Heather Love
“The facts alone will not save us.”
—Ruha Benjamin (2016)
In After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, John Law comments on the inadequacy of traditional methods to describe things that are “complex, diffuse, and messy” (2004, 2). He argues that, in approaching the world as a set of determinate processes, scholars strip it of contingency, ephemerality, and indistinctness. Rather than creating the world in the image of the knowledge we produce about it, Law suggests that social scientists develop new methods that aim not to stabilize the world but rather to allow for its vagueness, its ineradicable messiness. Law’s account of the paradoxes and challenges of defining what eludes capture resonates with the experience of queer scholars. Not only has queer scholarship dealt centrally with untidy issues like desire, sexual practice, affect, sensation, and the body, it has also struggled continually to resist what Michael Warner has called “normal business in the academy.” In an early statement, Warner wrote, “For academics, being interested in queer theory is a way to mess up the desexualized spaces of the academy, exude some rut, reimagine the publics from which and for which academic intellectuals write, dress, and perform” (1993, xxvi). When it comes to being messy, we are.
From the start, queer scholars have acknowledged, or often celebrated, the messiness of their subject matter, and have invented new modes of research, writing, and performance to deal with it. If they have been slow to identify these new modes as methods, it is both because the term as it is generally understood is ill suited to address the vagaries of embodied life.1 In their introduction to this volume, Matt Brim and Amin Ghaziani remark on the “apparent incommensurability” of the phrase queer methods (5). The phrase evokes a classic odd couple, uptight methods attempting to impose order on the slovenly queer. As Jane Ward writes in this volume, “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 later typically defined by orderly, discipline-specific, and easily reproducible techniques—produces something of an exciting contradiction, a productive oxymoron” (262).
Today, queer method, if not quite a recognizable subfield, is more than an oxymoron. Over the past several years, queer scholars across fields have turned to the question of method. The publication of Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash’s edited volume Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research (2010) was crucial in articulating this shift. In the introduction, Browne and Nash argue that “[q]ueer researchers are in good company with other scholars drawing on poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches such as some feminist, anti-racist, and postcolonial scholars, in consciously seeking to articulate their ontologies and epistemologies but who are seemingly less inclined to consider the implications of these approaches to methodologies and methods (1).” Browne and Nash see the critique of traditional method as central to queer studies, and situate this aspect of the field in relation to other fields that regularly struggle with the problem of impossible or ephemeral evidence. But they argue that the field has failed to develop beyond the moment of critique to develop full self-consciousness about its epistemology and its relation to disciplinary, institutional, and material structures.
My engagement with questions of queer method began several years back when I ventured beyond my discipline (literary studies) and undertook a series of research projects in the history of the social sciences. In 2012, I taught a PhD class called “Queer Method” to which I invited several scholars in gender and sexuality studies. When I asked them to talk about their method and their training, they responded by saying, “I have no method.” For a scholar in queer studies to avow a method is to undermine, as Brim and Ghaziani put it, “queer theory’s constitutional claims to inter/anti-disciplinarity” (2016, 15)—as well as its self-understanding as an outsider to the university. By capitulating to academic norms, we may seem to compromise both our critical stance and the minoritarian ethics developed in the field. Of course, queer critics do draw on traditional methods, as they both rely on and resist their disciplinary training. Scholars in the field have also developed methods, often quite widely influential ones. Nonetheless, these methods tend to get framed in other terms. Regarding Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s viral account of “reparative” reading, for instance, Warner observes, “It is not so much a method as (principled?) avoidance of method” (2004, 18).
As someone trained in literary studies (as well as poststructuralist theory and psychoanalysis), I harbor resistance to traditional method and to the constraints of professional scholarship. But over the last several years I have to come to see this unwillingness rather differently. I see the failure to acknowledge that queer scholars, too, have methods as a disavowal of forms of institutional belonging, attachment, and affiliation (see Wiegman 2012). This refusal to locate ourselves or to identify our methods has resulted in a failure to grapple with queer studies as positive knowledge project. But queer studies is a field as much in need of the self-reflexivity that Browne and Nash describe as any other. To see one’s practices as beyond method and utterly undisciplined is a failure to reckon with queer scholars’ position in the university; it fails to recognize the violence of all scholarly research—even its most insurgent and intimate forms.2 It was out of a commitment to a more robust avowal of the disciplinary and institutional frameworks of queer studies, as well as a recognition of the field’s ongoing innovations in method, that a group of us planned the conference “Queer Method” at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013.3 Over the past several years, queer scholars have engaged questions of method by addressing institutionalization, the history of the disciplines, and pedagogy; examining the conditions of academic work through attention to archives, funding structures, and labor; engaging fields of inquiry that had been sidelined in the field such as philology, biology, and sexology; and taking up outré tools such as taxonomy and quantification. The superb essays in this volume, which represent a wide range of disciplines and approaches, offer both further articulation of the paradoxes of queer method and proof of concept.
