‘As long as you’re not an asshole’: insider-outsider dynamics in queer research

ABSTRACT

This research note is a contribution to the growing body of literature discussing the methodological, ethical and personal questions of researching queer issues in Central Asia. Through reflective engagement with my own fieldwork experiences and participant interactions, I critically discuss how I have often found myself both a ‘queer insider’ and a ‘national outsider’ at different times and in different eyes. These simultaneous positions intersect to inform and influence my research on queer migration in Kazakhstan. While, so far, my queer insider position has often helped build relationships and trust, for some participants my national outsider position proved more complex: on occasion marking me out as a potential problem, and on occasion as a likely non-judgemental or open listener. By examining these shifting dynamics I hope to contribute to deeper understandings of the ethical considerations of cross-cultural queer research in Kazakhstan, Central Asia and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Kazakhstan
• Central Asia
• queer
• LGBTQ+
• insider/outsider
• positionality

Introduction

‘As long as you’re not an asshole, then why not?’ I had just asked a friend and research participant whether he thought someone like me had any business doing research on queer migration in Kazakhstan – someone like me being a white, cis, queer man from Western Europe. Should I leave the queer Kazakhstan research to queer Kazakhstani researchers, I asked.

As we chatted in a quiet corner of a cafe, it became clear that he did not have the easy answer I had rather unfairly hoped for. For him, the terms insider and outsider did not immediately come to mind, but they resonated. Sure, he knew I was not from Kazakhstan – something that cannot be missed, really – but that was not a barrier, so long as I was, as he said, not an asshole. What did he mean by that? My queerness helped him trust me in the context of my research, he said. But, he explained, foreign researchers often have to be treated with caution. He recounted a few tales of foreign researchers who had behaved disrespectfully: not bothering to learn languages, not listening to informants, refusing to shake off preconceived notions of Kazakhstan. His colourful statement was about those people and the disrespect and harm he believes they can bring.

I was pleased he did not count me among them, but his perspective set me thinking about my outsider status and how it relates to my concern about whether I should be researching queer migration in Kazakhstan. To my surprise, most other research participants, friends and acquaintances saw me in a similar way. No one could categorically say I was an insider or an outsider. Rather, I was for most what I came to call a ‘national outsider’ and a ‘queer insider’. Neither, I learned, makes the research harder or is a reason to stop, but being respectful and mindful (or, to quote my friend, not an asshole) is intricately tied to both.

Recent discussion has explored reflexivity, positionality and insider/outsider status of queer researchers from Central Asia and elsewhere as they conduct field research. A recent special issue of Central Asian Survey, for example, invited contributors to explore positionality and ethical challenges, and explain how their research properly reflects the complexity and diversity of queer lives (Wilkinson and Dall’Agnola 2024). Among those contributors was Aitbayeva (2024), whose discussion of how her insider status as a queer Kazakh woman influences her research on same-sex violence in Central Asia caused me to reflect on my own research. Likewise, Kamarauskaitė’s (2022) reflections on her position as a lesbian ‘homecomer’ researcher and Honig’s (2024) experiences as a European gay man re-entering the closet during fieldwork in an unspecified Central Asian country prompted me to think more deeply about my queerness, my outsiderness, and their relevance to my research on queer migration in Kazakhstan.

With this research note, I aim to contribute to this growing discussion. As such, I seek not to respond to or critique recent reflective accounts of queer fieldwork in Central Asia and beyond, but rather to add my own perspective as a queer PhD student from Europe conducting queer-themed research with and among queer people in Kazakhstan.

To do so, I will discuss how my insider and outsider statuses have both intersected and diverged during my PhD fieldwork. For that purpose, I will refer to anonymized recollections of discussions with Central Asian friends, research participants and others. First, I explore how my own queerness impacts my relationships with interlocutors in Kazakhstan who often perceive me as a ‘queer insider’. I will then explore the ways in which my nationality and foreign academic affiliation have contributed to perceptions of me as a ‘national outsider’.

