3 Queer Survey Research and the Ontological Dimensions of Heterosexism

Patrick R. Grzanka

“Subjugated” standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world. But how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the “highest” technoscientific visualizations.

—Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988)

I want to be clear about what I am not going to do here. First, I am not offering a defense of quantitative social inquiry. This has been done to varying degrees of success by many people who are more sophisticated statisticians than I (e.g., Cokley and Awad 2013; Jayaratne 1983; Westerman 2014). Rather, on the occasion of editors Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim’s field-defining provocation “to make space” for a more expansive methodological vision (Brim and Ghaziani 2016, 18), I am attempting to engage with one dominant, longstanding line of reasoning among critical social scientists and humanists suggesting that mathematical reduction is fundamentally problematic (Krenz and Sax 1986; Michell 2003; Pugh 1990). In this frame, essentially all attempts at quantitative measurement are necessarily inaccurate, misrepresentative, and potentially violent, particularly those contemporary approaches that we might identify with the rise of post-positivism (Eagly and Riger 2014). To the post-positivist, the myth of objective reality is apparently abandoned but actually reconstituted in the search for a close-enough approximation of the empirical universe, which is still presumed to exist somewhere “out there.” The “post” in post-positivism comes to serve as a political gesture more than as an epistemic reorientation: we probably won’t find the truth, but we might as well keep trying. Some of the staunchest advocates of post-positivism in the social sciences are social psychologists, who are rightfully critiqued for having carved up the social universe via survey instruments, implicit association tests, and externally invalid experimental designs, which purport to tell us copious details about a world that looks very white, very masculine, and very American while claiming to be none of these things (Gergen 1973; Guthrie 2003). Central to many feminist, antiracist, Marxist, and queer critiques of social science is a rejection of quantitative reductionism that is perceived as immanent to post-positivism. By way of French philosopher and eminent historian of the human sciences Michel Foucault (1970), I suggest that this line of reasoning mistakes the effects of oppressive research practices for the causes of these reductionist paradigms.

What follows is also not a rubric of best practices for queer theory–informed statistical inquiry, partially because I have no idea what such a rubric would look like, and also partially because I think that a sustained interrogation of a queer method should actually start at the level of methodology—which feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding (1987) famously distinguished as theories of research practices and the work they can do in the world, as opposed to the tools (i.e., methods) we use to conduct specific research practices (see also DeVault and Gross 2012). Accordingly, from the perspective of critical psychology, I am going to offer one example of a survey instrument that was developed with and through queer theoretical frames and that reflects a commitment both to statistical rigor and feminist objectivity (Haraway 1988). This particular instrument, the Sexual Orientation Beliefs Scale (SOBS) (Arseneau et al. 2013), may help us to examine complex relationships between heterosexist attitudes and ontologies of sexuality—in other words, beliefs about what sexual orientation actually is. I argue that the unique analytic potential of the SOBS is to reveal relationships between attitudes and beliefs that are otherwise obscured by hegemonic discourses about biological essentialism, or what sociologist of sexuality Jane Ward referred to as “the nearly obsessive focus on whether individual people are born gay or straight” (2015, 34). Biological essentialism is also integral to the neoliberal rights discourse that queer theorist Lisa Duggan named “Equality, Inc.” (2003, 43). Finally, I will briefly introduce the results of one study in which my colleagues and I took a “person-centered” analytic approach, as opposed to a “variable-centered” approach, and found evidence of the weakness of biological-determinist beliefs about sexual orientation to distinguish between individuals with high versus low levels of modern homonegativity. With queer theory-informed instrumentation, I suggest that this person-centered approach possesses a provisional capacity to function as what Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim, in the title of this innovative volume, call a “queer method.”

Part 1: The Retreat of the Mathesis

In The Order of Things (1970), the question of quantification is actually subordinate to Foucault’s broader concerns about representational practices in the social sciences. His archaeology, at once a history of science and a philosophical critique, explores the transformations in the structure of Western knowledge that anticipate the constitution of modern(ist) social science—specifically sociology, psychology, and anthropology. In the analytic crescendo of the book, he outlines the epistemic event in the order of knowledge that he identifies as the constitution of “man” (Foucault’s gendered language) as an object of scientific knowledge—wherein man is a thing that can and should be known by way of empirical inquiry. He uses this event to distinguish between the classical and modern epistemes and writes at some length about the concept of the “mathesis,” a kind of proto-Cartesian theory of everything. The mathesis was essentially a general theory of representation in which mathematics would possess universal explanatory power: the über-theory. Foucault elaborates:

In the Classical period, the field of knowledge, from the project of an analysis of representation to the theme of the mathesis universalis, was perfectly homogenous: all knowledge, of whatever kind, proceeded to the ordering of its material by the establishment of differences and defined those differences by the establishment of an order. . . . Questioned at this archaeological level, the field of the modern episteme is not ordered in accordance with the ideal of a perfect mathematization, nor does it unfold, on the basis of a purity, a long descending sequence of knowledge progressively more burdened with empiricity. (1970, 346; emphasis mine)

In a move that we can see in the retrospective context of his oeuvre as quintessentially Foucauldian, he suggests that critical attention to the rise of mathematics that we today would associate with the development of positivism, structural functionalism, and behaviorism (Orr 2006) actually effaces the epistemic choreography that makes the positivist human sciences so violent. He continues:

But it is not in its relation to mathematics that biology acquired its autonomy and defined its particular positivity. And the same was true for the human sciences: it was the retreat of the mathesis, and not the advance of mathematics, that made it possible for man to constitute himself as an object of knowledge. . . . But to imagine that the human sciences defined their most radical project and inaugurated their positive history when it was decided to apply the calculation of probabilities to the phenomena of political opinion, and to employ logarithms as a means of measuring the increase of intensity in sensations, that would be to take a superficial counter-effect for the fundamental event. (Foucault 1970, 350–51; emphasis mine)

The “fundamental event” was not caused by an explosion of mathematic inquiry or technological advances that enabled the manipulation of increasingly immense datasets, according to Foucault. Conversely, he asserts that the advance of mathematics was the consequence of the retreat of the mathesis and the contemporaneous introduction of the empirically knowable object of “man”—not its cause. This is of special importance to an interrogation of queer methods, I think, insomuch as Foucault’s archeology of the human sciences suggests that all social scientific optics of knowing—both quantitative and qualitative—possess the capacity for subjugation and unjust reductionism, which postcolonial feminist philosopher Gayatri Spivak calls “epistemic violence” (1988, 271) and Black feminist philosopher Kristie Dotson refers to as “repetitive, reliable” practices of silencing (2011, 241). The colonial ethnographer and the cybernetician are equivalent villains in Foucault’s critique not because of their methods per se but because of their location in the modern episteme. In other words, the Likert scale is not a priori more oppressive than grounded theory—and in fact a fixation on the problematics of quantitative survey research actually diverts attention from the broader and pervasive practices of precarious knowledge production that are endemic to the social sciences.

For Foucault, the argument against statistics is the conceptual kin of the repressive hypothesis he later dismantles in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1978). Foucault suggests that the commonsense argument that the rise of modernity corresponded with the repression of sexuality is not merely inaccurate. Rather, he argues that our investment in the concept of repression is actually symptomatic of, not in opposition to, a larger discourse on sexuality that is deeply oppressive. While prohibition has been commonly deployed as a form of sexual control, Foucault asserts that modernity is defined by a multiplication of discourses on sexuality, as opposed to a pervasive cultural silence around sex. Accordingly, in our pursuit of understanding and challenging discursive regimes of sexuality, he posits, “Perhaps the point to consider is not the level of indulgence or the quantity of repression but the form of power that was exercised” (1978, 41). Similarly, in the context of the fetishization of the quantitative among the social sciences, Foucault neither argues that statistics are inconsequential nor that quantitative inquiry is a rarely used form of representation. His point is not that statistical reductionism does not occur but that we are missing the point if we understand it to be the source of the social sciences’ epistemic situation, which he describes as both “perilous and in peril” (1970, 379).

In the same way that History offers a glimmer of resistance to biopolitical regimes through the study of bodies and how they have come to matter, The Order of Things likewise alludes to opportunities for critical social inquiry. In “The Discourse on Language,” Foucault (1972) explicates two modes of his own work—genealogy and critique—that enable him, first, to trace knowledge-power relations and, second, to challenge discursive, institutional structures organized by the “will to truth” that are seemingly impervious and unassailable. The “will to truth” produces the illusion that disciplinary technologies of knowing, from ethnography (Abu-Lughod 1990) to MRI (Joyce 2008), will reveal what sociologist Emile Durkheim ([1897] 2007) argued was positivism’s promise: stable, impersonal knowledge. Marking, naming, and tracing the ritualistic practices of disciplinarity facilitates the destabilization of what appear as permanent, inflexible rules of disciplinary knowledge production. But what is less obvious from Foucault’s writing is how we might actually go about the business of the social sciences without reproducing the will to truth. One can read his work, then, as an invitation to abandon the myth of achieving a position of exteriority to knowledge production practices—what feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway (1988) would later call the “god trick”—and to consider how all methods, both quantitative and qualitative, conceal a capacity for violence. Capacity is not, however, equivalent to inevitability. And so Foucault evades the question of method, but he also creates an opening.