What has driven the turn toward queer method? The institutionalization of queer studies, incomplete as it is, has made the field’s antidisciplinary stance harder to countenance. But the shift also reflects a return of the social sciences into the conceptual center of the field. Queer theory developed largely in the humanities in the early 1990s, a heady mix of activist energies and poststructuralist theory. Kadji Amin discusses this history and its consequences at length in this volume, suggesting that this combination of abstraction and urgency resulted in the definition of queer as “an almost infinitely mobile and mutable theoretical term” (279). Queer emerged, Amin argues, as a term that “seemed to carry within it the loaded transgression and charged sense of struggle around sex and sexual cultures” that defined the moment of its birth. This origin has given the term incredible traction, staying power, and range, but it has also led to the odd framing of queer studies as an academic field “paradoxically defined by its lack of a defined object of study” (283). This framing of queer was, as Amin suggests, not inevitable, but rather a contingency of this moment. Early scholarship in the field drew on but also displaced the contributions of black feminism, lesbian-feminist and gay male theory, radical sex cultures, transsexual activism, social history, Marxist sociology, and ethnic studies. In recent writing, I have argued that legacy of deviance studies was absorbed and disavowed by the field, and have traced how this movement led a field stance against method (Love 2015).
Queer studies has never been exclusively situated in the humanities, and social scientists working in the field have never accepted its definition as a theoretical and interpretive rather than an empirical and grounded field. But many have noticed the imbalance, and have bemoaned its material and intellectual consequences.4 In a 1995 GLQ essay, Lisa Duggan noted the “progressive impoverishment of the empirical, historical grounding for textual analyses” in sexuality studies research: the ascendancy of queer theory had given rise to an “impressive expansion of increasingly sophisticated analyses . . . balanced precariously atop a stunted archive,” she wrote (181). In 2005, E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson echoed this point in their introduction to the collection Black Queer Studies, citing Roderick Ferguson’s account of the antagonism toward “African American culture and nonnormative sexualities” in canonical sociology. As a result, they argued, “much of the interventionist work in the areas of race and sexuality has come out of the humanities and not the social sciences (2).” Over twenty years later, in their contribution to this volume, Zandria F. Robinson and Marcus Anthony Hunter cite Johnson and Henderson’s claim, and suggest the situation has not changed: “Black queer and black feminist work has certainly increased and advanced in the social sciences since the publication of Black Queer Studies; however, the continued marginalization of black feminist and black queer perspectives in the epistemology of queer social scientific work has rendered interventionist, liberatory work all the more difficult in the social sciences” (172).
In each of these articulations, scholars describe a situation of (at least) double marginalization: traditional social scientific fields dismiss the interventions of queer and black queer (and feminist) scholars, seen as too partial and particular to matter to the discipline as a whole; in the face of such resistance, misrecognition, and lack of support, queer scholars deepen their antipathy toward disciplinary methods. This antipathy is real, and is based on sound argument, and yet one senses a widespread chagrin about the impoverishing effects of the split. The frustration of queer social science scholars confronting this division over the years is palpable, and has hardly been assuaged by humanities scholars’ frequent claims about the interdisciplinary nature of their scholarship.5 As much as disciplinary boundaries are crossed and recrossed in queer studies, focusing on the question of method—turning from “what” to “how”—tends to make visible more fundamental differences in epistemology and practice. If scholars in the social sciences have never forgotten (have never been able to forget) the existence of such differences, some humanities scholars have begun to notice them, and to express some curiosity about how the other half thinks. Conflict is an inevitable but perhaps not a regrettable effect of this rapprochement. Avowing her commitment to “confronting frictions, disciplinary and otherwise,” Valerie Traub (2016) writes, “An emphasis on method, I suggest, helps us appreciate that protocols that would lubricate interactions are still in the process of being worked out. Not only does such as practice entail valuing the thorny issue, the dilemma, the impasse, but it also enjoins a willingness to unpack incommensurate idioms and resist the impulse to either assume sameness in the room or strive for premature unity. Rather, the naïve question, which denaturalizes what is taken for granted within disciplinary knowledge, can provide a key tactic for managing collaborations—whether with one’s own interdisciplinary self or one’s disciplinary others” (337).6