The ‘queer insider’

Aitbayeva (2024) explains that as a ‘novice researcher’, they were at first ‘convinced of the privilege of [their] “insiderness”’ both as a person from Central Asia and also as a queer person, before coming to consider how other parts of their identity may impact their access to the field and research participants in different ways. Similarly, Kamarauskaitė (2022) found herself viewed as an insider, outsider and ‘in-betweener’ by different people, including herself, at different points.

At the beginning of my master’s research, I was the opposite: convinced my foreign ‘outsiderness’ was a significant problem outweighing any benefit my queerness might bring. Though I had already spent several short periods in Kazakhstan, when I arrived in Almaty in January 2021 with plans to stay for 12 months (it ended up being 17) I had only a handful of queer friends there and was concerned no one would trust me as a foreign incomer. I later realized I was overlooking the importance of my queerness, and failing to understand its impact on how I would be received.

I did have some notion that the queerness I shared with my prospective research participants might help smooth the way, but this was somewhat naive. Since my first undergraduate forays into the field, I relied on my own simplistic interpretation of Kong, Mahoney, and Plummer’s (2001) chapter on queering the interview, which I took to hold that queer people inherently make better interviewers of queer people because of a mutuality of understanding, trust and position.

For that reason, I decided, like Aitbayeva (2024) and Kamarauskaitė (2022), to disclose my queerness to research participants and have carried on doing so. Mutuality following such disclosure has been found to positively contribute to research with queer participants (Gorman-Murray, Johnston, and Waitt 2016; Ryan 2006), and this also reflects my experience. But such openness has had its drawbacks, with some experiencing misunderstandings of its purpose (Thwaites 2017), and concerns that researchers might inadvertently claim greater expertise of queer identities, thus excluding participants’ experience (Abell et al. 2006; Thwaites 2017).

I am always truthful with research participants and in queer safe spaces. Queer-friendly safe spaces are an important source of safety and well-being for queer people in Kazakhstan (Kospakov, Shaikezhanov, and Kylyshbayeva 2023) and they have been important sources of well-being and community for me too. I am lucky to have been welcomed into them, and often seen as a queer insider, despite being also known to be a researcher and a foreigner. For example, some years ago I was welcomed to a series of queer social events by an organizer introducing me as ‘наш’ [nash  – lit. ‘ours’], contextually understood to mean I could be trusted, at least on matters of queerness. Whether I was an outsider in other ways was left unspoken in this instance, perhaps because it did not matter for the speaker, or perhaps because my queerness overrode it.

This will not, of course, hold true for everyone in all places. For safety reasons, Honig (2024) does not disclose in which country he conducted his research. Similarly, Aitbayeva must balance access to and membership of queer communities and spaces with the need for a ‘“don’t ask, don’t tell” protocol’ outside them (Aitbayeva 2024; Levitanus 2022). Such balances are reflected in current research as well as by participants in my own research, with many stressing the nuance of experiences and consequences of prejudice and discrimination, dependent on who they are, where they are, the people around them (Olijar and Li 2024) and places they can access (Kospakov, Shaikezhanov, and Kylyshbayeva 2023).

Nevertheless, many participants and friends indicated they see me as a queer insider even while highlighting my national outsider status. For example, after a recent interview about migration with a gay man I did not previously know, I asked how he felt. He confided that he had enjoyed the interview and highlighted this duality of position, saying ‘you clearly wanted to learn about where I’m coming from, but you understand where I’m going to’ – adding a geographical and metaphorical perspective to the relationship between my national outsider and queer insider statuses, and his migratory journey. Another of the clearest examples of this was a friend introducing me to one of his friends in English with words along the lines of ‘he’s from Scotland, but he’s one of us’. That person later participated in my research.

Another group of participants took to calling me ‘uncle ____’ whenever we ran into each other, each time giving me a Russified diminutive of my Scottish first name. While I loved this and the feeling of belonging it gave me, my curiosity grew until I asked them about it, sparking a discussion that revealed once again a duality of queer insider, and national outsider: ‘uncle’ and the diminutive connoting belonging among their group, but ‘uncle’ also highlighting my greater age; my Scottish name acknowledging my foreignness; and a Russian diminutive because I am not Kazakh.

