Other, Please Specify

Queer Methods in Sociology

D'Lane R. Compton, Tey Meadow, Kristen Schilt, D'Lane Compton, Tey Meadow, Kristen Schilt

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780520963993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This provocative collection showcasesthe work of emerging and established sociologists in the fields of sexuality and gender studies as they reflect on what it means to develop, practice, and teach queer methods.Located within the critical conversation about the possibilities and challenges of utilizing insights from humanistic queer epistemologies in social scientific research, Other, Please Specify presents to a new generation of researchers an array of experiences, insights, and approaches, revealing the power of investigations of the social world. With contributions from sociologists who have helped define queer studies and who use a range of interpretative and statistical methods, this volume offers methodological advice and practical strategies in research design and execution, all with the intent of getting queer research off the ground and building a collaborative community within this emerging subfield.

PART I

Anti-orthodoxies

1

The “Not Sociology” Problem

Kristen Schilt

In the 1973 supplemental issue of the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) titled “Changing Women in a Changing Society,” an intergenerational assembly of scholars weighed in on the problems facing women in the United States and on the place the study of gender held within the broader discipline. Publication of an issue edited and authored almost exclusively by women in the longest running and most historically significant sociology journal—and the fact that this issue was then printed separately as a book that sold over 25,000 copies¹—suggested a turning point in which feminist inquiry was becoming a central area of sociology. Almost fifty years later, Gender & Society, the feminist sociology journal started in 1987 by Sociologists for Women in Society, has nearly tied with AJS in terms of impact.² The Sex & Gender Section of the American Sociological Association also has emerged as the organization’s largest member subgroup. At the same time, a quick perusal of JSTOR shows that feminist scholarship—and even research on any gender topic—continues to be underrepresented in most high-impact sociology journals that advertise their mandate as publishing research of “general interest” to the discipline. Taken together, these trends suggest that while feminist theories and research might not yet be at the center of sociology, feminist scholars have staked out an influential claim in the discipline.

The evolution of a feminist community within the broader discipline of sociology exemplifies a dynamic that I wish to explore about “queer work”—and here, drawing on Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell’s writing about queer archives, I invoke the older meaning of queer as something “odd and perplexing” that can disrupt the status quo of a social milieu, such as an academic discipline (2015: 3). In the 1970s and 1980s, feminists presented such a queer challenge to sociology with their investigation into how normative gender ideologies infused traditional research methods and theories in ways that perpetuated institutional and interpersonal gender inequality (see Smith 1989; Stacey & Thorne 1985). When faced with opposition from disciplinary gatekeepers, they developed a community of scholars who served, first, as emotional support and interlocutors and, later, as feminist institutions gained ground, as editors, reviewers, and tenure-letter writers (see Laslett & Thorne 1997). A similar process of community and institution building in response to disciplinary marginalization is evident in the experiences of scholars of color working in critical race studies who have to navigate what Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva term “white logic, white methods” (2008), and exemplified as well by queer scholars pushing back against long-standing sociological associations between nonheterosexual identities and practices and social deviance (see Seidman 1996). The growing body of writing about the importance of community building from scholars working in areas of sociological inquiry that have been relegated to the margins of the discipline gives valuable insight into the varied strategies for resisting such marginalization, and presents a historical record from which future generations can evaluate disciplinary change.

In this chapter, I shift the focus from a discussion of how we navigate academic marginalization to an examination of the strategies used by disciplinary gatekeepers to keep us marginal. In thinking through how to conceptualize these strategies of resistance to queer work, I have come to think of them as bolstering what we might call the “not sociology” problem. I borrow this concept from Marjorie DeVault’s writing about how, early in her career, sociological gatekeepers often dismissed her feminist research with the statement “But that is not sociology” (1999: 15). This sentence struck a chord with me because it is a pithy synthesis of academic resistance that I have faced—and that I have seen many others face—while doing research in the area of transgender studies. And it captures the resistance my colleagues and students have encountered when doing social justice–oriented work on a number of other “queer” areas of inquiry, such as sex work (see Hoang, this volume). While we may discuss these marginalizing experiences in small groups in dark bars at conferences, we often keep silent about them in public talks or in print because the cost of calling out the ideological character of these responses to our work can be so high. Yet there is something to be gained from transforming these reactions from embarrassing personal incidents into a politically situated analysis about how sociological gatekeeping works—and how we might disrupt it.

THE THREE R’S: RESISTANCE, REDUCTION, AND RIDICULE

In mapping out the interactional and institutional strategies that push queer work to the sociological margins, I identified the Three R’s: resistance, the attempt to erect boundaries against an emerging area of inquiry (e.g., transgender studies, fat studies, critical heterosexualities) that pushes up against an established canon or theoretical frame; reduction, the attempt to dismiss scholarship on group X as too “fringe” to sociologically matter; and ridicule, the attempt to devalue scholarship on group X by positioning it as absurd. These strategies are not mutually exclusive—a scholar might face all three in the course of one talk—nor is my list by any means exhaustive. I see this trio simply as a starting point for a discussion about making disciplinary change and mitigating the emotional labor spent on navigating these reactions. People doing work at the margins of sociology often meet with ideological critiques disguised as objective criticism from colleagues, institutional gatekeepers, and peers. If we desire sociological careers in the academy, we can feel pressure to sit quietly while our work is dismissed with labels that fit under the “not sociology” umbrella: “too micro,” “descriptive,” “me-search.” If we offer a challenge, we risk being positioned as “not collegial,” “too ideological,” or “aggressive.” Yet keeping these experiences to ourselves can make us doubt our work, can lead us to switch to new research topics that we are not invested in but that seem “safe,” can encourage us to leave sociology for other fields, or can drive us out of the academy altogether.

