Friendship As Method in Collaborative Research

Autobiography has long been an important genre for articulating political selfhood in the contemporary sexual minority and transgender rights movement in India (Jameela 2007; Revathi 2010; 2016; Padmashali 2022). Within scholarly literature, the autobiography has been analyzed within the context of the colonial history of feminine sexuality (Mitra 2020) and as reflecting the negotiations of rights politics with both neoliberal and social justice imaginaries (Mokkil 2019). In this paper, I reflect on the collaborative process of producing autobiographies with sex worker and transgender activists, based on my experience with three recent collaborative autobiography and storytelling projects. Activist autobiographies are textual products, but they also result from an embodied process of writing and storytelling, dialogic across class and caste, a process an ethnographic eye is best equipped to elucidate. Following collaborations like that of Richa Nagar and the Sangtin Writers (2006), I use friendship as an analytic to consider the process as one fraught with tensions and erasures but also acts of generosity and connection. Though the concept of sisterhood has rightly been subjected to critique, it can hold potential as a model of feminist relationships and intellectual and political solidarities (Lugones 1995). Here, I use the concept of friendship to name the emotional valence of research and writing collaboration, one in which feelings of love, inspiration, disappointment, or betrayal coexist in a co-writing process structured by a broader set of inequalities of material resources and political representation. In this way, though research collaborations rarely achieve the mutuality and accountability of friendship, friendship can offer an opening to reflect on the emotional commitments fieldwork can sometimes produce.