, is
always a risky business that renders the researcher vulnerable, due to them exposing
experiences that would commonly be considered as private (Lapadat, 2017). We could
say that it is the fear of being labelled and ridiculed (as a researcher) as emotional on
which the vulnerabilising effects of autoethnographic, arts-based, and feminist research
370 Feminism & Psychology 33(3)

centrally rest, especially in research on gendered vulnerabilities such as those attached to

sexual harassment. Such a fear is also related to the affective potential carried by a risk of
being accused of self-centredness. Such accusations have become familiar from critiques
against auto-ethnography in methodological literature, where they productively point
toward dilemmas to be dealt with in determining the extent to which self-disclosure is
beneficial in research (Lapadat, 2017; Lazard & McAvoy, 2020). Less productively,
such accusations are also a part of common claims of feminists as selfishly being
obsessed with their own hurt feelings (Ahmed, 2018), which work toward positioning
feminists as irrational and unscientific, thereby undermining the value of feminist schol-
arly work.
It is important to recognise that the new layers (albeit related) of vulnerabilities mobi-
lised and potentially resisted through arts-based engagements with researcher vulnerabil-
ity are filtered through and enacted in interaction with the privilege attached to the
position of an academic researcher, of which there are various gradations dependent
on researchers’ other, intersectional positionings. In other words, vulnerabilities such
as these should not be confounded with those that I try to engage with in my research on
young people, for instance, where quite a different set of vulnerabilising effects are at
play. And yet, these interlocking layers of vulnerabilities are not completely separate, and
what is more, they become united in the ways in which research processes, such as the
current one, unfold. We could, for instance, see the same systems of heterosexualising and
gendering affective and discursive patterns as affecting these processes, systems that regulate
both research and researcher subjectivities as well as sexual harassment and its silencing
through the reproduction of the normatively shaped (classed, cisnormative, and racialised)
category “woman” as the opposite to rational, detached, and invulnerable subjects both
within and without academia (cf. Shildrick, 2002; Young & Hegarty, 2019).
New materialist theorisations on affect (e.g., Davies, 2016, 2020) emphasise the state
of becoming, where people’s social positions, identities, and experiences are in constant
flux. As I have aimed to illustrate throughout this paper, this has theoretical, methodo-
logical, and ethical implications for research on vulnerability. The most crucial is these
theorisations’ potential to avoid the reification of the identities of researchers and parti-
cipants into positions that highlight either their difference or sameness, or enable
seeing vulnerability only in one and not the other. In other words, attending to the sim-
ultaneity and the open-endedness of the interplay between difference and connectedness
is what makes new materialist approaches ethically response-able. Instead of glossing
over asymmetries in vulnerability (Rice et al., 2021), then, an approach to researcher vul-
nerability inspired by new materialism instigates constant engagement with the various
ways in which both difference and connectedness emerge.
In order to move toward ethically sensitive recognising and dealing with difference
and sameness in vulnerability, I propose that it might be useful to closely engage with
the following questions: To what extent does it serve empowerment to attach vulnerabil-
ity to certain identities and experiences? When have we crossed the vague line between
protection on one hand and silencing trouble and traumatic pasts on the other (cf.
Thompson, 2021)? To what extent should we address our own (multiple forms of) vul-
nerabilities as they come into play in our research on vulnerabilities? What kind of
Venäläinen 371

work, and under what kind of conditions, does such addressing do, and how might this
take us closer to ethical practice?
Creative research practices help renew the imaginaries we draw on in assuming posi-
tions in research, and renewed imaginaries may help to dissolve hierarchical distinctions
between researchers and participants while also sensitising researchers to notice differ-
ence. They work towards uniting the personal and particular with the political and
general, and thereby can provide insight into affective elements of gendered vulnerabil-
ities that can be partially shared and partially particular. They can add nuance to our,
researchers’, understanding by showing the many faces of vulnerability. In my case,
both thinking with affect theory and experimenting with poemish writing have enabled
me to gain an expanded understanding of vulnerability, which might serve some
others who explore gendered violations as well. Here and now, I sense (instead of see)
vulnerability as an encompassing and dynamic state of being affected and affecting
others, both in violent ways and in ways that aim to build solidarity and empathy.

Concluding thoughts
In this article, I have envisioned a feminist knowing of vulnerability that is multifaceted,
unpredictable, and yet continuous. It is a knowing that runs deep, it is affective and
embodied, and it ties together the past, present, and future. It is where vulnerability as an onto-
logical state, vulnerability as an epistemological lens, and vulnerability as an ethical and
methodological practice become conjoined. It is, or can be, painful and suffocating, and
can be met with silencing and other forms of oppression, but can also be resistant and empow-
ering. It holds specific potential for resisting stabilising forces, such as the shame linked to
vulnerability, and thereby opens up possibilities for new subjectivities and practices, both
in research and beyond it. Vulnerability and owning up to it is, hence, resistance, also to
the institutionalised and disciplined logics that regulate research.
The recognition of vulnerability can be seen as productive and agentic both in the
sense of researchers’ openness and response-ability toward others and as a means to
expose the harmful effects of dominant practices that silence vulnerabilities such as
those created by sexual harassment. I suggest that specifically in research on gendered
violence and harassment, feminist researchers need to engage with vulnerability in
both of these senses: as the topic of our inquiries in the latter sense as well as a target
of our reflections on the relationality of researcher positionality. Creative methodologies
such as arts-based approaches allow for recognising vulnerability in ways that subvert
traditional research practices implicitly based on idealising researcher invulnerability.
By doing so, they enable disruption of the reification of hierarchical difference
between assumedly invulnerable researchers and vulnerable participants, and pave the
way for attuning to the complex interplay of difference and sameness as it unfolds and
surfaces in the process of research.

Author’s note
Current Affiliation: University of Eastern Finland
372 Feminism & Psychology 33(3)

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the reviewers and the editors of this special issue and of Feminism & Psychology for
their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful to all the NGOs and
other collaborators who did, in the end, generously assist me in finding participants and proceeding
with the research project discussed in this paper.

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.

Funding
This work has been supported financially by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation.

ORCID iD
Satu Venäläinen https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3298-1336

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Author Biography
Satu Venäläinen currently works as a university lecturer in Social Psychology at the
University of Eastern Finland. She has done research on discursive representations of
gendered violence, and more recently on affective–discursive dynamics related to gen-
dered inequalities, violence, and intersectional distinctions. Her current research
project explores affective and discursive meanings and dynamics of sexual harassment
among young people.