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 Queer Theory
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SAGE Research Methods Foundations

By: Patrick R. Grzanka

Published:2019
Length: 5,000 Words
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036
Methods: Queer Theory
Online ISBN: 9781526421036
Disciplines: Psychology, Sociology
Access Date: September 30, 2019
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
© 2019 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.
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Queer theory is an indispensable tool for researchers asking questions about the roles of power, discourse,
and knowledge in the development and sustenance of structural forms of domination, especially those forms
of oppression that appear to be normal or natural. It is a vital approach for social researchers seeking to
illuminate and critique taken-for-granted concepts and social dynamics, and it is hardly limited to the study of
sexuality and gender.

Despite its ubiquity in critical social inquiry, queer theory remains one of the most misunderstood, misapplied,
and even maligned terms in social research. To consider the place of queer theory in social research methods
is to confront at least two controversies contained in the term itself. Both “queer” and “theory” are contested
constructs that contain diverse meanings across their social, historical, and disciplinary travels. This brief
essay addresses some of the complexities of using queer theory as method by surveying the origins of queer
theory, as well as some of the most notable scholarly critiques of queer theory. Once these critiques are
viewed in the perspective of 50 years of queer theorizing, it is more accurate to speak of queer theories or
queer studies than of a monolithic approach that can be captured by a single theoretical framework.

What Counts as Method?

Although the distinction between theory and methods in the social sciences may seem obvious to some,
queer theory complicates such a dualism because queer theory’s origins are in political activism and
humanistic inquiry, as opposed to science (Sullivan, 2003). In positivist and postpositivist social science,
theory tends to be conceptualized as a testable explanatory framework that has developed through extensive
empirical inquiry and has demonstrated sufficient generalizability so as to apply to more than a single case
or sample; alternatively, in more critical, social constructionist forms of social research, theory might be more
aptly conceptualized as a lens or framework for making sense of the empirical world (e.g., feminist theory).
At the risk of generalization—and there is much variability within any broad disciplinary umbrella—humanities
scholars typically use the concept of theory in ways that might look like “method” to a social scientist, that is,
particular tools for analyzing evidence or data. At the very least, the boundary between theory and method is
often blurrier in the humanities than it is in the social sciences.

Accordingly, when humanities scholars began to articulate what queer theory means, what it does, and why it
matters, they often used it as a method or approach: the theory was the means by which seemingly inevitable
and immutable categories, such as gay and straight, were exposed to be arbitrary and social constructed.
Eve Kosofky Sedgwick (1990), the “mother” of queer theory, exemplifies such an approach in her landmark
Epistemology of the Closet, in which she “reads” a range of literary and historical texts to conceptualize “the
closet” as a position from which knowledge is produced and from which students of queer theory can come
to understand sexuality and gender as potentially transgressive subject positions. Rather than accept the
dominant notion of the closet as something one is either in or out of, Sedgwick’s work exposes the ways
in which the closet is better conceptualized as a process—of continually coming out of, going back into,
negotiating strategically and unexpectedly, and of knowing and being nonnormatively. She argues that to think
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of the closet in binary terms and to limit its relevance to the study of gay life and culture is to ignore how the
closet affects and is affected by Western culture writ large. In her work, heteronormativity is as a social force,
that is to say, the structural conditions produced by a heterosexist society that presumes heterosexuality to be
the default, unspoken-but-always-spoken-about norm of social life (see also Foucault, 1978). Furthermore,
Sedgwick demonstrates a hallmark of queer theoretical frameworks: the queer reading, in which analyses
of texts, broadly construed to include virtually any kind of discourse, focus on sexual and gendered power
dynamics that are otherwise obfuscated by the dominant logics of heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy.

Students of social and behavioral research should likewise question the investment in and allegiance to a
theory/methods binary that denies the many ways in which theory and methods are coconstitutive. Indeed, as
queer, feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theorists have long established, the frameworks that scholars
use to conceptualize the social world inform how social scientists probe the social world to gather and
taxonomize evidence, to enumerate what even counts as evidence, and to decide what to do with evidence
once they have it (Haraway, 1988). Once scholars destabilize the theory/methods dualism, they open
up possibilities for how interpretivist, humanities-informed approaches such as queer theory can become
incredibly powerful tools for conducting critical social research across the disciplines of the social sciences.
The next section illustrates queer theories’ capacities for helping social scientists to (re)think about all stages
of the research process from an oblique angle.

What Counts as Queer?

