"Thanks, But No" Research Topics

Like most scholars, I keep a mental file of unwritten research. I have a list of topics that I've considered studying and writing about, only to reject them for other paths. Some topics just don't seem as fruitful in the light of the next day. Some require too big of an investment of time and energy. Others just get shoved down by the weight of other deadlines.

And others, a smaller group, just seem too icky to get into.

One of my ongoing interest areas involves activism beyond or opposed to the traditional left-progressive orientations. I write about conservative evangelicals, "ex-gay" ministries, and voluntary human extinction movements (like VHEMT), for instance. In such work I aim to get as accurate a take on the worldviews and rationales of these movements or groups as I can. The ideal is for me to be able to articulate their views so well that they, reading my summary of them, would say, "Yep, that's accurate."

Some views are easier to articulate than others. VHEMT, for instance, is surprisingly cheery about its view that humans should "live long and die out." (The same cannot be said for other antinatalist movements past and present.) I can get into evangelical mindsets with some work thanks in part to my early childhood in the Southern Baptist Church. Even sexual orientation change ministries take pains to explain themselves as clearly as possible. I mark how bereft of solid research their claims are as well as how harmful they've proven to so many LGBTQ+ folk, but I can hold those realities in tension with the good faith and professed self-experience of some of that movement's advocates.

Mind you, I have no interest in defending them or apologizing for groups that pathologize queerness. But rigor means accuracy. Accuracy requires that I understand them from their own point of view as well as from that of other perspectives.

All well and good. But there are some topics, some movements, some sites of performance for which the journey toward rigorous understanding seems simply too treacherous. These are the "Thanks, but no" topics.

I once knew someone tangentially, for example, whose job it was to infiltrate online message boards  frequented by pedophiles and pose as a minor in order to catch them in the act of soliciting underage sex. This was in the aughts, before the dark web had quite cohered into today's form. To Catch a Predator had recently premiered, a show (in case you're unaware) in which actors posed as underage people and invited liaisons with adults interested in...that. The men (almost always men) who showed up to the address would be greeted by the youthful-looking actor. The actor would then step outside the room, and in would walk NBC reporter Chris Wallace, who would then shame the men for national audiences. Think Candid Camera but for sex offenders.

My interest as a theatre scholar had to do with the acting involved. At no point was an actual minor involved in any step of the transaction--just actors pretending to be. I wondered just what kind of process the actors used to imagine and enact their characters as well as what kind of costs (a very taxing species of emotional labor, I imagine) such artifice extracted from them.

Nor was the interest purely academic. For all its popularity mobilizing righteous indignation, TCaP came under heavy fire from some children's rights groups. I read an article at the time (I'm disinclined to hunt it down) that demonstrated that the show's targets rarely suffered legal repercussions. It turned out that, in many jurisdictions, the fictional setup the show manufactured to catch their predators meant that no actual crimes had been committed. The theatricalized spectacle of schadenfreude undid the attempted workings of justice.

I was--and remain--interested in the kind of acting that might simply be called "lying" or "dissembling." I could imagine a book about the acting of scammers, entrappers, infiltrators, double agents, and snake-oil salespeople. To Catch a Predator might make a good chapter in such a book.

But.

I have trouble imagining the kind of research necessary for such a chapter. I'm sure the dark web is full of fascinating case studies of dissemblers as well as a small but dedicated cadre of people pretending to be dissemblers in order to catch them in the act. But the thought of wading into that mucky world in order to get the kind of near observation I view as rigorous--well, (as my character in Crucible says of cider) "It rebels my stomach." It's the kind of research that I fear would be contaminating. I'd see things I'd not be able to un-see, examine mindsets that I would be better off keeping out of my consciousness and definitely off my hard drives. It's a bit like a basilisk; simply viewing that stuff can be deadly.

I would prefer not to.

A similar "thanks, but no" feeling arose in me when I heard of right-wing activist Larry Klayman's plan to host a "citizens [sic] grand jury" to "try" the Bidens for their crimes (i.e., debunked conspiracy theories of wrongdoing in the Ukraine). On the one hand, a faux court session designed for a certain bandwidth of right-wing audience seems right up my alley as a researcher. But the thought of nosing around in the deep thickets of (racist, xenophobic, nationalist) conspiracy theorizing?

I would prefer not to. At least for now.

Thanks, but no.

JF