Quotes I Marked
(p.4) “Many humanists embrace a ‘suspicion of method’ (Brim and Ghaziani 2016, 16) and assume that queer frameworks are incompatible with social science epistemologies.”
(p.7) “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 live livable”
(p.14) Bit about Halberstam and scavenger methods
(p.15) Quotes from Munoz about evidence and how the nature of queer history means there often isn’t the traditional kinds of evidence bc leaving evidence is dangerous
(p.17) Note about “zombie categories”— categories that are invented by researchers for particular purposes but don’t catch on because they don’t resonate with people, OR categories that used to resonate with people but are now archaic holdovers
(p.29) - mentions that when Heather Love taught a queer method graduate seminar and invited several established scholars, they said they have no method. Method in queer studies undermines “queer theory’s institutional claims to inter/anti-disciplinarity”
(p.30) “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.”
(p.33) “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’ Jose Esteban Munoz designated as queer utopia (2009, 1).”
(p.33) “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.”
(p.55) Discussion on the ethical issues (and practical difficulties) of doing ethnography on a group that you’re not a part of, but argues that refusing to do the research just because of your identity is the ‘skeptic’s cop-out’ and might be the worst position, since you’re avoiding dialogue altogether. At least if you do something shitty, people can talk about it.
(p.90) Story about developing a survey instrument, via casual conversations with queer people, which helped shape how the survey instrument ended up looking. Says most item development studies are done using majoritarian beliefs about minorities, so using queer people as the starting point is unusual.
(p.105) Discussion of the shortcomings of available data on LGBT households, including that the census only looks at coupled households, which excludes single people, people who don’t live with their partners, people not willing to identify their sexualities, bi people, and trans people.
(p.106) Important discussion about how WHAT you ask about (behavior? identity? feelings experienced?) deeply determines the results you get. Also that gay people are a group that is IMPOSSIBLE to randomly sample.
(p.107) description of RDS data collection (respondent-driven sampling) - helps you get in touch with more of a community than you could on your own
(p.110) description of how the researcher used news stories about different neighborhoods as structuring tools for their interviews and how this method is useful
(p.134) Discussion of some of the difficulties in measuring GNC populations