This is not to say that I came out to everyone in Kazakhstan. The decision to disclose one’s queerness in Central Asia is a privilege not open to all, and one that must be considered carefully. Research across the region indicates overwhelmingly negative public opinion (Dall’Agnola 2024; Kospakov, Kylyshbayeva, and Uyzbayeva 2022), and violence against queer people is common (Kok.Team 2019) – though my experience has been that my foreignness shields me from most such risks, as does my being a man. As such, the experience of women, and trans and non-binary people will differ tremendously from mine (Sekerbayeva et al. 2016).

To avoid such risks, like Honig (2024), I have misled people about my sexuality. Unlike him, I have also outright lied, especially when asked if I am married: to taxi drivers, old ladies at the bazaar, strangers who wanted to chat in cafes or on the bus. Sometimes I even pretend to have a wife: she’s a lawyer, very kind, smart and beautiful. Sometimes I am sadly widowed or recently divorced, and not yet ready to marry again. While I do not like making up stories, it is a matter of safety as well as comfort. In day-to-day life, these stories shield me from suspicion about my lack of a wife, and provide a reason to decline offers to be set up with women. Given the experience of women and non-binary colleagues (e.g., Thibault 2021) I feel lucky that I have rarely faced direct marriage proposals, harassment or violence from strangers – mainly, I suspect, because I am a man.

The ‘national outsider’

Despite my perception as a queer insider making me feel confident and welcome, its frequent entanglement with my perception as a national outsider made me nervous. There can be no doubt that I am an outsider researcher in many senses: I was not born in Kazakhstan and have no family heritage there. I benefit from a great many privileges that many others, including many participants in my research, do not: I am a white, cis man from Western Europe, I carry a passport which grants me visa-free entry to dozens of countries, I enjoy relative financial stability and all of my education has been free.

I first confided my fears about whether an outsider has any business conducting research like mine in Kazakhstan to another participant with whom I became friends. I asked whether he thought it would be more ethical to leave research about queerness in Kazakhstan to queer people in Kazakhstan. His response surprised me. Specifically highlighting his identity as a person of mixed ethnicity, he said he preferred to speak about sexuality and migration with a foreigner. Noticing my surprise he explained he would be wary of speaking with a researcher from Kazakhstan, because they may have fixed notions of what constitutes a ‘real’ Kazakh man, or a ‘real’ Kazakhstani. While he thought I might understand such notions, he believed my national outsider status meant I could take him at face value and avoid preconceptions. Moreover, like Thibault’s (2021) interlocutors, he felt I was less likely to judge because I was an outsider. Not only did he think it was acceptable for a foreigner to be doing this research, it might even be good. His concerns about national insider scholars’ preconceptions could highlight issues researchers who are both national and queer insiders may face when conducting research with queer communities.

I had similar discussions with other participants from various backgrounds. To my surprise, most either agreed, highlighting positive aspects of being a national outsider, or had no strong opinion. In a similar vein to the friend who gave this article its title, one PhD student also highlighted the importance of respect, but otherwise did not mind, saying ‘if you actually listen and work with us, then sure’. He went on to say he ‘would never get the funding to do this kind of research, never mind get to do it’.

That I ‘get to do’ this research is intimately tied to my privileges, some of which come from being a national outsider. This student explained that for scholars like him undertaking queer-themed research could risk career damage due to its political sensitivity. Like Aitbayeva (2024), others had to consider personal impacts like the implicit outing that conducting or publishing such research might entail. With a British passport, employment opportunities outside Kazakhstan may come easier for me, and if things go wrong I can leave Kazakhstan at any moment. This is often not the case for Kazakhstani scholars, especially at institutions in Kazakhstan. There can be no doubt that a national outsider like me faces less risk and this may go some way to explaining why some I spoke with indicated that, with caveats about respect, they did not mind me doing such research.

Such tentative approval of my work was not, of course, universal: some people were more sceptical. One lesbian woman, introduced by a friend, declined to participate in my research because she believed a foreigner such as me simply ‘could not understand’ her life. On another occasion, a deeply religious Russian Orthodox gay man from Kazakhstan felt that a non-religious European could not possibly understand his faith and its impact on migratory intention.

