Queer Methods

Four Provocations for an Emerging Field

Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim

Queer methods. Say the words out loud, and let them linger for a
moment. The idea of distinctively queer methods is probably less famil-
iar to you than its companion queer theory. Now say those words out
loud. Do they sound any different? Feel any different?
Queer theory emerged at an academic conference in 1990 at the Uni-
versity of California, Santa Cruz. Teresa de Lauretis organized the gather-
ing, and she coined the phrase “queer theory” for it. From the outset, the
framework exploited an “antimethodological impulse” (Love 2016, 347).
Queer theory was inspired by social movements of the day, especially
ACT UP, which linked “deconstructive reading practices and grassroots
activism together” (Freeman 2010, xv). A focus on methods, which direct
techniques for gathering data, and methodologies, which pertain to the
logics of research design, would have risked a confrontation with queer
claims to interdisciplinarity, if not an antidisciplinary irreverence.
Although queer theorists have made great strides on the clarifica-
tion of concepts like queerness, sexuality, gender, transgender, race, na-
Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

tionalism, discourse, fluidity, performativity, and normativity, among

others, we have made much less progress on the application of these
ideas in our research. In fact, scholars who use queer theory often pro-
ceed with “undefined notions of what they mean by ‘queer research’”
(Browne and Nash 2010a, 1). This isn’t surprising, since queer theory
frequently defines its object of study as “fluid, unstable, and perpetu-
ally becoming” (ibid.). How do we study ephemeral subjects and their
worldmaking efforts using standard methodological procedures?
A movement has been growing in recent years inspired by questions of
design, data, and analysis—a renaissance in queer methods, as we, your

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editors, like to call it. The turn toward methods makes visible “actual ways
of working” (Mills 1959, 195), as scholars and students identify protocols
that have been largely overshadowed by advances in theory. The 2010
volume Queer Methods and Methodologies (Browne and Nash 2010b) in-
dexed this shift toward methods by reframing the well-rehearsed question
“What is queer theory?” as the pioneering “How do we do queer theory?”
Three years later, the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at
the University of Pennsylvania hosted a two-day “Queer Method” confer-
ence where the panelists similarly asked: What does it mean to understand
queer work as having a method, or to imagine method itself as queer?1 In
2016, we edited a special issue of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly under
the theme “Queer Methods.” Two years after that, the University of Cali-
fornia Press produced Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology
(Compton, Meadow, and Schilt 2018). We’re back again and deliver for
you a volume unlike any other. In these pages, we take the deepest dive
yet, display the most cutting-edge innovations in the field of queer meth-
ods, and sample its intensely interdisciplinary flavor.
The enterprise on which we are embarking in this book has not come
easily or inevitably for us. Questions of method incite heated discussions
of disciplinarity, since our theories precede and largely determine the
particular research strategies that we adopt in our work. Yet queer stud-
ies has staked its claim by working within, against, across, and even be-
yond disciplinary boundaries, thereby blurring distinctions between the
field and its methods. Many humanists embrace a “suspicion of method”
(Brim and Ghaziani 2016, 16) and assume that queer frameworks are
incompatible with social science epistemologies. Scholars in the so-
cial sciences, their argument goes, emphasize the systematic, coherent,
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orderly, modal, normative, positivist, and generalizable while queer

theorists in the humanities champion the fluid, flux, disruptive, trans-
gressive, interpretivist, and local knowledges. Hence, conjoining “queer”
with “method” can present a paradox. The former celebrates a “failure
to adhere to stable classificatory systems or be contained by disciplinary
boundaries” while the latter is “defined by orderly, discipline-specific,
and easily reproducible techniques” (Ward 2016, 71). What productive
avenues of inquiry exist between these orthogonal elements? What are
the methodological implications and applications of queer theory in our
research practices? Questions like these are impossible to answer unless

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we embrace an interdisciplinary imagination. We are pleased to be your

curatorial guides as you adventure through the largely uncharted terri-
tory of queer methods. Page after page, our contributors shine a light
on innovative ways of working and producing new knowledge as they
collectively articulate the promises and pleasures of an emerging field.

Worldmaking and Livability

Queer methods are possible, despite the “apparent incommensurability”
of the phrase (Brim and Ghaziani 2016, 16). Yes, the words do conjure
“a classic odd couple, uptight methods attempting to impose order on
the slovenly queer” (Love 2016, 346). But opposites attract—and often
productively so. In the social sciences, the biggest obstacle for devel-
oping queer methods has been what political scientists Kevin Clarke
and David Primo (2012) call “physics envy.” To establish their legitimacy,
sociologists, economists, and political scientists in particular mimic the
“real” or “natural” sciences by using words like “theory,” “experiments,”
and “laws.” Science has a method, researchers in these areas insist, and
to be scientific, we must adopt it. The scientific method proceeds from
a theory from which researchers deduce one or more hypotheses that
they can test against systematically collected data. This conventional
approach to conducting research is called hypothetico-deductivism.
“If your discipline does not operate by this method, then in the minds
of many it’s not scientific,” Clarke and Primo explain in their thought-
ful essay for the New York Times. Hypothetico-deductivism is a flawed
rendering of how research actually occurs, however, since it ignores
“everything messy and chaotic about scientific inquiry”—precisely the
Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

place where queerness thrives. The hegemony of this model has sty-
mied social scientific efforts to build queer methods—until recently. A
new generation of scholars sees generative possibilities where others felt
blocked. Jane Ward (2016), a professor of gender and sexuality stud-
ies, writes words we previewed earlier and with which we very much
agree: “To pair the terms ‘queer’ and ‘methodology’—the former defined
by its celebrated failure to adhere to stable classificatory systems or be
contained by disciplinary boundaries, and the latter defined by orderly,
discipline-specific, and easily reproducible techniques—produces some-
thing of an exciting contradiction, a productive oxymoron” (71–72).