Part 2: Quantifying Ontologies

Much of my work, situated at the intersection of sociology, psychology, and science and technology studies, engages psychology’s particular capacity for reiterating harm and promoting forms of social transformation and resistance (e.g., Grzanka 2016; Grzanka and Mann 2014). The SOBS was born out of an interdisciplinary queer research team at the University of Maryland, College Park, during a time when psychological discourse on the immutability of sexual orientation became a political maxim amid attempts to resist and prohibit sexual orientation conversion “therapies” (Brian and Grzanka 2014; Waidzunas 2015). As sexual minority graduate students immersed in critical feminist and queer theoretical perspectives, we were suspicious of the wholesale embrace of biologically inflected strategic essentialism as the tactic by which rights would be secured, including freedom from dangerous so-called therapies and freedom to marry and serve in the U.S. armed forces (Duggan 1994). The SOBS, which began as counseling psychologist Julie Arseneau’s (2008) dissertation project, developed into an attempt to better understand what queer people actually believed about the nature of sexual orientation and then grew into an investigation of how LGBT-identified and straight people’s beliefs about sexual orientation may differ (Arseneau et al. 2013). Ultimately, we hoped that the SOBS might help to illuminate how people understand sexual orientation categories and evaluate members of those categories.

Though the project began well before Lady Gaga turned “born this way” into a catchphrase, her zeitgeist suggested that we were on to something. In developing the instrument, we aimed to address several weaknesses in the extant psychological literature and took steps to infuse queer and feminist theories into our work. First, we started generating items for the SOBS via qualitative work, that is, conversations with queer people about their own sexual orientation beliefs and what they thought others believed. These conversations were formal and informal brainstorming sessions among academics, item generation in non-academic settings, and casual conversations with friends and colleagues. Furthermore, the entire first half of the initial validation study was conducted with queer people, in a marked departure from the existing literature on psychological essentialism, most of which focuses on majority group beliefs about minorities (e.g., Haslam and Levy 2006; Hegarty and Pratto 2001). In collecting and analyzing reactions from queer subjects about items developed by queer subjects about sexuality, we entered into the precarious position of representing and interrogating the beliefs of the variously marginalized. While we suspected that our queer respondents might have more sophisticated and critical understandings of sexual orientation than heterosexual respondents, whose straight privilege insulated them from having to think much at all about sexual orientation, we were committed to including a range of beliefs into the SOBS, not just those that reflected our political sensibilities.

Accordingly, we built three primary belief domains into the SOBS that would extend those already covered in the literature: essentialist, social constructionist, and constructivist beliefs. Social constructionist ideas about the historical and cultural contingency of sexual orientation categories had previously been elided in the research, and notions of sexual orientation agency and choice, which psychologists refer to as constructivist beliefs, had become somewhat taboo in contemporary sexual politics. For example, when actress Cynthia Nixon said that being gay is a choice for her, she received tremendous criticism from the gay left. She said, “A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out” (qtd. in Witchel 2012). The backlash against Nixon stood in stark contrast to the radical queer politics of the prior century, including well-known agentic arguments, such as the following from Gloria Anzaldúa: “I made the choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent)” (1987, 41; emphasis in original). Rather than avoid constructivist themes or foreclose them as symptomatic of internalized homonegativity, we included several items that emphasized agency and choice in the constitution of sexual orientation. Although we developed ninety-one items that reflected a wide range of beliefs, we excluded those that were explicitly heterosexist so as to avoid developing an instrument that could be easily used to reinforce negative ideas about sexual minorities. Finally, we concentrated on the multidimensionality of sexual orientation beliefs, rather than the traditional psychometric priorities of parsimony and mutual exclusivity, so as to develop an instrument in which individuals could endorse multiple beliefs simultaneously, even if those beliefs might appear to contradict one another.