One notable difference in responses to “queer method” by scholars in the humanities and social sciences is where they locate the difficulty with the phrase. For those trained in traditional empirical methods, adding the volatile queer to method introduces the scandal of theory, aesthetics, and cultural studies: jargon; small sample sizes, and in some cases of a single (fictional) text; unclear standards of evidence; lack of attention to representativeness; and disconnection from real people, places, and things. For those trained in the humanities, the scandal is just the opposite: the anchoring of queer to method threatens to drain its political potential by submitting to regimes of statistical reduction, the reification of identity, the overvaluing of visible behavior, and the foreclosure of the speculative, the counterfactual, and the “not yet here” José Esteban Muñoz designated as queer utopia (2009, 1). As is clear from this brief discussion, epistemological questions cannot be separated from pressing and unsolvable questions of ethics and politics—questions that can barely be stabilized because of the divergent perspectives from which they are asked. Grounded or empirical research appears exemplary because of its orientation toward social and materiality reality and its engagement with the experience of individuals and communities. But in its truck with practices of quantification and reduction, “grounded” research practice can seem strangely immune to the real people and situations it describes. Humanities scholarship has no such immunity, dedicated as it is to complexity, affective witness, and the art of narrative. Queer research in a humanities framework is not guilty of reduction, but is characterized by attentiveness to what Lauren Berlant, in an analysis of the case study as genre, refers to as “tender singularities” (2007, 669). Yet the fear is that such scholarship brings its considerable methodological resources to bear on merely fictional, idiosyncratic, or hypothetical instances, far removed from the exigencies of anyone’s life.7
One of the great pleasures of working in interpretive disciplines is the intellectual (as well as aesthetic and emotional) freedom that it affords. Depending on your perspective, this ability to tarry with uncertainty is either the greatest gift of the humanities or its greatest curse.8 In a recent essay arguing for the utility of speculative methods for African American studies, Ruha Benjamin (2016) writes,
In this moment of social crisis, where even the most basic assertion that black lives matter is contested, we are drowning in “the facts” of inequality and injustice. . . . In this context, novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of the social world—alternatives to capitalism, racism, and patriarchy—are urgently needed. Fictions, in this sense, are not falsehoods but refashionings through which analysts experiment with different scenarios, trajectories, and reversals, elaborating new values and testing different possibilities for creating more just and equitable societies. Such fictions are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible. (2)
Benjamin shares her conviction that the “facts are not enough” with many scholars of African American life.9 In this remarkable essay, she puts this conviction into practice, drawing on her training in social studies of science to write a story about racial violence and biotechnology (“Ferguson Is the Future”) set in 2064.
Sarah Schulman reflects in this volume on the significance of fiction in doing lesbian history. In the case of this insistently minor field, complexity, indeterminacy, and the refusal of self-nomination can create a situation of scholarly discretion that shades into indifference. Silence about same-sex intimacy does not always indicate absence, and even in the case of absence, there is more to say.10 By contrast, and drawing on her work as a novelist, Schulman argues for robust imagination of the many facets—some sexual, some not—of women’s relations with each other:
I propose that we look into the emotional, psychological, economic, political, intellectual, artistic, sexual, daily, and lifelong experiences of women who allowed or refused the embrace. The conversations that did happen and did not. The words permitted, and those uttered without permission. The invitations refused and accepted. The fears. The imaginations, erotic and projected. The walks in the woods, the fucking, the pleasure of the company acknowledged and refused. The meals, the conversations, how and what conversations provoked, the actions, the artworks, the articles, books, tears, orgasms realized/failed/imagined/remembered, caresses, tendernesses, the refusals of tenderness, kisses that were and should have been, and how this moved the earth, the culture, the society, or even just one or two people’s small lives. (297)
Calling for more and more fine-grained and detailed accounts of “the things we did and didn’t do,” Schulman suggests how empiricism and fictionality—apparently opposed—might be understood as complementary.11
Despite the extreme diversity of perspectives represented in this volume, there is widespread agreement about what constitutes ethics in research, and how to mitigate the violence of traditional methods. The fact of queer studies as a shared context partly explains this congruence. When scholars attend to complexity, refuse to equate behavior with identity, address stigmatized activities without judgment, or “hustle” between disciplines and academic and vernacular frames of reference, they bear witness to core queer values (and furthermore suggest the extent to which queer studies has developed recognizable methods).12 Other areas of congruence are less clearly identified with queer studies, but instead reflect the consensus of scholars in the humanities and in the qualitative social sciences over the past few decades. Across these essays, scholars attest to the importance of practices including careful listening; inviting the participation of their research subjects; attending to these subjects’ acts of resistance, including their resistance to the research process itself; sharing, insofar as it is possible, the risk and vulnerability involved in such encounters; and cultivating reflexivity, openness, and the willingness to be surprised. These are qualities about which there is very little disagreement. But scholars disagree about how much these good intentions matter, how to put them into effect, and to what extent they mitigate (if at all) the inequality that structures the field of knowledge production.
