Introduction: Queer Methods

Abstract

Queer is experiencing a methodological renaissance. In both the humanities and the social sciences, scholars have begun to identify research protocols and practices that have been largely overshadowed by dramatic advances in theory. The 2010 volume Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, edited by Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash, indexed this shift toward by reframing the endlessly rehearsed question what is theory? as the nascent is done? Three years later, the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania hosted a two-day Queer Method conference. Organizers asked what it means to understand work as having a method, or to imagine method itself as (QueerMethod 2016). A 2016 University of Massachusetts Amherst conference similarly refocused studies-as well as black and postcolonial studies-through the lens of methods, and next year, the University of California Press will release a new collection on in sociology. With this special issue, WSQaffirms and enriches these conversations by presenting pioneering feminist work on in sociology, performance studies, African American studies, lesbian cultural studies, critical psychology, African studies, statistics, transgender and studies, media and digital studies, history, and English, as well as poetry and fiction.An Alternate HistoryWhat if a high-profile academic conference in 1990 had ushered in an enterprise called queer methods rather than queer theory?1 Our ques- tion-speculative and provocative in its rewriting of a watershed moment in intellectual history-is also surprisingly plausible. The that scholars used to establish gay and lesbian in the decades prior to were often quite themselves, particularly when guided by social constructionist approaches to the study of homosexuality. This was certainly true in sociology, as Steven Seidman (1994), Arlene Stein and Ken Plummer (1994), and others have noted.2 Why then has not staked a more pervasive, methods-oriented claim? Insofar as has relied on a humanities-centered displacement of the disciplinary innovations that were unfolding in the social sciences as LGBT/queer studies (see Lovaas, Elia, and Yep 2006), a focus on would not only have exposed that displacement but also forced a confrontation with disciplinarity that might have threatened theory's constitutional claims to inter/antidisciplinarity. The current turn back to may be perceived as an attempt to leverage disciplinarity against those longstanding claims by theory. Working explicitly through the question of methods, the following contributions thoughtfully negotiate such disciplinary impasses.From another angle, the political context that inspired early might also have translated into an inaugural focus on methods. Like much of gay and lesbian scholarship, academic was largely inspired by activist social movements of the day. In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman suggests that ACT UP exemplified the pragmatic ability of activists of the 1980s and 1990s to join deconstructive reading practices and grassroots activism together, laying the groundwork for . . . theory (2010, xv).3 Freeman thus links theoretical work in the academy to the questions of how that activism so ingeniously answered. To take her example, ACT UP was grounded in goal-oriented tactics and techniques including direct actions (e.g., teach-ins, kiss-ins, and die-ins), building coalitions across race and gender (e.g., affinity groups), highly stylized graphic designs, medical interventions (e.g., needle exchange, inclusive clinical trials, lay expertise4), video/media innovation, acts of disclosing, self-nominating, public shaming, outing, and marching. …