The importance of respect, listening and working with people was a recurrent theme whenever my national outsider status was raised, especially in connection with my being from a UK university. Both Kamarauskaitė (2022) and Aitbayeva (2024) explored how their university affiliations and socioeconomic backgrounds affected their perception among queer research participants, and mine also raised questions around my national outsider status.

Some participants had met European and North American researchers before. For some who had studied there, this connection was positive. But a few had previously taken part in research and been disturbed by some foreigners’ research ethics, poor cultural knowledge and lack of language skills. For example, some contacts I first met in English-speaking environments were surprised I could speak Kazakh and Russian, and was capable of interviewing in the latter (and continue working to be able to in the former). Another explained he was wary about trusting ‘westerners’ doing queer research after an unsettling experience with one who ‘barely knew what Kazakhstan is’. For some, my perceived connection with such researchers due to my national outsider status thus created doubt or suspicion which I had to overcome.

Of course, not everyone had met foreign researchers, but other parts of my national outsider identity also cast doubt. Particularly among participants who had not attended university or did not know many foreigners, I sometimes encountered a conception of foreigners as wealthy and frivolous. While I am lucky to be publicly funded in the UK, and receive a more generous stipend than in Kazakhstan, my fieldwork expenses and the cost of living in Scotland are high. Early in my fieldwork, I discovered some participants felt more comfortable when they realized that, by Scottish standards at least, I am relatively ‘normal’ and have always studied on public funding and scholarships.

The impacts of perceptions of me as a national outsider have thus been more mixed than as a queer insider, often requiring extra efforts on my part to overcome negative impressions left by others. Nevertheless, I welcome this: it has ensured such questions remain at the front of my mind, and I am regularly reminded to make sure I am being as respectful, ethical and as little of an asshole as I can.

Conclusion

Further on in my research from the basic interpretation of Kong, Mahoney, and Plummer (2001) I discussed earlier, I now understand that my queerness helps me in my research, but things are deeper than that. I am both an outsider and an insider at different times and in different people’s eyes. Being perceived as a queer insider enabled trust and understanding with those who saw me that way. Meanwhile, for some research participants being a national outsider was a positive thing that enhanced trust, but for others, bad experiences with other foreign researchers made it a red flag that had to be addressed before they could trust me. Principles like respect, cultural knowledge, inclusivity and openness ought to be the bare minimum, but the experiences of some with foreign scholars show they are not.

I do not imagine any of the experiences shared in this paper to be an endorsement of some kind of unique qualification to study queer migration in Kazakhstan, or that I am somehow better at this research than a Kazakhstani scholar would be. Quite the opposite: I take this as a reminder to think carefully about everything I say, write and do. Nor do I think perceptions of me as a queer insider mean I have lived the same experiences as the Central Asian friends and participants mentioned here. To me, it means only that the queerness we share means I share enough experience that some will trust me to listen and understand with respect. Moreover, regardless of any queer insider, national outsider or even in-betweener status, national outsider scholars like me must remember that we do not and cannot speak for queer people in the communities with whom we do our research and, therefore, must ensure their voices are not just heard but centred in our work.

While, in this research note, I focused on insider/outsider dynamics specifically, there remains more to say and more to consider on many aspects of conducting good, ethical, non-extractive and respectful research with queer communities. This essay is my contribution to ongoing discussions of positionality, reflexivity and ethics.

Perhaps my initial questions to friends about whether I should be doing this research were born of fragility, dare I say, the fragility of a white man centring his own worries. Perhaps it was selfish to seek reassurance the way I did. However, the discussions that followed reminded me that, although there is no leader of a Grand Queer Council to revoke my visitor’s pass (and I will resist the temptation to joke about acquaintances who might suit the role), I am a guest of the individuals and communities with and among whom I conduct research. As such, I must continue to listen to them – as much in their own languages as I can – and ensure my research is with them, rather than about them.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank all those who engaged in the discussions described in this note. Thanks also to the peer reviewer for their positive and constructive comments, and to the editor for her support. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. The research projects leading to this article were approved by the University of Glasgow School of Social and Political Sciences Ethics Committee. Reference numbers: PGT/SPS/2021/060/IMCEREE and 400230033. All those whose words are discussed here consented to such use, either verbally or in written form.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council under grant number ES/P000681/1.