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Scholars in the humanities have encountered their own challenges by

casting queer theory in the dual roles of method and method’s foil. The
late literary theorist Eve Sedgwick’s “nonce taxonomy” created an early
flashpoint for this conflation. Rather than embrace reproducibility as an
emblem of methodological rigor, Sedgwick champions “the making and
unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new
categorical meanings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a
world” (1990, 23). Humanities scholars have gravitated toward terms like
“critical approaches” and “critical frameworks” to name their work. Such
phrases imply that we create a lens through which to view our objects of
analysis, and these in turn influence and direct how we see them.
Worldmaking matters, but a critical position doesn’t always lend itself
to a discussion of methodological specificity. Recent advances in queer,
trans, non-Western, and queer of color scholarship respond to this eli-
sion of methods in our worldmaking efforts by featuring the resistant,
mobile, and intimate practices by which knowledge is constructed. The
cultural critic Phillip Brian Harper (2005, 108) identifies one way to re-
engage with methods in the humanities at the millennial turn by pro-
moting what he calls “speculative rumination,” an approach that counts
as evidence the “guesswork and conjecture” that accrues to the experi-
ence of eroticized blackness in the United States. Certainty and guess-
work, knowability and conjecture mix quite easily in this framework.
Consider as well the renewed discussions of reading that have emerged
from scholars like the English professor Peter Coviello (2013), who ad-
vocates “ground-level explication” and “long exposure” to texts. These,
he says, are “better served by a practice invested in detail, particularity,
and unsystematizable variousness—all the specificities that literature
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proffers” (2013, 18). Citing the “descriptive turn” away from the liter-
ary, Heather Love (2013, 404), who generously writes an additional in-
troduction to our volume, promotes “thin description,” a practice that
describes “patterns of behavior and visible activity but that do[es] not
traffic in speculation about interiority, meaning, or depth.” Her efforts at
reworking research practices in the humanities show that any analysis of
“layers of meaning” (407) is incomplete without also including “visible
behavior[s]” and “physical act[s]” (406). Love rejects the assertion that
empiricism is confined to the social sciences. Such a fallacy has “blocked
humanities scholars from using a range of potentially useful tools” (419),

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including observations and descriptions, both of which are “an impor-

tant part of reading” (427). Love offers an insight that a number of schol-
ars in the social sciences and humanities have mutually proposed yet
seldom said: what appears as an expression of pure theory also implies
a methodological praxis.
With repercussions beyond the academy, and certainly beyond just
one discipline, queer methods offer options for “making space for what
is” (Love et al. 2012, 144). They “bring to the surface social worlds only
dimly articulated hitherto—with, of course, the suggestion that there are
more, many more, even more deeply hidden” (Plummer 2005, 368). To
see them, we must resist the hypothetico-deductive urge to “fix objects
in place” and instead “ask what we think we know and how we think we
know it” (Morgensen 2015, 311). We thus envision a dual mandate for
queer methods: to outline the conditions of queer worldmaking and to
clarify, but not overdetermine, the conditions that “make life livable,” to
borrow a lovely phrase from an interview with the gender theorist Judith
Butler (Ahmed 2016b, 490).
The proposals and practices that we share with you in this volume
are coherent and provisional, precise and protean, expansive and self-
reflexive, timely and anticipatory, disciplinary and boundary-spanning.
Unlike the first published volume on queer methods, which focused on
the social sciences (Browne and Nash 2010b), or the next iteration that
zoomed in on just one discipline (Compton, Meadow, and Schilt 2018),
we offer an inclusive call to action that comes from all corners of the
academy. We have brought together thinkers who have very different
viewpoints on what methods mean and why they matter. In fact, we
deliberately sweep from verstehen, pure interpretivism, reading, and
Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

ephemera to formal measurement, modeling, sampling, scaling, and

statistics. This range represents the interface of scientific and human-
istic modes of producing new knowledge, the place where qualitative,
meaning-oriented approaches mix and mingle with formal, behavioral,
and quantitative styles of knowing the world. No one else has attempted
to do what we’ve done in this volume.
We asked our contributors to grapple with tough questions. If inter-
disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and antidisciplinarity are the defining
features of queer theory, then what challenges emerge as especially ur-
gent within a program of queer methods? What inferential and inter-

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pretive possibilities are afforded to us when we think about this as a

program of study unto its own? What we present to you is a picture
of queer methods as an emergent enterprise—hardly the last word. We
want to stir and provoke you, not force a premature consensus and clo-
sure. Here you will find ways of holding multiple, opposed ideas in your
mind while still retaining the ability to imagine queer methods as a new
scholarly enterprise.
In the rest of this chapter, we offer four provocations to arouse your
imagination: identifying new types of data; modifying existing proto-
cols to better resonate with queer theoretical frameworks; challenging
methodological norms of coherence, generalizability, and reliability; and
eliciting the pedagogical implications of queer methods. These are not
prescriptive, exhaustive, or mutually exclusive. Rather, we wish to iden-
tify some of the most exciting and useful possibilities of queer world-
making and the conditions that make life livable.

