Methods
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How do scholars create new knowledge in gender and sexuality studies? How do we work with interviewees, key texts, and other data sources while putting not only protocols but political commitments into practice? More broadly, How do we do gender and sexuality studies? These questions, each of which asks how we do something, point to the topic of methods. Methods may seem like a set of standard protocols for collecting and analyzing data. Feminist researchers count, survey, interview, transcribe, and code. They, like others, use qualitative approaches, quantitative techniques, and critical lenses to understand culturally and historically significant phenomena. But does academic inquiry always require an ordered approach? The answer is no. In fact, gender and sexuality scholarship recognizes disorder as generative. Interdisciplinary feminist scholars have long mixed different types of research methods, resulting in a blossoming and blurring of fields. Likewise, rather than dismissing outlier data or trying to straighten up its unruly subjects, scholars who work in the emerging field of “queer methods” exploit the possibilities that arise from the “messiness” of LGBTQI social life (Browne and Nash 2010; Ghaziani and Brim 2019; Love 2019). When Latinx ethnographers work in their field sites, lesbian literary scholars offer close...
This essay may be found on page 153 of the printed volume.