Playing with Theatre in Research Practices: Response-ability and Becoming with a Queer Community

This chapter contributes to the debate about response-ability as a necessary capacity in research practices. It focuses on the relationship between queerness and response-ability using arts as a tool of inquiry. This chapter conceptualizes response-ability as a form of becoming with of queer community members and researchers, which is mobilized by the material and affective forces of the theatrical performance. Analyzing an art-based focus group shows how it enacted forces that stimulated the participants’ responses in their affective connection. Playing with the affects mobilized in the performative exchanges, the participants (including the researchers) became together and developed an empathic safe space, where mirroring and recognition fostered mutual affirmation and care. This chapter shows how response-ability in research can be conceptualized as a practice of affective attunement practiced with politeness like the one that takes place in healthy queer communities enabling queer subjectivities to flourish and co-becoming.