The First Provocation: Queer Methods

Although they write from different backgrounds and different countries,
English and comparative literature professor Jack Halberstam (1998)
in the United States and emeritus sociology professor Ken Plummer
(2005) from the United Kingdom both see in queer theory “a refusal of
all orthodox methods—a certain disloyalty to conventional disciplinary
methods” (Plummer 2005, 366). Implied in their argument is the pos-
sibility of something new, rather than a reworking of what we already
have available to us in our existing portfolios. But how can we diversify
our approaches beyond an “overwhelming” interest in “an analysis of
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texts—films, literature, television, opera, musicals” (ibid.)? How do we

respond today to the earlier proposition that “almost everything that
would be called queer theory is about ways in which texts—either lit-
erature or mass culture of language—shape sexuality” (Warner 1992, 19)?
We know that sexuality is epistemologically distinct (Sedgwick 1990)—
not to mention “complex, diffuse, and messy”—and existing methods
tend to “make a mess of it” (Law 2004, 2). What are we to do?
Sociologists John Mohr and Amin Ghaziani (2014, 231–36) offer an
example from the history of science that can help us. Scholars who de-
veloped a theory of measurement in the mid-century argued that its for-

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mal applications were possible only if the “axiom of additivity” (Stevens

1959, 21), or the ability to add or subtract numerical quantities, corre-
sponded with how we manipulated objects. In other words, the applica-
tions of measurement theory required “quantitative estimates of sensory
events” (Stevens 1975, 38). This standard was too stringent, however. The
psychologist S. S. Stevens, who we know today as the founder of scales
(nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio), complained, “Only a few prop-
erties, such as length, weight, and electric resistance are measurable in
this fundamental way” (1959, 21). The belief that true measurement was
possible only when an experimenter could perform a physical or empiri-
cal addition—or locate a phenomenon in discrete categories and then
count those categories—was “blocking progress in psychophysics,” Ste-
vens lamented. How do we measure subjective states like brightness or
loudness, which escape “the requirement of empirical addition” (Stevens
1979, 50)? Stevens saw a need “to measure the previously unmeasured”
since “procedures such as the counting and adding of beans do not suf-
fice for the measurement of such concepts as the social status accorded
a person” (1979, 46).
Like the scholars in our volume today, Stevens then sought to extend
an existing theory into new domains. To clear a path forward, he resisted
“old-style assumptions” about the singular application of measurement
theory to “problems of counting” (Stevens 1959, 19). New developments
were possible only under new conditions of the imagination: “the as-
signment of numerals to objects or events according to a rule—any rule”
(ibid.), he supposed, not just the assignment of numerals by addition
or subtraction alone. Provided that “a consistent rule is followed, some
form of measurement is achieved” (ibid.). Procedural innovations are
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hard to devise because the approaches we adopt in our practice of a the-

ory appear “ontologically real” (ibid.). Stevens explained how he maneu-
vered his way through the quagmire: “The best way out seemed to be to
approach the problem from another point of view” (ibid., 23). To adopt
the ever-elusive “another point of view” requires us to engage in an “on-
going and regular confrontation with the methodological assumptions
of the field” (Mohr and Ghaziani 2014, 233). Only then can we reinvent
our protocols and procedures. This process consists of conflict, differen-
tiation, and split, and it produces a “fractal distinction” (Abbott 2001) at
the end, or a new idea that upends entrenched conventions.

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The development of queer and measurement theories have a surpris-

ing amount in common. Concepts within each framework structure
how we experience reality and how we study it. The imagery of fractals
is apt for queer conversations, as these structures can account for irregu-
larly shaped objects and spatial nonuniformity in a way that Euclidean
geometry cannot process.2 The challenge for us is how to move from a
place of conceptual innovation and experiential resonance to empirical
expression and methodological diversification—the fractal distinction
of queer methods. To do this, we replicate Stevens’s logic below. We first
present the hallmarks of queer theory that Arlene Stein and Ken Plum-
mer (1994, 181–83) proposed—but we use them “to approach the prob-
lem from another point of view,” that is, to outline the possibilities of
distinctively queer methods.

1. Reject unchanging categories. Terms like “heterosexual”

and “homosexual” are not ahistorical (it is a fallacy to assert that
sexuality is a biological expression exempt from historical forces)
or transhistorical (it is equally misguided to believe that sexual
meanings are stable across time). Sexuality has a history (Halperin
2002). One early example of this constructionist argument comes
from the British sociologist and activist Mary McIntosh (1968),
who argued that homosexuality is a “social role” that varies across
societies, not an essential “condition” that has existed in all places
at all times. The French philosopher Michel Foucault provides an-
other influential redirection when he declared that “the homosex-
ual as a species” was born around 1870 (1978, 43). In this tradition,
we also find the American historian Jonathan Ned Katz, who notes
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that German sodomy-law reformer Karl Maria Kertbeny coined

the terms heterosexuality and homosexuality in 1868. Unlike other
scholars who focused on homosexual history, Katz dives into the
“sex cultures” (Ghaziani 2017) of heterosexuality and challenges an
idea that many people accept, even now, without second thought:
heterosexuality is not as “old as procreation, ancient as the lust of
Eve and Adam.” Although many people mistake heterosexuality as
“unchanging, universal, essential: ahistorical” (Katz 1990, 7), Katz
proposed an alternative thesis: heterosexuality is a recent inven-
tion, located in specific moments in time, and it has organized

