‘Babe, I like your lipstick’: rethinking researcher personality and appearance

There remains a deficit of research which discusses how personality affects the fieldwork process and the resultant production of knowledge. In taking a step towards remedying this, this Viewpoint forms a discussion of my positionality beyond the key categorical frames of reference including class, gender, sexuality, race and age, to also include personality and appearance. It is something of a ‘hidden ethnography’ (Blackman 2007, 707), in that it includes information from my fieldwork which some may perceive as too controversial for publication.