At its best, queer studies can exemplify the intimacy, uncertainty, erotics, boundary-crossing, and activist energies that gave rise to it, while engaging critically and productively with the resources of traditional disciplinary knowledge. Several scholars in the collection argue that queer method can serve as a bridge between the social sciences and the humanities. For instance, Amin Ghaziani argues that “queer methods create space for the coherent and the chaotic,” the former typically identified with conventional social science and the latter associated with queer theory (116). As is so often the case in these essays, theory is united with practice: Ghaziani backs up this vision of queer method with a granular and step-by-step account of specific research problems and advice for how to solve them. However, in contrast to such methodological optimism, and to the desire for queer to bring out the best in the humanities and the social sciences, the volume also includes the perspective of methodological pessimists. In place of the both/and, they look at method more in terms of neither/nor. They suggest that idealizing queer method does not fully come to terms with “knowledge production as the scene of political struggle” (Wiegman, cited by Fields, (69), and the violence—some might say, the inevitable violence—of relations in the field.13
Jessica Fields is alert to this danger in her account of the “racialized erotics” of field research, and for this reason refuses to close her account on complicity and incitement by imagining “a shiny new method” (79). With stunning vividness and granularity, Fields attends to the visceral entanglements between researchers and the subjects they study; recalling her own work with women in prison, Fields recounts how showing how, despite her best intentions, she was drawn into a nexus of “violence, pleasure, affirmation, and exploitation” (75). Because of structures of race and class inequality, and their imbrication in desire and sexual practice, it is impossible to steer clear of this nexus; one can simply navigate it with awareness. Rather than seeing such dynamics as “spoiling” the research or counseling her readers on how to avoid them, Fields suggests that they constitute a resource. She writes, “Anxious situations—failures, flirtations, and misreadings—are not obstacles to empiricism; rather, I see them as visceral experiences of social difference and affinity in which researchers, participants, and collaborators assert their personhood” (70). Several other contributors join Fields in taking on this intersection of violence, incitement, pleasure, and knowledge. There is widespread agreement in the volume about the value of minoritarian experience and of perspectives “from below.” In his analysis of John Keene’s Counternarratives, Brim points to the narrator Burunbana’s claim “that some who have been condemned to the most foul contumely do reside, nevertheless, in Truth, and so this missive proceeds from that strange and splendid position” (Keene, cited in Brim, 157). This account of the intimate relation between contumely and surplus knowledge echoes W. E. B. Du Bois’s account of the origins of double-consciousness, a state of being inaugurated by the question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” ([1903] 1996, 5). Though often “unasked,” this question lingers in the atmosphere surrounding minoritarian research.
There is a temptation, in the face of the difficulties posed by method, to give it all up, to throw, as Zandria F. Robinson and Marcus Anthony Hunter write, “measurement away altogether” (165). Several authors in this volume contemplate this possibility, citing Audre Lorde’s dictum that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 1984). However, despite much grappling with these “hard lines,” no one in this volume actually suggests a full retreat.14 Collectively, the contributors attest to the gains—intellectual, pragmatic, and personal—to be won via an engagement with method. The utility of such methods is not in doubt in Petra Doan’s essay, which perhaps best exemplifies the pragmatic orientation of the volume as a whole. Despite the question implied by her essay’s title (“To Count or Not to Count”), Doan insists that epistemological and ethical qualms about statistical methods should not keep scholars from doing crucial work. She writes, “If compulsory heterosexuality ‘others’ queer populations, then counting them may undermine this ‘otherness’ by demonstrating the legitimate needs of the LGBTQ+ population. For the transgender population, the urgent need for access to safe bathrooms and social services, including medical care, more than justifies the act of counting” (121). With such necessities clearly in view, Doan unambiguously identifies the aim of her research—to count “as broadly as possible” (124)—as a form of advocacy. This articulation conjoins one of the most traditional (and, within the humanities, reviled) methods—counting—with the activist and strategic aims of queer studies. It is for this reason that Doan reckons counting a “queerly radical act” (138).