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arrangements between men and women in ways that are culturally

constructed. From this corpus of research flows four queer meth-
odological principles: (a) embrace a logic of historical variation
and social construction; (b) analyze how the meanings of sexuality
change over time, especially their discursive character; (c) identify
triggers of change (e.g., institutional agents such as psychiatrists
and legal definitions); and (d) specify the contexts in which these
definitions operate.
2. Reject impermeable categories. A study by neuroscien-
tist Simon LeVay showed that homosexuality may have a biologi-
cal antecedent based on a controversial finding that gay men and
straight women have a similarly sized hypothalamus. To this,
psychologist John Money retorts, “Of course it [sexual orienta-
tion] is in the brain. The real question is, when did it get there?
Was it prenatal, neonatal, during childhood, puberty? That we
do not know.”3 Searching for the origins of sexual orientation—
asking what “makes one” a lesbian or if she was “born that way,”
for example—has been afforded an outsized and obsessive role in
sexuality studies. Underlying the raging nature/nurture debates are
assumptions about identity and difference, continuity and change.
According to history professor David Halperin, sexuality scholars
need a “strategy for accommodating the aspects of sexual life that
seem to persist through time as well as the dramatic differences be-
tween historically documented forms of sexual experience” (2000,
88). Such a procedure begins with the “methodological suspension
of modern categories” (90) so that we can locate them at differ-
ent points in time (to Kertbeny, for example, who coined homo-
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sexuality and heterosexuality). Halperin calls this a “genealogical

analysis” (ibid.), and queer researchers can use it to investigate the
cultural contradictions of categories (does heterosexuality require
the absolute negation of homosexual encounters?) and their alleg-
edly unified meaning (is heterosexuality as timeless as the lust of
Eve and Adam?). We can use ongoing arguments about sexuality
as an analytic device to trace historical changes in its meanings,
which leave behind “genetic traces, as it were” (ibid.). If we do
this, Halperin is confident that we’ll see sexuality as an “eloquent”
expression of “the historical accumulation of discontinuous no-

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tions sheltered within [a] specious unity” (ibid.)—sexuality as a

sedimentary formation that balances diverse elements in a “thinly
coherent” fashion (Ghaziani and Baldassarri 2011).
3. Reject dualisms. Power operates through the imposition
of conceptual binaries such as gay or straight, male or female,
masculine or feminine. According to cognitive sociologist Evi-
atar Zerubavel (1996), this process of “lumping and splitting” the
world is inconsistent with an “essentially continuous” reality. As
an example, Halperin (1993) shows that antiquity was populated
by “molles” (soft or unmasculine men who depart from cultural
norms of manliness by embracing femininity) and “tribades”
(masculine women who are eager to have sex with other women).
When historian George Chauncey (1994) used the archives to visit
early twentieth-century New York City, he uncovered a world filled
with “trade,” “husbands,” “wolves,” “fairies,” “third-sexers,” and
“punks.” Sociologist Peter Hennen (2008) notes that the “wed-
ding date” of effeminacy and homosexuality was written into the
popular imagination in the eighteenth century, while Halberstam
(1998) asserts that masculinity exists apart from the male body and
its effects. By extending the study of gender and sexuality across
geographical and temporal domains, we can act on the queer
impulse to distinguish Western and non-Western epistemologies
as well (Babayan and Najmabadi 2008). All these studies show that
queer worldmaking and livability require us to embrace multiplic-
ity and pluralism, not binaries and dualisms. Because existing cat-
egories imperfectly map onto many of our lived experiences, queer
methods reject a close-fit assumption across categories, identities,
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attraction, arousal, and sexual behavior. Multiple categories, new

categories, and continua are among a number of innovative pos-
sibilities that emerge from queer methods.
4. Reject interest group politics. According to the fi-
nal hallmark, lobbying and other forms of electoral, single-issue
identity politics are not the most effective ways to create change.
Queer theorists initially examined street-level forms of provoca-
tion, parody, and coalitional politics that had cultural revisionism,
or what we define as normal and natural, as their goal (Berlant
and Freeman 1993). Scholars have continued to expose the risks

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of identity politics by tracing how power is unevenly distributed

through, not just against, categories of minority genders and
sexualities. These efforts include critiques of homonormativity
(Duggan 2003), homonationalism (Puar 2007), and legal inclusion
(Spade 2011). British-Australian feminist writer and independent
scholar Sara Ahmed’s call for an “affinity of hammers” (2016a)
similarly rejects identity in favor of a model of trans/feminist
politicality that draws on the lived experiences of different people
who share the feeling of being hammered by oppressive systems
(see Cohen 2001 for another example). Ahmed’s work suggests that
we can use how identity feels as a way to study the isolating perils
of identity politics. In a recent blog post, political scientist Paisley
Currah proposes another approach that uses a model of gender
asymmetry rather than gender neutrality or even plurality that is
typically associated with newer transgender analysis. He writes,
“Any conceptual framework, from the sex/gender binary to the
transgender-cisgender dichotomy, risks ossification, risks turning
what had been a provisional and generative idea into a method-
ological imperative that over time obscures more than it reveals.
But I do think that, in particular moments and circumstances, we
need a transgender feminist approach that is not gender-neutral—
that dares to identify asymmetry when it sees it” (2016). A turn to
queer methods can navigate such complex returns—to politics,
identities, isolation, asymmetries, worldmaking, and livability.

