Queer Methods

Queer Methods

Volume 44, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2016
Cynthia Chris

Excerpted from the Editor’s Note

Public policy researchers are not the only ones grappling with questions of how to study LGBT populations, how to categorize us, and what to call those categories. The term “queer,” once bitter epithet but now proud sobriquet, appears at the current juncture to be flexibly broad enough for many of our purposes, but not granularly nuanced enough for others. Scholars across disciplines have long contested the applicability of established methods to study queer subjects, queer lives, and queer cultures. They called for new modes of studying sexual identities that would de-construct biologically determined categories of sex and gender. By devising social constructionist theories, researchers redefined the meanings of deviance. These seismic shifts emerged in large part in postwar sociology. Nearly a half century ago, Mary McIntosh insisted on new paradigms for thinking about sexual identity in her then-radical article “The Homosexual Role” (1968). A few years later, John Gagnon and William Simon broke similar ground in Sexual Conduct (1973), as did Ken Plummer in Sexual Stigma (1975), all just prior to publication of the first volume of philosopher Michel Foucault’s influential opus The History of Sexuality (1978).