Rejecting the theory/method binary does not settle the question of what makes a theory queer. There are an
infinite number of ways to define queer, which makes it both a useful and sometimes problematically vague
concept. One usage of the term is as an identity category that captures a range of nonheterosexual sexual
orientations and/or politicized sexual identifications and practices that expressly reject heteronormativity. The
former functions as a catch-all umbrella under which people who identify as a gay, lesbian, bisexual might
stand, whereas the latter suggests a potentially narrower frame that has less to do with sexual orientation
per se and more with an antinormative relationship to heterosexuality and its attendant structures, such
as marriage, monogamy, capitalism, and White supremacy. This latter conceptualization of queer as an
antinormative, counter-hegemonic perspective is more closely aligned with queer theory’s analytic capacities
and methodological strengths. This usage of queer also underscores queer theory’s fundamentally political
nature, as opposed to postpositivist notions of social theory that seek a so-called objective, neutral, or
unbiased perspective to an exterior social world. To the contrary, queer theory is rooted in the subjective
experiences of queer people.

The ideas that were eventually consolidated into academic queer theory are rooted in social movements and
activists’ attempts to challenge heteronormative institutions, sometimes literally to save lives. The emergence
of HIV/AIDS worldwide in the 1980s gave rise to groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation, neither of which
were without detractors but both of which contributed to the understanding of how queer praxis can effectively

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negotiate seemingly intractable social problems (e.g., the lack of research and development into antiretroviral
treatment, pervasive HIV stigma in health care) through subversive practices both within and outside of
traditional channels. Facing mass death in the face of AIDS, ineffective health systems, and indifferent
government bureaucracy, ACT UP and Queer Nation used direct action characterized by several hallmarks of
queer culture—including a form of parody referred to as a camp. Through “kiss-ins,” “die-ins,” and high-profile
protests at the National Institutes of Health in the United States and international summits on HIV/AIDS,
these groups creatively used homophobic stigma against heteronormativity. Even use of the word queer
itself represented a form of subversion whereby the homophobic slur was reclaimed by a new generation of
activists who saw queer as liberating and empowering, rather than a tool of intimidation and violence to be
used against sexual and gender minorities.

These activists also rejected the assimilationist politics of more mainstream lesbian, gay, bisexual, and, to
a lesser extent, transgender (LGBT) rights organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign and the
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in the United States. These so-called assimilationist groups (Sullivan,
2003), which queer activists saw as seeking a place at the proverbial table of heteronormativity, rather than its
disestablishment or deconstruction, sought LGB (and sometimes T) inclusion through traditional means and
through the expansion of rights and privileges afforded to straight people and those who identify with the sex
they were assigned at birth (i.e., cisgender individuals). These privileges include civil marriage and the right
to serve openly in the military. Queer theorists likewise critiqued a focus on these specific rights as retaining
an investment in privilege, inclusion, and the neocolonial ambitions of Western powers that represents LGBT
collaboration with rather than rejection of heteronormativity and intersecting systems of inequality.

These political contestations have produced some of queer theory’s most enduring and potent constructs
including homonormativity. A play on the concept of heteronormativity, Lisa Duggan (2003) popularized the
term in her treatise on neoliberalism, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the
Attack on Democracy. Duggan argued that mainstream LGBT rights activism is actually quite complacent
with existing social norms; this kind of homonormative politics seeks accommodation within heteronormative
institutions and social arrangements. Homonormativity draws upon ideas of intersectionality to highlight
how LGBT individuals are differently situated in terms of access to power and privilege along a variety
of other dimensions of difference—for example, race, social class, and citizenship status (Grzanka, 2014).
Homonormative subjectivity, according to Duggan, reflects a material and symbolic investment in
monogamous marriage, gender conformity, White American middle-class social mores, meritocracy, and
individualism. Duggan’s characterization of homonormativity then helps to expose how some perceived
advances in LGBT rights, such as the right to civil marriage, may simultaneously advantage some LGBT
people while simultaneously reproducing stigma and exclusion for other LGBT people, particularly queer and
gender nonconforming people of color, working class and poor LGBT people, sex workers, LGBT persons
with disabilities, and undocumented LGBT people, for example. In other words, homonormativity—not unlike
heteronormativity—only affords privilege to those who can exhibit and embody its idealized standards.
Scholars have taken up this concept and illustrated how homonormativity manifests in gentrification and
neighborhood policing (Hanhardt, 2013), advertising and tourism (Boyd, 2008), and mental health advocacy

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(Grzanka & Mann, 2014).