Existing research methods only partially capture the “mess of social

worlds” (Browne and Nash 2010a, 13). That’s because “parts of our world
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are caught in our ethnographies, our histories, and our statistics. But
other parts are not” (Law 2004, 2). As we outlined in our first provo-
cation, queer theory sees a world that is “vague, diffuse or unspecific,
slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive, or indistinct, changes like a ka-
leidoscope, or doesn’t really have much of a pattern at all” (ibid.). The
methodological directive that follows from a mandate to embrace the
mess is to devise new modes of inquiry and analysis. British sociology
professor John Law elaborates, “If we want to think about the messes
of reality at all then we’re going to have to teach ourselves to think, to
practice, to relate, and to know in new ways. We will need to teach our-

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selves to know some of the realities of the world using methods unusual
to or unknown” to us (2004, 2). Following a trail of breadcrumbs left
behind by queer theory, we have shown that queer methods can guide
our data collection techniques around the “playful possibilities of un-
stable and indeterminate subjectivities and for transgressive practices
that challenge binaries” (Browne and Nash 2010a, 5). Queer methods
can access hidden histories by negation (Muñoz 1996), by emphasizing
instability and the disruptive (Krahulik 2006), and by using deconstruc-
tive practices.

The Second Provocation: Queering Methods

“Queer methods” is a noun. It connotes a new set of protocols and
procedures. “Queering methods” functions as a verb, and it inspires a
different question: How can we use queer insights to adjust established
protocols in the humanities and social sciences? Our second provoca-
tion is a revisionist effort that begins by identifying the limitations of
extant models, metrics, or empirical approaches and then innovates
based on the signature strengths of queer studies. Let’s assume that our
methodological toolkits are robust in general but ill-suited for respond-
ing to the distinctiveness of sexuality.
Plummer (2005, 366–67) coins the term “subversive ethnographies”
to describe “relatively straightforward ethnographies of specific sexual
worlds that challenge [heteronormative] assumptions.” Laud Hum-
phreys’s (1970) study of tearoom trade is a classic example in the social
sciences, and Jason Orne’s (2017) research on “sexy communities” in
Chicago gay bars provides a contemporary illustration from sociology
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that foregrounds the role of sex in queer communities. Gender studies

scholar Marlon Bailey’s (2013) first-person performance ethnography
of ballroom culture in Detroit offers an organic method for examin-
ing queer cultural formations that resist normative genders, sex, and
kinship.
Plummer also raises the notion of “scavenger methods” (2005, 367),
and cites Halberstam’s (1998) work as an example. He shows how hu-
manists can “raid” literary textual methods, film theory, field research,
historical surveys, archival records, and taxonomies to produce unique
arguments about “female masculinity.” More recently, Peter Hennen

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(2008) chronicles how three groups of gay men (faeries, bears, and
leathermen) respond to the historical association of effeminacy with
male homosexuality. Inspired by Halberstam and echoing Plummer,
Hennen calls his approach a “scavenger method” as well because he
uses existing techniques to “produce information on subjects who have
been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of
human behavior.” He mixes “methods that are often cast as being at odds
with each other,” such as participant and nonparticipant observation,
interviews, historical data, and archival data, and “refuses the academic
compulsion toward disciplinary coherence” (Halberstam 1998, 13, qtd.
in Hennen 2008, 23).
Studies like these assume that “queerness is often transmitted co-
vertly” (Muñoz 1996, 6). The Cuban American academic José Esta-
ban Muñoz explains the consequences of this assumption for research
practice: “Leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer
subject has left herself open for attack.” This alters the nature of evi-
dence. “Instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queer-
ness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and
performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its
epistemological sphere—while evaporating at the touch of those who
would eliminate queer possibility” (ibid.). The covertness of queerness
compels Muñoz to propose “ephemera as evidence,” as he titles his
essay. Ephemera include all those things that remain after a perfor-
mance, a “residue” (11) that provides “evidence of what has transpired”
(10). The ephemeral provides a type of proof that traditional meth-
ods would miss, especially “structures of feeling” (10) that drive queer
“worldmaking capabilities” (11).
Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

Methods are queered when we use the tenets of queer theory to tweak
or explode what is possible with our existing procedures. The most com-
mon pursuits include making strange the otherwise commonplace or
familiar; interrogating alternate possibilities for worldmaking and liv-
ability; negotiating differences; resisting categorization or adopting an
anticategorical stance altogether; disrupting ideals of stability, rational-
ity, objectivity, and coherence; rethinking the meaning of empiricism
and our assumptions about data; critiquing heteronormative practices
and recentering the lens on queer lives; and “deconstructing rather than
reifying social constructs” (McDonald 2017, 134–35) like gender and

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 16 | Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim

sexuality, as we would expect, but also disability (McRuer 2006), fail-

ure (Halberstam 2011), intelligibility (Martinez 2013), loss (Love 2007),
migration (Manalansan 2003), racism (Holland 2012), shame (Halperin
and Traub 2009), and time (Halberstam 2005). Unlike the first provoca-
tion, the goal in this second one is not to establish a “discrete or stable
queer methods,” communications scholar James McDonald hastens to
add, since “queering is an ongoing process” that requires “an attitude of
unceasing disruptiveness” (2017, 8). The ambition, at least for sociolo-
gists like Kristen Schilt, Tey Meadow, and D’Lane Compton (2018), is “to
find ways to gather empirical data about the experiences of people who
are politically and socially marginalized without reproducing such mar-
ginalization through practices of research and theorizing that conflate
objectification with ‘good science.’”