In our LGBT-identified sample of over six hundred online survey respondents, we found four groupings of sexual orientation beliefs that are conceptually distinct but correlated and together compose the thirty-five-item instrument. The first group of items (i.e., subscale), “Naturalness,” describes four basic beliefs: sexual orientation is innate and biologically based, immutable, stable across cultures, and characterized by early life fixity. A sample item is, “Biology is the main basis of an individual’s sexual orientation.” The second subscale, “Discreteness,” describes the belief that sexual orientation is organized with clear boundaries between category groupings and that an individual may claim membership in only one category grouping. A sample item from this subscale is, “Sexual orientation is a category with distinct boundaries: A person is either gay/lesbian or heterosexual.” The third subscale, which included items such as “Knowing a person’s sexual orientation tells you a lot about them,” we called “Entitativity,” which is a social psychology word for “group-ness.” These items capture two essentialist beliefs: the informativeness of sexual orientation categories, and the interconnectedness and uniformity among sexual orientation group members. The final subscale, “Social and Personal Importance,” is composed of items that emphasize the relative importance of sexual orientation either intrapsychically or interpersonally, such as “Using terms like ‘lesbian,’ ‘gay,’ ‘bisexual,’ and ‘heterosexual’ only reinforces stereotypes.”

Next, we turned to the question of “factorial invariance” to examine if this particular organization of items would be replicated in a sample composed of straight-identified college students. In this independent sample of almost four hundred undergraduates, we found that the subscales and distribution of items were slightly different, which led us to create a thirty-one-item Form Two of the SOBS for use with samples involving straight and sexual minority respondents. The “Discreteness” and “Naturalness” subscales were nearly identical, but two new subscales emerged in our analysis. The items on the new “Homogeneity” subscale emphasized similarity among sexual orientation group members. The new “Informativeness” subscale was a combination of five “Social and Personal Importance” items from Form One plus three items that previously loaded on the “Entitativity” subscale. In contrast to our findings in the LGBT-only sample, this subscale included no explicitly political items and instead stressed the knowledge and information gained from knowing or perceiving an individual’s sexual orientation.

The initial validation study established the means through which to explore these beliefs and their connection to attitudes about sexual minorities, as well as sexual minorities’ own self-evaluations (see Morandini et al.’s 2015 use of the SOBS). Although several items that were developed to reflect social constructionist and constructivist themes remained in the final instrument as reverse-scored items (i.e., items that reflect the “opposite” ideas of the other items on a subscale), each of the subscales generally reflect essentialist themes. Nevertheless, the incorporation of social constructionist and agentic items alongside more traditionally recognized essentialist beliefs resulted in a multidimensional scale that was rooted in queer theory and queer-identified respondents’ perceptions of sexual orientation. By synergizing queer and feminist theories with the social scientific tools of factor analysis and structural equation modeling, we created a queer instrument—or in Haraway’s terms, a semiotic technology for making meanings (1988)—through which to interrogate the nature-culture nexus that is psyche and society (1991). But a survey instrument is just a series of words with scoring instructions. We may have scripted the technology with queer meanings (Akrich 1992), but its radical and/or conservative capacities—what it can or cannot tell us about the social life of sexual orientation ontologies, as well as how these knowledges may be used or abused—remains to be seen.

Part 3: Queer(ing) Statistics?

Although these beliefs are certainly interesting in and of themselves, to me the SOBS is only useful insomuch as it may be able to expose social dynamics that are obfuscated by dominant discourses about sexual orientation. Though qualitative research is adept at uncovering silences and excavating hidden meanings in textual data, quantitative analysis can also be useful for circumventing normative, hegemonic logics and for illuminating implicit or unconscious attitudes. While the SOBS is not a test of implicit attitudes in the social psychological sense of the term (e.g., Fazio and Olson 2003), it does attempt to capture beliefs without conflating them with attitudes. This means that the SOBS might illustrate how people who have similar beliefs about sexuality may have significantly different attitudes toward sexual minorities, and vice versa. I would argue that the connections between heterogeneous attitudes and beliefs are especially difficult to detect in the context of contemporary homonormative discourse that suggests being born gay is the only way to be gay (Duggan 2003; Osmundson 2011).

One common way to go about this kind of statistical inquiry is to use what my colleague Katharine Zeiders and her collaborators in developmental psychology have called a “variable-centered approach” (2013). In this framework, relationships among dependent and independent variables are foregrounded and explored through correlations, analysis of variance, or regression models based on means or sums of scores on particular measurement tools (see figure 3.1).

