How are interpretive methods feminist and queer? Four discursive methods for studying marginality

Abstract

ABSTRACT What is a queer feminist method? Both feminists and queer scholars attend to the issue of power, but in somewhat divergent ways. Feminist scholars focus social justice concerns on modernist notions of experience and agency within systems of inequalities, while queer theorists shun a modernist notion of rational actors and focus on the poststructuralist goal of demonstrating the organizing power of discourse. (How) Can social scientists translate these two epistemologies into empirical methods? We consider how traditional social science methods have not been conducive to studying power as everyday discursive marginalization and how interpretive methods can attend to feminist and queer analytical and activist goals. We identify four analytic methods (queer feminist discourse analysis, Loseke’s formula stories, queer feminist ethnography, and interpretive materialism) as potentially feminist and queer. In doing so, we find resonances between feminist and queer epistemologies, which, unlike some of our forebearers, we see as entirely compatible.