The Third Provocation: Queering Methodology

Our discussion thus far has focused on methods. The word denotes
“what is ‘done,’ that is, techniques of collecting data (interviews, ques-
tionnaires, focus groups, photographs, videos, observation, inter alia)”
(Browne and Nash 2010a, 10). Having considered some possibilities for
a distinct queer methods as well as queering established methods, we
turn now to concerns of methodology, which entail “sets of rules and
procedures that guide the design of research to investigate phenomenon
or situations; part of which is a decision about what methods will be
used and why” (ibid.). To speak of methodology means to articulate the
logic that links our theoretical frameworks with the choices we make
about how to study the expressions of those theories in texts, ephemera,
Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

performances, conversations, discourses, memories, corporeality, inter-

actions, and behaviors. How can queering our rules, procedures, and
practices illuminate the epistemologies and ontologies that we deploy
when we try to understand gender and sexuality? Three themes strike
us as especially urgent: knowability and queer reflexivity, zombie catego-
ries, and quantification of the subject.
By connecting queer theory with protocols for data collection and
analysis, both humanists and social scientists challenge basic precepts of
the research process, including the “knowability of the social” (Browne
and Nash 2010a, 13). Some scholars go further and declare that the social

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 Queer Methods | 17

is dead. They favor alternatives like “assemblages” (Puar 2007) that reject
“the idea of the social as coherent” or else shift focus to “objects, animals,
environments, [and] materials” (Browne and Nash 2010a, 13). Rather
than tumbling into methodological nihilism, this exercise can free how
researchers think about concepts like “methodology” and “empirical
research” (McDonald 2017, 134) along with the “knowledge-power re-
lations” (Di Feliciantonio, Gadelha, and DasGupta 2017, 405) between
us and what or whom we study. Questions of knowledge-power fre-
quently implicate related concerns of whether we should adopt a stance
of “emotional neutrality” (Burkhart 1996, 34). Doing so is often costly
for LGBTQ field researchers. Hennen responds to the “positive science
emphasis on distance and objectivity” by advocating a “sensitivity to
borders” (2008, 26). He says that we should “identify freely” with our
study participants, since doing so creates “an enormous amount of good
will” (27) and builds rapport in interviews. Deconstructing accepted un-
derstandings about the practice of research, as Hennen does, requires
that we adopt a skeptical stance toward “traditional claims to objectiv-
ity” (McDonald 2017, 135). Those who travel down this road encourage
us to be reflexive; hence, “queer reflexivity,” which McDonald defines as
“a form of reflexivity that entails reflecting on the performativity and
closeting of identities over the course of the research process, with par-
ticular attention to the ways in which heteronormativity is enacted and
resisted in the field” (2017, 135).
Queering methodologies also draws attention to what the German
sociologist Ulrich Beck (2003) calls “zombie categories.” These are cat-
egories that “once had life and meaning but for many now mean very
little” (Plummer 2005, 358). So why do we keep using them? Plummer
Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

muses, “We probably go on using them because at present we have no

better words to put in their place. Yet dead they are.” As a testament to
the growing chasm between undifferentiated categories like “gay” and
the complexities of worldmaking and livability, we only have to consider
the proliferation of terms like queer, of course, but also bisexual, same-
gender loving, and MSM (men who have sex with men). In avoiding a
conventional identity-based category, the goal of epidemiologists who
coined MSM was to find a way of counting “non-gay-identified MSM”
without automatically assuming that they are closeted gay men (Car-
rillo and Hoffman 2016). The category “unscrambles sexual behavior

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 18 | Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim

from sexual identity” (Ghaziani 2017, 151) and prevents researchers from
conflating these two dimensions of sexuality. MSM didn’t stick beyond
certain academic and medical circles; other terms like “heteroflexible,”
“mostly straight,” and “bicurious” have become more popular. As one
of us argues elsewhere, “These neologisms expand the definition of het-
erosexual . . . by incorporating same-sex desires and practices into the
sex cultures of straights” (Ghaziani 2017, 151). For our purposes here,
the terms also stress the need to address zombie categories by creating
newer ones that better resonate with the diverse aspects of queer lives.
Cultural and linguistic anthropologist David Valentine’s (2007) ethnog-
raphy of “transgender” as a category is a creative example of this tradi-
tion and its sensitivity to language.
Perhaps the biggest area of contention between humanist and social
scientific investments in queer theory pertains to counting. Sociolo-
gists of sexualities often feel cornered in this conversation. On the one
hand, they struggle with the acutely normative pressures induced by
hypothetico-deductivism. We constantly confront “positivist gatekeep-
ers who evaluate the significance of research in terms of p-values and
generalists who prioritize broad ‘so what’ claims” (Schilt, Meadow, and
Compton 2018) that are best handled by flaunting large sample sizes.
On the flip side, social scientists are also burdened by anxieties that they
are “‘not yet queer enough’ in the eyes of our humanistic colleagues”
(ibid.). Humanists are clearer on the matter of quantifying the subject.
Muñoz asserts that “the inability to count as proper proof ” is a “pro-
foundly queer” position (1996, 6). As an alternative to quantification,
queer theorists like him propose a “worldmaking project” that promotes
“queerness as a possibility” over counting bodies (or “same-sex partner
Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

