Smithing Queer Empiricism: Engaging Ethnomethodology for a Queer Social Science

2021 ◽  
pp. 073527512110263
Author(s):  
S. L. Crawley ◽  
MC Whitlock ◽  
Jennifer Earles
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Grand Theory ◽  
Black Queer Studies ◽  
Empirical Perspective ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
Modernist Discourse

Is queer social science possible? Early queer theorists disparaged empiricism as a normalizing, modernist discourse. Nonetheless, LGBTQI+ social scientists have applied queer concepts in empirical projects. Rather than seek a queer method, we ask, Is there an empirical perspective that (ontologically) envisions social relations more queerly—attending to discursive and materialist productions of reality? Dorothy Smith’s work foregrounds people’s activities of engaging texts and satisfies Black queer studies’ and new materialisms’ critiques of early queer theory. Underutilized and often misread, especially its ethnomethodological sensibilities and its vision of actors as relational, practical actors, her work shows how my race is not mine, it is ours; your sexual orientation is not yours, it is ours; their gender is not theirs, it is ours. Smith offers an ontology without essence, grand theory, or normativity, facilitating a range of queer, interpretive projects—from the intersectional to the transnational to the embodied.

History and Social Science in the West

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Passmore
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
External Force ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The West ◽  
Grand Theory ◽  
Academic History ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter analyzes the relationship between history and various disciplines within the social sciences. Historians and social scientists shared two related sets of assumptions. The first supposition was of a world-historical shift from a traditional, hierarchical, religious society to a modern egalitarian, rational one. Second, history and social science assumed that progress occurred within nations possessed of unique ‘characters’, and that patriotism provided the social cement without which society could not function. Nevertheless, academic history seemingly differed from social science in that it was untheoretical and predominantly political. Yet historians focused on the nation’s attainment of self-consciousness, homogeneity, and independence through struggle against internal and external enemies—a history in which great men were prominent. Historians and sociologists unwittingly shared versions of grand theory, in which change was an external ‘force’ driven by the functional needs of the system, and in which meaning derived from measurement against theory, rather than from protagonists’ actions and beliefs.

Getting Emotional After Sex: Tendencies in Queer Studies Browne, Kath and Nash, Catherine (eds) (2010), Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-7546-7843-4, 316 pp., £65.00. Halley, Janet and Parker, Andrew (eds), After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4909-9, 336 pp., US$24.95.Heckert, Jamie and Cleminson, Richard (eds), Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power, Routledge, Oxon and New York, 2011. ISBN: 978-0415-65818-8, 238 pp., US$42.99.

Somatechnics ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 190-206
Author(s):  
Sarah Cefai
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Duke University

This article reviews three recent queer studies anthologies: Queer Methods and Methodology: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, by Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash (2010), Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power by Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson (2011) , and After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, by Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (2011) . A brief synopsis of the books is followed by discussion on three key observations. First, I discuss the specificity of the queer ‘body’, particularly with regard to the scholarly subjectivity articulated by contributors to these anthologies. Second, I discuss the distillation of queer identity from the field of queer corporeality as a specific move to embrace anti-identitarianism through conceiving identity as fluid. Lastly, questions of queer and identity are reconsidered as methodologically specific and, as such, as entailing sensitivity to the movement of concepts between the different epistemological fields of knowledge called the social sciences and the arts and humanities. Through discussion of these observations, this review aims to stimulate thought and reflection on these texts as responding to and participating in the highly contested institutionalisation of queer studies in the academy.

Book Review: Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology

Sexualities ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-503
Author(s):  
Esperanza Miyake
Keyword(s):  
Queer Studies ◽  
Black Queer Studies ◽  
Black Queer

Frantz Fanon’s Homosexual Territories

Frottage ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 31-60
Author(s):  
Keguro Macharia
Keyword(s):  
Queer Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Black Diaspora ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Black Queer Studies ◽  
Queer Diaspora ◽  
Black Queer

This chapter identifies Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) as a fault line between black diaspora studies and queer studies, and argues that it is a central work for theorizing the inextricability of blackness and sexuality in colonial modernity. By the mid-1990s, as queer studies was consolidating into a field, an uneasy consensus had been reached in work by Diana Fuss, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, and Kobena Mercer that queer scholars could learn from Fanon’s work on blackness, but he was too homophobic for queer scholars to engage. So successful has this divide been that almost no contemporary scholarly work in black queer studies and black queer diaspora studies engages Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. In turn, almost none of the important scholarship on Fanon takes sexuality as a foundational element of his thinking. My chapter argues that Fanon provides a genealogy of sexuality that has blackness as its foundation. The black person’s body is the psychic object of colonial modernity’s desire and the material through which such desire is expressed. Simply put, within the world created by colonial modernity—I use Sylvia Wynter’s 1492 as a handy starting point—desire and sexuality cannot be imagined without the black person’s body. In the latter part of the chapter, I move beyond this genealogical account and examine how Fanon’s attention to touch—“Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?”—can be juxtaposed with Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic to imagine and practice black livability. I read Fanon’s final injunction to “touch” the other as reclaiming frottage for black diasporic collectivity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document