Doan’s essay demonstrates how queer method, despite its paradoxes, can be put to work; it also recalls a broader history of politicized uses of method. According to Robinson and Hunter, blanket dismissals of social science and quantitative methods ignore “how marginalized people have harnessed measurement to liberate themselves from enslavement, challenge and upend the status quo, and rewrite history” (165). Du Bois’s 1901 study The Philadelphia Negro constitutes a crucial example of this deployment of statistics. Although Du Bois’s multigeneric, narrative, and rhetorical works make him a model for scholarship that is anti- or at least counterdisciplinary, his marshaling of statistics to refute charges of black morbidity suggest the strategic utility, the urgency, of counting (see Hunter 2015; also Katz and Sugrue 1998). The pragmatic orientation and real-world impact of research are clearest in an essay like Doan’s with explicit links to policy. Yet the evidence of an orientation toward action and demonstrable stakes is clear across the collection, even in pieces by scholars in literary and cultural studies, which tend to be grounded in the material practices of pedagogy and curation—or, as Brim describes it, “put[ting] books in each other’s hands” (160).
Reading these essays together, the creativity and resourcefulness of these scholars in dealing with the problems of queer method is striking. But even more striking, and affecting, is their moral courage in facing these problems. In the face of the most daunting and unsolvable ethical dilemmas, they forge ahead, suggesting either explicitly or by example that retreat is both intellectually misguided and ethically questionable. Schulman suggests that through robust imagining of lesbian history we should give no one any more excuses than they already have for “hesitant obscuration.” E. Patrick Johnson puts the case most forcefully. In discussing the ethics of undertaking his oral history project with African American queer women from the American South as a black gay man, he writes:
I believe that the benefits of the research far outweigh the potential pitfalls, for to not conduct this research based simply on the fact that I am a man would be to fall prey to what the late performance ethnographer Dwight Conquergood called the “skeptic’s cop-out,” a pitfall of ethnographic research that retreats to quietism, paralysis, and cynicism based on “difference.” According to Conquergood, this position is the most morally reprehensible on his moral map of performative stances toward the other . . . because the “skeptic’s cop-out” forecloses dialogue altogether. (55)
Johnson reiterates Conquergood’s views that to allow ethical qualms to get in the way of actually doing the research is morally bankrupt. In the case of the occluded, marginal, and disregarded narratives that these scholars hope to represent, the stakes are simply too high.
Lorde’s judgment on “the master’s tools” is not merely a critique of the design or implementation of a particular research method. Instead, she offers a more sweeping critique, pointing out the limits of academic scholarship as a whole. “Survival is not an academic skill” (1984, 14; emphasis in original), she writes. Not only will the master’s tools not dismantle the master’s house, but they are also being employed for ends they were never meant to serve. The facts won’t save us, not only because they are bad facts, but also because facts are indifferent to survival and salvation both. Lorde indicts the insularity of the university, and the tendency of feminist scholarship to drift away from the experience of those “who stand outside of this society’s definition of acceptable women” (14). As we commit or recommit to the oxymoron of queer method, we should recall Lorde’s words, which not only challenge our thinking but also shift the ground beneath our feet. The tension between queer and method is not merely ideological—it is material, and it is here to stay. Queer studies developed as an activist field, and it has always maintained skepticism and even hostility toward the business of academic life. From the perspective of a radical queer tradition, the turn to method can seem like the surrender, the final capitulation to academic business as usual. But avowing our place as academics may be necessary to recognizing what in the world is not academic: the ongoing struggles for survival that exceed our methods, our countermethods, and our antimethods.
1 The bibliography of work on mess and messiness in queer studies is extensive; recently it includes more work that considers intersections between mess and method, which has emerged primarily out of new work on archives. For work on mess and messiness within queer studies, see Martin F. Manalansan IV’s recent work on immigration, everyday practice, and informal archives (2014; 2015); José Esteban Muñoz’s indictment of the ideology of rigor (1996); Ann Cvetkovich (2003); and Rebecka Taves Sheffield (2014).
2 See, for instance, Judith Stacey (1988) on the inevitability of betrayal in the field.
3 Many of the ideas for the conference were generated in the 2012 seminar, named above. For a list of all those involved in planning and organizing, as well as conference aims and speakers, see www.queermethod.tumblr.com/.