households,” to invoke a zombie category that demographers use; see

Spring 2013). He emphasizes “a sense of self-knowing, a mode of social-
ity and relationality” (6) over quantification. Allergic reactions to count-
ing among humanists don’t surprise social scientists who are versed in
queer theory. They recognize that it may be “illogical to count subjects
once one has argued that a countable subject does not exist” (Schilt,
Meadow, and Compton 2018). Until recently, this created an impasse
because of binary thinking about methodology: you either count or you
don’t. In our volume, we will showcase the surprising compatibilities
between quantification and queerness.

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 Queer Methods | 19

The Final Provocation: Queer Pedagogy

A book about interdisciplinary approaches to queer methods must
acknowledge our intellectual forebearers, especially the black lesbian
feminist collective who co-edited the anthology All the Women Are
White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s
Studies (Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith 2015). Of that founding document’s
many contributions, its innovations in pedagogy continue to resonate
and inspire, and we organize our final provocation around this theme.
What are the implications of a queer methods collection for classrooms
and for relations of teaching and learning?
As editors, we believe that an inclusive set of essays from across aca-
demic fields will make for a better text, but we became more committed
to exploring the relationship between queer methods and pedagogies
when we realized that our contributors have teaching experiences across
a broad spectrum of institutions in higher education. When conversa-
tions about queer methods are collected as we have done here, cross-
class perspectives necessarily emerge. This makes our effort an expansive
pedagogical project, potentially indicating a new way to figure the field
of queer studies in relation to socioeconomic class and institutional
status.
Our authors teach at commuter schools, elite private liberal arts col-
leges, sprawling public urban university systems, and Research 1 flagship
campuses. Some are graduate students who have recently returned to the
academy; others hold endowed chairs at prestigious sites of knowledge
production; still others are artists. They write from the United King-
dom and Canada, and in the United States they are based at institu-
Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

tions that are situated in the South, the Northeast, the Midwest, and
the West. The scholars in this volume teach students who are earning
their associate, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. They work in
places that span from prisons to the Ivy League and in certificate pro-
grams, night schools, graduate programs, and community centers. They
teach students who are homeless, from the working poor, middle class,
upper class, and the one percent. They teach and train people of color,
Dreamers, and in our contributor Zandria Robinson’s words, “first-gen-
of-all-races scrappers” (2015), as well as students who receive the spe-
cial accommodation of legacy admission at highly selective schools. As

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 20 | Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim

they write about and crucially with people at all levels of socioeconomic
status, they speak as scholars who come from disparate socioeconomic
statuses.
It makes sense that the scholars who are thinking today about queer
methods are also engaged in debates about the class-inflected inequali-
ties that structure queer worldmaking and the conditions that make our
lives livable. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the question of how to teach
queer methods frequently forms in tandem with inquiries about insti-
tutional access and status. Yet queerness and class have historically been
difficult vectors to hold in tension, despite calls to do so by thinkers
such as Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis (1993) and
Allan Bérubé (2011). This has been particularly true in the context of the
dominant narrative of class mobility in higher education. Class has al-
ways been a moving target for queer studies, and for all its gorgeous and
generative introspection, queer studies has not fully engaged with its
own class-based institutional life. The essays that we have gathered here
coalesce around the potential of queer methods to intervene in these
concerns and to democratize intellectual work in the academy and be-
yond, a project made urgent by the fact that institutions of higher educa-
tion in the United States have over the past forty years become symbols
of the expansion of opportunity and the explosion of class stratifica-
tion. What should we make of the coincidence that the rise and relative
success of queer studies has been contemporaneous with the academy’s
massive redistribution of resources and people according to class and
socioeconomic status? The collection that you hold in your hands of-
fers leverage in the struggle not simply to reverse this course but also to
creatively and concretely redirect it.
Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

The less recognizable but perhaps more exciting pedagogical possi-

bilities that this volume puts into play extend across disciplines, across
institutions, and across class backgrounds. The need for such structural
crossings-over among scholar-teachers working at different types of col-
leges and universities is imperative, English professor and higher edu-
cation innovator Cathy Davidson (2017) argues. Now more than ever,
higher education reflects and reproduces shocking degrees of class
stratification. Socioeconomic inequality has become the defining fea-
ture of higher education as institutions ruthlessly sort students by class
background (with the attendant racial implications of that class sorting

