Practicing a “Love Ethic” and Academic Dissimulation as Queer Resistance

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) use positivist/biomedical frameworks of ethics to construct a fear-based logic through discourses of risk/harm. This critical queer autoethnography explores how the fear-based logic of IRBs is experienced on an embodied and affective level by a graduate student navigating sexually precarious ethical situations in the field. Using Black feminist thought and queer of color critique, I reflect on bell hooks’s “love ethic” as a queer strategy to subvert this fear-based logic and transgress the academy by leaning into the messiness of ethnography. Doing so, I introduce “academic dissimulation” as a performative resistance tactic for navigating institutional constraints of IRBs.