4 Scholars who contributed to this critique include Gayle S. Rubin, John D’Emilio, Jeffrey Escoffier, Arlene Stein, Jeffrey Weeks, Ken Plummer, John Gagnon, William Simon, Kath Weston, Steven Epstein, Peter M. Nardi, and Beth E. Schneider. To take one example, typical in its tone of frustration, see Jeffrey Weeks’s 1998 reflection on the legacy of Mary McIntosh’s 1968 essay “The Homosexual Role.” Weeks writes, “It is frustrating for those of us who have been toiling in this particular vineyard since the turn of the 1960s and 1970s to have our early efforts in understanding sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular, refracted back to us through post-Foucauldian abstractions . . . and then taken up as if the ideas are freshly minted” (1998, 132). A great deal of bridging work has been undertaken by queer scholars trained in the social sciences or working between disciplines, for instance Roderick Ferguson, Lisa Duggan, Nayan Shah, Jafari Allen, Margot Weiss, Anjali Arondekar, and others.
5 I have described Stephen Greenblatt’s engagement with Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description” as one such example of a claim to interdisciplinary practice by a humanities scholar that does not grapple with more fundamental epistemological differences between the disciplines. See Love (2013), especially 402–4, 410–11. In the rest of this essay, I explore other grounds on which it might be possible to link textual reading with observational practices in the field more robustly. Several contributors also take up this question. See, for instance, Rivera and Nadal’s discussion of close reading as a qualitative and observational practice (204). See also Brim on the pragmatic and conceptual work of reading in the classroom, and Brim and Ghaziani on the overlap between reading and counting (6–7).
6 Traub is responding to a set of short essays about her book Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (2015) published in the “Queer Methods” special issue of WSQ. She is a humanities scholar with ties to the social sciences, through her use of historical methods in her own work and her chairing of a multidisciplinary Women’s Studies Department at the University of Michigan.
7 In a related analysis, Margot Weiss considers the ambivalence of empiricism in queer theory. Contrasting the “conceptual simplicity of our theoretical categories” (2011, 650) with the complexity of community knowledge turned up by the core disciplinary methods of ethnography and participant observation, she also resists the call for “more data” to enrich the field. Instead, she argues that theory and data are forever entangled, and suggests that we see the (impossible) longing for grounded theory as a spur to pay “more attention to the production of all knowledge” (662).
8 Robinson and Hunter express acute frustration with this aspect of humanities scholarship, tying the abstraction and ambiguity of poststructuralist theory to a failure to address the realities of racism and poverty. They write that queer theory and intersectionality “gained traction in academic discourse just as ‘people,’ ‘bodies,’ and ‘oppression’ were being replaced by the poststructural language of ‘identities,’ ‘signifiers,’ and ‘difference.’ . . . While sociology can claim some immunity from this largely humanities-based turn, it was not unaffected by its tendency to obscure. This language and its accompanying methodological shadowboxing distances us further and further from the roots of organizing for liberation of all dispossessed persons” (170).
9 On the limits of fact in the context of contemporary racial violence, see Browne, Dark Matters (2015).
10 Cf. Benjamin Kahan (2013) on celibacy, or the absence of sex, as a disposition and set of practices worth attending to. Kahan, like Schulman, uses the occasion of celibacy to engage a broad rethinking across disciplines and genres of the “epistemology of the closet.”
11 This account, as I have hinted, suggests a queer reading of the Magnetic Fields song “The Things We Did and Didn’t Do.” Smith (in this volume) proposes “redaction-as-revelation” as a method for rereading queer women’s communication. Redaction-as-revelation “functions via paradox: by ‘blacking out’ text, its aim is not to hide or delete (with all the word’s ominous overtones in a context of oppression) but to rejoice in the transformative powers of the substance, or body of blackness, and its encounter with the white page” (216–17).
12 Thrasher (in this volume) proposes “hustling” as method to account for his movement between scholarship and journalism. The concept recalls some canonical methods in cultural studies, for instance bricolage (Michel de Certeau), and also recalls Marcus Anthony Hunter’s concept of “the nightly round” as an informal practice of knowledge gathering and building social capital. See Hunter 2010.
13 On the inevitability of violence, Patrick Grzanka argues that “all methods, both quantitative and qualitative, conceal a capacity for violence,” epistemic and otherwise (89), but points out that capacity is not the same thing as perpetration.
14 The phrase is from Carolyn Steedman’s work of critical memoir, Landscape for a Good Woman (1986, 2), itself a profound meditation on feminist method and the ethics of research. Kay’s [Steedman’s] mother says this to her after being dressed down by a home health visitor.
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