For example, we might examine how membership in a racial category (e.g., identifying as Black or white) might predict higher or lower levels of “modern” or colorblind racism (Neville et al. 2013). We could examine how gender identity might predict sexist attitudes and do the same with sexual orientation, which might also correspond with psychometric constructs such as homonegativity (Morrison and Morrison 2002). Scholars have examined how socioeconomic status predicts beliefs in meritocracy (Horberg, Kraus, and Keltner 2013) and how religious affiliation and religiosity might correspond with authoritarianism (Altemeyer and Hunsberger 1992). And we can also explore relationships between outcome or dependent variables, such as the correlations between contemporary forms of aversive racism and ambivalent sexism, as well as the links between beliefs in meritocracy and right-wing authoritarianism.

We know that relationships among constructs like those in figure 3.1 are actually more complex than bidirectional correlations or one-way causal dynamics. There are often important qualifications to relationships between constructs, which means that we have to contend with a moderating variable such that the relationship between X and Y depends upon Z. And what about when gender, race, sexual orientation, and social class all affect homonegativity? We can conceptualize and test four-way interactions and so forth, but statistical problems (e.g., power, sampling error) aside, these models still prioritize variables over actual respondents. In other words, variable-centered approaches are always limited by their emphasis on variables themselves, such as how categorical variables (e.g., race) relate to continuous variables (e.g., a test of racism). Although they can show correspondence and even causality, variable-centered approaches often leave important practical questions about the empirical world unanswered, including the following: How frequently does a particular kind of response pattern occur on a given instrument? What kinds of important factors might prevent X person from responding like other X people, and Y person responding like other Y people?

In contrast to a variable-centered approach, which focuses on a specific variable and links it to a specified outcome, Zeiders and colleagues advocate a person-centered approach, which examines variables “holistically and realistically” in order to garner a clearer perspective on the cumulative and interactive relationships among multiple variables (2013, 604). A person-centered approach provides information about patterns of responses and how these patterns, as opposed to individual variables, relate to a specified outcome. This approach explains that a person-centered instrument can unpack qualitative and quantitative differences in response patterns. Though it may seem counterintuitive to a qualitative researcher, Zeiders and her colleagues suggest that person-centered statistics can qualify how relationships among variables may look different for different groups of people in the same sample—groups that might otherwise be invisible. In other words, a person-centered analysis illuminates qualitatively distinct patterns of responses to multiple variables and shows how commonly (i.e., quantitatively) these patterns occur in the data. In the context of the SOBS, a person-centered approach allows us to consider how endorsement of multiple beliefs measured by the SOBS (such as belief in discreteness and naturalness) may co-occur among a substantial number of respondents, even though these individual subscales are only weakly correlated with each other (Arseneau et al. 2013). Furthermore, such an approach helps us to identify what kinds of things may predict a particular constellation of beliefs, such as scoring high on all four SOBS subscales, or scoring low on one and high on the other three.

Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) is a person-centered approach that combines the best qualities of strategies like cluster analysis—which allows researchers to analyze response patterns—with elements of structural equation modeling, which necessitates comparisons across conceptual models to assess how well a variety of models may fit (or not fit) the data. LPA allows researchers to analyze variance in responses across multiple continuous variables, create groupings of response patterns, and investigate the probability of respondents falling into different “classes” based on their responses across multiple variables, such as the subscales of the SOBS. The “latent” part of Latent Profile Analysis is that it uncovers “groups” of respondents who feel or think similarly without respondents identifying explicitly as part of that respective group. Unlike variable-centered approaches, the analytic weight in LPA is placed on actual individuals’ holistic responses to a battery of items, rather than on statistical relationships among variable scores divorced from the respondents who produced those scores.

Like arguably all forms of quantification, LPA involves commensuration, or what sociologists Wendy Nelson Espeland and Mitchell Stevens (1998) describe as the social process by which disparate things—in this case, beliefs—are organized into artificial groupings for the purposes of comparison. However, unlike variable-centered approaches that tacitly embrace commensuration as inevitable, LPA enables researchers to resist the arbitrary clustering of respondents and to consider nuanced, atypical, and even seemingly illogical response patterns that variable-centered approaches might dismiss or ignore.

Figure 3.2 visualizes the results of an LPA that my colleagues and I conducted in two independent samples of college students: one mixed-gender sample (N=379) and another sample of only women respondents (N=266) (Grzanka, Zeiders, and Miles 2016). We achieved similar results in both samples, so I have combined them here for conceptual clarity. We called the group with the squares “Naturalness-Only” (NO) (n=213). While these respondents were higher on “born this way”–type beliefs, they were lower on the other three belief domains, which are labeled on the y-axis. The group with high scores on all four subscales—the stars—we call “Multidimensional Essentialism” (ME) (n=166), because these respondents were relatively high (i.e., above the five-point scale’s midpoint) on all four dimensions. We examined social class, gender, sexual orientation, and race to see if membership in particular identity groups would predict likelihood of falling in either class and found that only being heterosexual indicated a significantly lower probability of being in the “Naturalness-Only” group. Most importantly, the endorsement of “born this way” beliefs did not primarily distinguish these two groups. It was their relative endorsement of other sexual orientation beliefs that most significantly distinguished them. Conversely, it would be accurate to describe both groups as sharing a belief in the innateness and immutability of sexual orientation as measured by the SOBS.

