Introduction

Feminist and queer methodologies emphasize the creation of research through relational spaces of betweenness, particularly between researchers and those who participate (Haraway, 1988; Stanley and Wise, 1993; Rose, 1995; Collins, 1990/ 2000; Nash, 2010). These spaces are negotiated through not only research practices and processes created by the researcher/ s, but also by the ways in which interactions play out in research spaces (Rose, 1993, 1995). Attending to this relationality foregrounds the complexity of power relations in the research process; where positionalities and their effects are taken seriously but where assumptions about hierarchical power relations are continually troubled. Power is then seen as diffuse, circulatory, and productive of effects, rather than as something straightforwardly held by some in a hierarchical relationship with others (Bondi, 1990; Browne and Nash, 2010; Kelly and Gurr, 2019). Research participants can be in positions of disproportionate social, cultural, or economic power and privilege in relation to the researcher, and this can influence the research process and outcomes in important ways (for example see feminist research with ‘elites’: Puwar, 2001; Glass and Cook, 2020). This conceptualization of the nature of research spaces emphasizes practices and relationalities with the caution that research spaces should be understood as interactional and negotiated spaces, or in other words, as relational. They are formed via the research priorities and processes created by the researcher/ s with imagined audiences, and through the interactions that play out across the lifetime of a research project. Relationality is operationalized in undertaking geographical research in order that we might ask questions about the possibilities and limitations of communicating or empathizing across difference and engaging the ‘other’ (Nash, 2010; Rose, 1993, 1995; 1997).

In the contemporary moment, heteroactivism associated anti-gender ideologies are increasing in many parts of the world (Correa et al, 2018; Nash and Browne, 2017, 2020). It is therefore vital for feminist and queer geographers to interrogate how hard-won sexual and gender rights, including same-sex marriage, abortion, and trans rights, are being challenged and contested across different geographical contexts (Browne et al, 2018; Browne and Nash, 2019; Nash and Browne, 2020). In this chapter, we focus on research that engages with those who see the heterosexual family as the pinnacle of society and who believe that marriage should only occur between biological men and women and/ or that families should be based on a heterosexual union.