The affective performance of the researcher: Embodiment, space, and the politics of elite research

Researching elites unsettles feminist methodology, particularly when encounters unfold within institutional spaces structured by authority, surveillance, and performance. While feminist scholarship has prioritised marginalised standpoints, less attention has been paid to the affective and methodological dilemmas of studying women occupying positions of organisational power. This article develops the concept of the affective performance of the researcher to capture the embodied labour required to sustain access and negotiate elite research relationships. Drawing on interviews with women in finance and reflexive fieldnotes, it demonstrates how organisational environments shape what can be said, asked, and pursued, generating hesitation, fatigue, and tension. Interviews are understood as affective and spatial encounters in which authority, silence, and rapport are negotiated. To account for these dynamics, the article theorises the ambivalence of inclusion as the affective and methodological tension arising when participants are simultaneously privileged by institutional status and constrained by organisational expectations. By treating affect as methodological data, the article advances a feminist methodological framework that reconceptualises research encounters as embodied and spatially produced events through which institutional power becomes perceptible. In doing so, it contributes to emotional and affective geographies by demonstrating how institutional power is affectively experienced and made knowable through the research process.