In the second sample, we found two similar groups, both with shared endorsement of “born this way” beliefs but differing on the three other SOBS subscales—plus a new, third group. This relatively smaller group of only thirty-six respondents was high on “Discreteness,” “Homogeneity,” and “Informativeness,” but lowest (though still above the midpoint with a mean score of 2.97 out of 5) on “Naturalness”; accordingly, we refer to them as “High-DHI.” This time, sexual orientation did not correspond with group membership, but we included attitudinal measures and found that lower scores on psychologists Melanie Morrison and Todd Morrison’s (2002) test of modern homonegativity—basically, aversion as opposed to explicit hatred toward gay men—predicted membership in the “Naturalness-Only” group relative to the “Multidimensional Essentialism” and “High-DHI” classes. This means that multidimensional essentialists and those highest in discreteness, homogeneity, and informativeness were likely to also score high on homonegativity, but they scored similarly on “born this way” beliefs when compared to those with lower levels of homonegativity. So, here’s what we’re thinking: belief in the discreteness, homogeneity, and informativeness of sexual orientation categories more significantly distinguishes these groups of respondents than does belief in the naturalness of sexual orientation. Respondents high in all of these beliefs are more likely to be straight and homonegative. These beliefs are inevitably subject to transformation over time, and the SOBS cannot measure all possible beliefs about sexual orientation in the contemporary United States. The SOBS also does not tell us how people actually understand its individual items, only the degree to which they endorse them. Nonetheless, at least in terms of these samples derived from a college student population in the Southwest, our findings suggest that a lot of people believe in “born this way,” but it’s what else you believe about sexual orientation that really matters.

But that is not really my point. Rather, I would suggest that it is quite difficult to see these dynamics if we listen to mainstream LGBT left discourse, political moderates, or the conservative religious right, particularly as general support for the biological basis of sexual orientation continues to rise among Americans (Masci 2015). Feminist biomedicalization theory (Clarke et al. 2003) would suggest that biological and epigenetic accounts of sexual orientation’s origins will persist—regardless of evidence to the contrary—as advanced biomedical technosciences continue to extend their reach into heretofore unseen dimensions of human experience (e.g., Waidzunas and Epstein 2015). If we examine biodeterminist beliefs in isolation—or only through exclusively qualitative, interpretivist means—we might not observe the meaningful differences in these beliefs that distinguish individuals who exhibit higher or lower levels of homonegative attitudes or fail to see how common (or uncommon) these beliefs actually are. This kind of statistical work, which emphasizes multidimensionality, embraces rather than shies away from complexity and social constructionism, and focuses on actual people’s responses rather than aggregated and disambiguated variables, has the potential to realize the spirit of queer methods. Queer methods do not lead us outside or beyond the positivist origins of contemporary social science, but they do encourage reorientations toward the histories and potential futures of those methods. I suggest that queer statistics might reorient the methods by which we study sexuality in much the same way that queer of color critique and intersectionality theory have compelled interrogations and reorientations of queer theory itself (Ferguson 2004; 2012; Johnson 2001).

Statistical research is unquestionably rife with opportunities for error, including miscalculations, misinterpretations, and overgeneralizations. But uncoupling statistics from their epistemic anchor in post-positivist paradigms enables us to imagine quantification otherwise: to unmoor it from violent truth-making and to use numbers as one way of accounting, not the only or even preferred arithmetic for making sense of the social world. Person-centered approaches such as Latent Profile Analysis can be used complementarily, I contend, with critical, queer methodological orientations, and they can also be used to carve up the universe into reductionist slices that obscure relations of power and inequality. However, there are other ways to envision “slices” of the universe; Haraway (1997) calls them “diffractions.” Diffractions are modest accounts of what you see that open up possibilities for other ways of knowing. The SOBS is a tool that, when put to use in queer ways to do some queer work in the world, can facilitate more adequate, sustained, radical interventions into our present and future, rather than simply reinforcing the strategic essentialism of Equality, Inc. (Duggan 1994; 2003).

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