Queer sensibilities: notes on method

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis note characterizes queer methods developed in the humanities in ways that may be useful in social science and law. Since it is antithetical to queer theory’s resistance to fixity to concretize queer methods into a metatheory, this note characterizes these methods as queer sensibilities. Queer sensibilities are useful for analyzing queer bodies in public spaces – physical spaces and democratic spaces – especially in research programs concerned with sexual citizenship. This note connects queer sensibilities to sculptures of Charles Ray. His work serves as both a metaphor for and substantive example of methods that replicate heteronormativity by erasing pubic queerness. Queer sensibilities leverage insights for how law and culture construct norms of sexual citizenship. At the heart of this note is a queer perspective on the extent to which men’s naked and queer bodies enter the dialogic of sexual citizenship, when heteronormativity censors such bodies and silences sexual expression.