As a tenured professor, I recognize that the costs for me in writing publicly about these strategies are less severe than the potential costs to graduate students, untenured faculty, and adjunct faculty. I also recognize that in talking about such reactions to our work, we must look at how they manifest differently depending on who is presenting the research. I received much more overt resistance to my work as a graduate student, for instance, than I do now as a tenured professor. Further, as a white, queer cisgender woman, the forms of resistance I have faced when presenting research on transgender topics have sometimes overlapped and sometimes differed from the experiences of transgender and nonbinary colleagues with whom I have collaborated. Many of us have encountered the advice that transgender research is a bad idea—it’s just a fad, it’s too micro, we won’t get jobs (see Lombardi this volume for a larger discussion). Yet I rarely face questions about whether I am doing “me-search.” I am more likely to be positioned on a continuum from someone who does intentionally “provocative” work to someone who received poor guidance as a graduate student—and who could be saved if I just moved to a new area of study. To cite a case highlighting this last point: when I was on the job market, two senior scholars at different universities asked me in what I interpreted as hopeful voices, “Do you have any other interests besides transsexuals?”

As someone who identifies in my published work as cisgender, I also have been privy to unwanted commentary from cisgender sociologists whom I often barely know about their experiences with and feelings about transgender people³—much in the same way that white people may assume that other people whom they perceive as white are a safe audience for racist commentary (Picca & Feagin 2007). While telling people I was politically committed to transgender social justice did little to stop such comments, letting them know that I had been partnered with a transgender man for many years usually did—though I was then often asked for details about my sexual history. I mention these experiences as a way to make my positionality visible and to demonstrate how our social locations in the status hierarchy of the discipline and our identities—and how our colleagues perceive these identities (whether correctly or incorrectly)—shape the ways in which our research is taken up and what gatekeeping strategies, if any, we may face when doing queer work. I turn now to examples of how I have experienced the Three R’s while presenting to sociological audiences research about the lived experiences of transgender people.

Resistance

My early interest in sociology came from its ability to provide what I saw as an empirically grounded and theoretically rich language with which to investigate my long-standing preoccupation: how to make effective challenges to social inequality. While the Sociology Department at the University of Texas at Austin, my undergraduate institution, emphasized a particularly traditional form of sociology, I was able to take courses with feminist professors and graduate students that shaped the trajectory of my adult life. It was transformative to discover the theory of social constructionism—to take hold of the idea that unequal social relations could change, no matter how hard that change might be to accomplish, because they were not static, ahistorical, or innate. For my MA work, I built on my undergraduate thesis about Riot Grrrl, a 1990s punk rock feminist subculture that presented challenges to second-wave (1960s–1970s) feminist theory and the male-dominated realm of subcultural studies. I found generous support for this work from feminist mentors. Senior feminist scholars invited me to present at conferences as an early-stage graduate student, where I built crucial mentoring networks, and encouraged me to send my work out for review to journals. With a vibrant community of mentors who reflected to me the value of studying areas of social life that are dismissed or devalued by those in positions of social power, I grew a thick skin for situations in which nonfeminist professors and peers told me that gender scholarship was not interesting or important—in other words, was “not sociology.” And, most important, I learned how to distinguish a constructive critique of my research design or theoretical argument from an ideological opinion (often stated as a fact) about what was worthy of study.

I did not realize how important this ability to distinguish between critique and opinion would be until I began presenting my dissertation research about the workplace experiences of transgender men to feminist audiences in the mid-2000s. I saw this shift in my research as a response to the body of crucial and innovative theoretical and empirical scholarship about the lives of transgender people that began to emerge in sociology in the 1990s and early 2000s (see Namaste 2000; Rubin 2003). Having the opportunity to take classes in LGBTQ studies, queer theory, and transgender studies as a graduate student at UCLA, I viewed sociological methods as well suited to bring rigorous empirical data on transgender people’s experiences to bear on policy and activism around transgender rights—much in the way that feminist sociologists had done for cisgender women in arenas such as sexual harassment and workplace inequality. I saw the emerging subfield of transgender studies in sociology as poised to challenge the long-standing positioning of trans people as deviant within the sociological literature and to radically transform how sociologists conceptualized gender. As a person with political commitments to feminist and LGBTQ activism, I wanted to be a part of this work.

I had the luck to be in a department with a core group of feminist scholars who strongly supported my research even though it was outside their topical areas of expertise. Yet, in my first attempts to present my research to a broader feminist audience, I was often met with seemingly purposeful resistance from the people who held positions of authority in the subfield, such as conference panel organizers and journal editors. When I sent in papers about transgender workplace discrimination to “Gender and Workplace” sessions at the annual sociology conference, I was told that my work would find a better home in the Sexualities Section or on LGBTQ-focused panels (of which there were very few at the time)—advice that signaled to me that transgender people’s experiences at work were not of interest to gender-and-work scholars. In presentations, I had feminist audiences dismiss accounts of trans men’s experiences of workplace discrimination and ask if I could provide examples of how trans men might help cisgender women at work—a question that signified to me an understanding that cisgender women should always be at the center of sociological research on gender inequality. And I met with a pervasive assumption among older feminist scholars that transgender men initiated gender transitions because of internalized misogyny. I was asked many times by second-wave feminists in formal and informal settings why “those poor women” (i.e., trans men) felt they needed to “mutilate” their bodies with surgical interventions and hormones.

At first, it felt as though an unspoken message were being conveyed that research on transgender people was irrelevant to sociologists of gender—a “not sociology of gender” variant of mainstream dismissal. This message became overt, however, when I saw a prominent gender scholar tell a conference audience that transgender people could not be part of “the gender ...