ABSTRACT
This chapter is a good example of how as a lesbian feminist scholar, I tackled the structural constraints and career diversions that many LGBTQI scholars confronted over the past four decades. Using autoethnography as a feminist method, I begin this chapter by recounting my journey as a Catholic nun (and closeted lesbian) through social and community activism of the late 1960s to early 1970s in East Coast, US. I also provide a glimpse of what it was like to be involved in feminist sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE), University of London in the 1970s and the influence of British and American feminism on my postgraduate research on lesbians. I then turn my attention to the impact of drugs and alcohol research on my lesbian feminist sociological imagination and vice versa. Lastly, I reflect upon my contributions to the sociology of the body and the construction of deviant bodies’ within a genetics moral order. All of what I say is framed by my being a feminist sociologist in academia since the 1970s. I hope to show how being in this situation feels and howas a result ofmy life changing, precarious experiences, Iwas propelled into political life. This chapter emerges from the growing body of work by LGBTQI scholars (Adams, 2011; Adams and Holman Jones, 2011; Berry, 2006; Crawley, 2002, 2008; Eguchi, 2015; Gust, 2007; Joshi, 2007; Macdonald, 2013; Munoz, 1995; Philareatou and Allen, 2006; Trotter et al., 2006; Vannini, 2008) who reflect autoethnographically upon their positions vis-à-vis heteronormativity, albeit this work may be viewed as marginal in relation to conventional academic canons (Plummer, 2009). Nevertheless, I introduce autoethnography as a methodological tool for speaking and writing reflexively about being out in academia and developing a ‘critical sexology’ (Barker, 2006). Similar to other academics, whether sociologists (Glassner and Hertz, 2003), women (Krieger, 1996), lesbian couples
(Gibson and Meem, 2006) or lesbian and gay scholars (McNaron, 1996), I want my story to resonate.
