Feminist and queer research approaches build on the conviction that academic knowledge is both created by and creating social relations; that in fact any kind of knowledge production is part of social production in general, and that as researchers, we cannot remove ourselves from those relations of knowledge/ power. We cannot, as herising puts it, ‘claim epistemological or ontological innocence for we are not outside of the conditions, contexts, and positionalities of life’ (herising, 2005, p 139). How we select our material and generate our data always includes a prioritization of what we think ‘matters’. What matters to us is of course guided by research questions, empirical material and theoretical approaches but also by personal experiences and intersectional positionalities. On the following pages, I discuss methodological aspects such as site selection, data generation and analysis as well as the ethical challenges that come with being a queer researcher researching ‘queer stuff’. I also reflect on the process of writing as part of the analysis. Writing is particularly important in qualitative research as ‘qualitative work carries its meaning in its entire text’ (Richardson and Adams St. Pierre, 2005, p 960). Within traditions of situated knowledge production, validity has to be created through reflexivity and transparency about how knowledge claims came about. Being clear about how and what we write at different stages is therefore an important part of that process of validation. Hopefully, this chapter will be of interest both to the seasoned researcher and those curious about how to design their own research projects.

Choosing a field, selecting sites

This book engages with three specific research sites concerned with boundary making around notions of Swedishness connected to LGBTQ rights as well as grids of intelligibility enabled by these discourses. They show contradictions and previously untold stories and thus provide unique opportunities to contribute to our understanding of these processes. Here, I briefly introduce each of them before discussing how the combination of these different sites enabled me to approach the questions that guide this project. In line with feminist and queer principles of situated knowledge production, site selection developed during the course of the research period, rather than being predetermined.