Queering research methods

This piece introduces a blog series on queering research methods, extending out of a roundtable GENDER.ED hosted on this topic back in LGBT+ History Month, augmented by work by other ECRs. 

Back in LGBT+ History Month, GENDER.ED hosted a roundtable on queering research methods, to showcase the insights of three current fellows at IASH, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. The event was chaired by Dr Wannes Dupont, Associate Director of GENDER.ED. 

The roundtable was so generative that we then realised there were connective threads around queering research methods in GENDER.ED’s wider community, which we have sought to bring together as a blog series. This introduction captures our initial curiosities and provocations, and the questions around which we have scaffolded this mini-series on queering research methods. 

Published in 2010, Kath Browne and Catherine Nash’s curated book Queer methods and methodologies laid out a central conundrum for queer studies scholarship. In research deemed ‘queer’, the methods we use often let us speak to or interact with people or with the traces of people on the basis of sexual/gender identities and within anti-normative frameworks. Yet “if, as queer thinking argues, subjects and subjectivities are fluid, unstable and perpetually becoming, how can we gather ‘data’ from those tenuous and fleeting subjects using the standard methods of data collection”? (p.1). In the excitement of new revelations and interventions from queer studies, this question had been overlooked. But clearly theory, data and method cannot be understood from one another: “can we have queer knowledges if our methodologies are not queer?” (p.2).  

Returning to this issue at our roundtable, Wannes observed, to zoom in on queer research methods raises the question of what we understand a method to be. Fifteen years on from Browne and Nash’s book, many working in gender and sexuality studies today have still had very traditional methodological training and have moved into interdisciplinary territory later. When we encounter queer methods, however, method needs to mean something very different. As Wannes reflected, queering research methods can be about one’s positionality, or about the intervention one seeks to make in bringing certain disciplines or perspectives together. Queering research methods can be an approach to power relations; it can be an affective relation to the work. A queer impulse is to evade pinning something down but still, is there something like a queer method there? If there is, what stakes does a queer research method have; what do we seek to invest in this particular type of method? These are key questions that this blog series will address.

Biography:

Kaveri Qureshi is Associate Director of GENDER.ED.

References:

Browne, K., & Nash, C. J. (2010). Queer methods and methodologies: Intersecting queer theories and social science research. Taylor & Francis.