Re/Searching Gender Euphoria 

Mika Gratzke  

The purpose of this zine is to explore various aspects of my research to date and research plans for the near future in the fields of love & relationships studies. The zine will serve three interconnected purposes: 

• To allow networking with other academic researchers and potential postgraduate researchers who are interested in cognate research projects; 
• To disseminate the ethos and some findings of my research to non-academic audiences; 

• To give me as the researcher a space in which to experiment more with alternative methods of knowledge production such as autoethnogaphy and autotheory.  

Amongst other topics, I will report on my participatory research using storytelling, creative writing and zine making with community groups such as young writers, LGBTQ+ young people and an intergenerational group of LGBTQ+ people in Scotland. I will compare and contrast research outcomes from these interactions with my study of the transition of lived experiences made by trans masculine, butch and nonbinary people into autobiography and autobiographically inspired fiction in a corpus of 15 book publications from North America, the UK and Germany.  

I will further outline my views on the value of alternative ways of knowledge production and dissemination which differ from standardised academic research – such as practice research and autoethnography. This part will contain an evaluation of my role in ‘DIY gender research’ as a white, cis, able-bodied male academic.