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 Queer Methods | 21

as well). From this perspective, the academy couldn’t be more in lock-

step with the “real world” against which it is so frequently pitted. What
does queer studies have to say about class dynamics in the academy?
How do we contribute to the processes of stratification that divides the
field of queer studies from itself along the lines of class and institutional
status? How might queer collaborations across peer and nonpeer insti-
tutions offer a model for the redistribution of intellectual and material
resources? And how might a fresh volume on queer methods, rather
than another on queer theory, galvanize the kinds of interclass, cross-
institutional queer formations that don’t rely on the aspirational model
of progress that our administrators adore? Eve Sedgwick once said, “You
can write your way out of anywhere.” But what if “out” means not just
up but also down, sideways, and around? What if “anywhere” mapped
not just the institutional locations we want to leave but the universe of
other destinations toward which we wish to direct ourselves? Where can
queer methods take us?
If pedagogy is a relation of teaching and learning, we propose that
queer pedagogies are central to interdisciplinary articulations of queer
studies and the integration of queer-class worksites across the academy.
In other words, we see queer methods as capable of recoding operations
of institutional differentiation (rank, cost, and reputation) as operations
of institutional integration by envisioning class as a queer connective
tissue rather than a divisive barrier in higher education. Queer pedago-
gies facilitate queer-class linkages because students can see how scholars
do queer studies differently when they’re faced with different institu-
tional resources, student demographics, regional locations, and career
goals. A program of queer methods can help us recognize and com-
Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

municate across those differences. Seeing queer methods invented and

adapted in relation to institutional status—which itself closely relates
with socioeconomic class in today’s educational landscape—can teach
our students about their own intellectual investments, including what
they prioritize in research and how they connect research to their own
often-unarticulated class locations. Paula Krebs, the dean of the Col-
lege of Humanities and Social Sciences at Bridgewater State University,
suggests in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2016) that pedagogical
programs such as the one we are promoting here can help graduate stu-
dents prepare for academic careers in and beyond the R1 universities for

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 22 | Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim

which they are almost exclusively trained. Queer pedagogies can ori-
ent us, even in the midst of the powerfully disorienting forces of the
neoliberal academic marketplace, by allowing us to think critically and
expansively about what kind of teacher-scholars we want to be—with
whom, for whom, and where.
Perhaps the best reason for depressurizing queer theory at this
moment is because of its longstanding association with elite sites of
knowledge production and institutional privilege. While queer theory
has “traveled,” to borrow from Katie King’s (1995) framing of feminist
theory—and while it has even traveled methodologically—we believe
that a focus on methods can offer a more public form for the transporta-
tion of queer ideas at a time when privatization, class and racial exclu-
sions, and institutional status overdetermine how the academy works
and, at times, how queer studies works within the academy. This is not
a critique of high theory but rather of the structural embeddedness of
queer studies in a class-stratified university system. The essays gathered
here suggest, often individually but collectively for certain, that queer
methods can act as a “relay” (Henderson 2013) across queer-class divides
in higher education. We understand this work not as primarily compen-
satory (à la shiny diversity initiatives) but integral, not assured but pos-
sible. Queer methods can offer critical and pedagogical ways.

A Renaissance in the Making

Queer studies is in the midst of a renaissance. The incitement to explore
queer methods and methodologies that we present in this volume offers
an opportunity to reevaluate a number of practical, philosophical, and
Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

pedagogical issues about the craft of our disciplines, along with aca-
demia’s attachments to class, privilege, and status. As you travel through
these pages, you will notice that some problems persist and endure,
plaguing the scholars here just as they did those who came before us. But
there are also issues on which we have made much progress, including
our capacity to think in nuanced ways about sexuality and its comple-
mentarities with methods.
We have organized our volume with a goal of dramatizing the possi-
bilities of, and for, queer methods. That impulse is reflected in the title of
our book, which positions the boundless and protean queer imagination

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 Queer Methods | 23

alongside more disciplinary and deliberate methods. The book’s structure

includes innovations that playfully upend genre conventions, such as of-
fering two introductory chapters (ours and another written by Heather
Love) that speak to the novice and the expert. And just as the introduc-
tory “Methods/Mess” section emphasizes multiple entry points into the
volume, each of the four parts that follow evoke plenitude and possibilities
in doing queer research. We actively resist intellectual silos; none of our
sections is populated solely by essays in the humanities or social sciences.
We wish instead to enable unexpected combinations, configurations, and
conversations. We debated whether to use a “slash” or “and” in our section
headings. We settled on the slash, as you can see, because it declares that
a relationship exists without confining its nature, leaving you the reader
with a sense of unease that we believe is generative as you embark upon
using these ideas in your own work and life. Part I: “Subjecting/Objecting”
urges you to maintain an inventive tension between performativity and
positivism, to be both intimately present and precise. After that, in “Nar-
rating/Measuring,” our contributors show that while quantification might
seem incompatible with interpretive methods, the two are not always easy
to disentangle, let alone distinguish. The third part, “Listening/Creating,”
rejects the passive/active duality as our contributors incorporate the voices
of others into their visions for the shared queer work ahead of us all. The
final section, “Historicizing/Resisting,” will propel you beyond this vol-
ume with a set of essays that reflect the urgency of imagining new meth-
ods for queer intellectual and pedagogical engagements.
Before our ink dries, we offer a call to action to ensure that the foun-
tain ever flows: drawing on your own desires, disciplinary protocols,
assumptions, horizon of expectations, and hopes, identify the patterns
Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved.

that leap out from the essays in this collection and use them to build a
productive, plentiful, powerful, and pleasurable queer worldmaking and
livability project of your own. Onward—bravely turn the page.

Notes
1 Queer Method. 2013. Blog. [Link]/.
2 “Tourists in an Unknown Town: Remapping the Social Sciences,” University of
Chicago Magazine 93 (2) (December 2000). [Link]
3 Quoted in “Homosexuality: Born or Bred?” Newsweek, February 24, 1992, 46, 48.

Ghaziani, A., & Brim, M. (Eds.). (2019). Imagining queer methods. New York University Press.
Created from utoronto on 2026-01-17 [Link].
 24 | Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim

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