Abstract
Are there queer methods and methodologies? The fourteen chapters in this book attempt to answer this question by drawing on research from a diversity of case studies and research approaches. The interdisciplinary collection includes chapters by anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and communications scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Australia. The editors begin with a discussion of the postmodern challenge to “queer” research, namely, “If, as queer thinking argues, subjects and subjectivities are fluid, unstable and perpetually becoming, how can we gather ‘data’ from those tenuous and fleeting subjects using the standard methods of data collection such as interviews or questionnaires? What meanings can we draw from, and what use can we make of, such data when it is only momentarily fixed and certain?” (p. 1).
It is a challenge to review edited books and this one proved to be particularly difficult given the diversity of approaches represented in the collection. In fact, the editors admit to their own difficulty in organizing the book. They found it impossible to offer an overview of “common themes, approaches and ideas” which they felt would be “a rather forced and artificial affair highlighted by the constructed ‘finding’ of arbitrary coherences and illogical ‘logical’ connections” (p. 3). However, after considering a number of alternative ways of framing the book, they decided to emphasize key concepts in the connection between “queer approaches and research design” (p. 16) in the first part. The second part includes illustrations of different research approaches. The final section consists of chapters that offer a “rethinking of queer theorizing and social science methods and methodologies” (p. 16). However, key concepts are found throughout the collection since authors emphasize other concepts or generate new concepts that are not anticipated in the opening chapter. In addition, different research approaches are highlighted in chapters that span the three sections. In fact, I had a difficult time determining where one section ended and another began since there are no indications given to separate one part from another.
As with early efforts by feminist scholars to articulate what counts as feminist methods and methodologies, queer scholars in the social sciences are grappling with the implications of what the editors term “queer thinking” for research relationships, methodological strategies, and ethics. The editors define “queer research” as “any form of research positioned within conceptual frameworks that highlight the instability of taken-for-granted meanings and resulting power relations” (p. 4). Not surprisingly, many of the authors use queer research to contest approaches to identities and subjectivities that align with the heterosexual/homosexual binary. For example, in Chapter Two, Jamie Heckert troubles the taken-for-granted understanding of sexual orientation “as a natural truth” (p. 45) and discusses the use of “interview partners” who are in “mixed sexual orientation identity relationships” to uncover the complexity of people’s sexual experiences (p. 44). However, in his analysis of the “surfing binarism” of real life/virtual life in Second Life, author Tom Boellstorff demonstrates that queer research can be productive for research that does not necessarily address sexuality as a central concern.
One of the issues that sexualities scholars highlight in their work and that, they argue, is missing from other approaches to research, regardless of the research topic, is attention to sexual desire and erotic experiences in the field. One answer to the question posed at the beginning is that queer methods and methodologies make visible the role of sexual desire and erotic subjectivity in the research account. This issue is front and center in a number of chapters in the book. For example, in her chapter on emotions and performativity in ethnography, Alison Rooke argues that while researchers observe and chronicle others’ sexual lives, they rarely, if ever, include “their own erotic subjectivity” (p. 33). The topic of desire and erotic subjectivity is also linked to the subject of “queer ethics” that is taken up in several chapters in the collection, most notably in Mathias Detamore’s discussion of “a politics of intimacy in researcher/researched relations” (p. 167). Detamore includes an insightful analysis of ethics as “inherently methodological” and considers how researchers can negotiate their own “emotional lives with the entanglements and attachments of a living research project” (p. 169). Another consistent theme that further links discussions of desire in the field with queer ethics is the chapter by Stacy Holman Jones and Tony E. Adams who focus on authoethnography as a queer method. They draw on Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological approach for their discussion of “a queer, identity-as-achievement logic” that informs their analysis.
Queer Methods and Methodologies also draws on a number of feminist epistemological innovations, including reflexivity and intersectionality. The versatility of queer intersectional approaches is especially evident in a number of chapters. Yvette Taylor foregrounds the intersection of class, gender, and sexuality and reaffirms “Ken Plummer’s (1998) call for attention to ‘stratifying homosexualities’” (p. 83). Andrew King and Ann Cronin incorporate attention to age in their assessment of the production and performance of sexual identities by older lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. Michael Connors Jackman centers international and transnational sexualities and analyzes “them within a global framework of unequal power relations” (p. 115). Lorena Muñoz’s chapter further broadens the intersectional perspective by examining the complex performance of sexuality by queer Latina and Latino street vendors in Los Angeles. She uses what she defines as a “queer of colour” methodology to reveal how spaces that appear to be heteronormative can be understood as “fluid temporal queer space” when shifting the standpoint to the experiences of queer Latinas and Latinos. She concludes by emphasizing the value of queer of colour critique for contesting the limits of “white queer” approaches that marginalize the “racialised ‘other’ and thus reinforcing homonormative privilege” (p. 66).
While many of the chapters evoke a feminist epistemological sensibility, Boellstorff’s is most explicit in this regard, although he only cites queer studies scholars in his discussion of the link between epistemology, methodology, and method. However, almost twenty-five years ago, feminist philosopher Sandra Harding (1987:1–14) asked: “Is there a Feminist Method?” In answering the question, she distinguished between epistemology (“a theory of knowledge”), methodology (“a theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed”), and method (“a technique for . . . gathering evidence”). She pointed out the “important connections between epistemologies, methodologies, and research methods” (1987:31). Queer Methods and Methodologies further illustrates this insight by demonstrating how queer epistemologies can inform research design, data gathering, analysis, and writing. As further evidence of the range of methods that could benefit from a “queer eye,” in the concluding chapter, Kath Browne argues for the value of “queer quantification or queer(y)ing quantification” (p. 231). She explains that: “To deconstruct methods and methodology that count and create state sanctioned subjectivities could be read as a ‘queer’ pursuit, particularly when the objects in question are based on sexualities and, potentially, normalisations within sexual identity categories” (p. 235).
While some sociologists might find a few of the chapters hard going, especially those that are written from within a postmodern framework, this book is the first of its kind to bring together case studies that adopt a queer epistemology to social science research. As was the case for the development of feminist methodology, I expect that it will serve as a jumping-off point for subsequent efforts to clarify what a queer epistemology will offer social science research.