The “Missing” Revolution

As queer theory flourished in the humanities during the late 1980s and early 1990s, sociologists Arlene
Stein and Ken Plummer (1994) observed that the study of sexuality—and, in particular, nonheterosexual
sexualities—remained ghettoized within sociology. Furthermore, much sociological inquiry into gay and
lesbian life was mired by the legacy of the “deviance” framework. In other words, when sociologists studied
LGBT people, they generally did so through a deviance lens that compared gay men and lesbians to straight
people and described or otherwise assessed the degree to which their behaviors and subcultures represented
a form of social disease or psychopathology. Some prominent exceptions included Mary McIntosh, John
Gagnon, and William Simon, whose work on homosexuality helped social scientists consider the social
construction of sexualities rather than take sexual categories as inevitable orthodoxy. Steven Epstein (1994)
likewise argued that much of what was considered novel about queer theory had been well established
among social constructionists in sociology and anthropology, who had rejected essentialist approaches to
sexuality and other social categories long before Foucault was in vogue. Nevertheless, as queer theory was
transforming other parts of the academy, sociology (and psychology, most certainly) as a whole was largely
ignorant to its insights, which Stein and Plummer saw as possessing revolutionary potential for the sociology
of sexualities. They characterized the “hallmarks” of queer theory thusly:

1. a conceptualization of sexuality which sees sexual power embodied in different levels of social life,
expressed discursively, and enforced through boundaries and binary divides;
2. the problematization of sexual and gender categories and of identities in general; identities are
always on uncertain ground, entailing displacements of identification and knowing;
3. a rejection of civil rights strategies in favor of a politics of carnival, transgression, and parody, which
leads to deconstruction, decentering, revisionist readings, and an antiassimilationist politics;
4. a willingness to interrogate areas which normally would not be seen as the terrain of sexuality and to
conduct queer “readings” of ostensibly heterosexual or nonsexualized texts. (1994, pp. 81, 82)

Although queer theory has changed somewhat in the decades since Stein and Plummer identified its tenets,
their four-point framework holds up well even in light of the critiques described later in this entry. Noteworthy
for the purposes of thinking of queer theory, methodologically is the degree to which Stein and Plummer’s
hallmarks (particularly #2-#4) include analyses, processes, and action, rather than merely qualities, principles,
or ideas. From their perspective, queer theory was also somewhat of a methodology in Sandra Harding’s
(1987) sense of term: A way of conceptualizing how social scientists approach doing research and creating
knowledge.

Stein and Plummer (1994) went further than suggesting sociologists take queer theory seriously. They called
for a better sociology through a seismic paradigm shift that would incorporate queer theory not only in the
study of sexuality but in broader sociological scholarship and teaching. Furthermore, as social theorists
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whose work was inductively generated and grounded in systemically derived empirical observations, they
also suggested that sociology could help queer theory become more accessible outside of its elite core of
followers. The degree to which their suggestions have been taken up by the discipline is a conversation
beyond the scope of this entry, but their contributions are still evident in much of the way contemporary social
scientists use and think about queer theory. For example, they borrowed from Michael Warner (1991/1999) in
asserting that what sociologists needed was to queer theory rather than make theories about queer people;
today, social scientists recognize that queer theory is useful in a variety of contexts, even those sites that may
not appear to be sexualized. Stein and Plummer also identified queer theory’s critical target as heterosexuality
not sexual minorities. The impact of this reorientation cannot be understated: By arguing that queer theory is
actually about critically identifying the taken-for-granted ways that heterosexuality’s influence pervades social
life, they rejected the longstanding deviance frame that made sexual minorities (and all those who could not
effectively meet heteronormativity’s demands), the primary object of sexuality research in the social sciences.
Queer theory’s most radical insight, ironically, would be its ability to name and critique what had been there
all along, hiding in plain sight: heterosexuality.

Although it is certainly a mistake to attribute the entire movement to him, it is almost impossible to imagine
queer theory without the work of French structuralist-cum-poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault. Like
Sedgwick’s foundational work, Foucault’s impact on the field is profound for numerous reasons. His work on
the history of sexuality itself was groundbreaking (Foucault, 1978), but he also practiced methods that have
become synonymous with queer theory including discourse analysis. In an important speech 1970, as he was
ascending to a prestigious professorship in Paris, Foucault outlined his future projects and described them as
falling into two modes of analysis: critical and genealogical (Foucault, 1972). In this speech, “The Discourse
on Language,” Foucault explained how genealogical work would trace the knowledge–power relationships
that create social categories, institutions, and forms of control; his critical work, on the other hand, would
involve interrogating and challenging those structural forces. In practice, his work generally involved both
modes simultaneously, as his analyses focused on the transformations of knowledge–power that produced
important social categories—such as the homosexual—and critiqued these processes by revealing the
arbitrary ways through which rules, norms, and identities are reified and naturalized through discourse. In
the History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault (1978) analyzed the history of science to argue that modern
scientific disciplines actually created the homosexual—a biopsychiatric person whose foil, the heterosexual,
was evidence of his deviance. Homosexuality was the scientific alchemy of desire, behavior, and social
norms; psychologists, biologists, and criminologists in late 19th century Europe had taken sodomy and turned
it into a category of personhood. By fixating on homosexual deviance, they had produced taxonomies of
pathology and of its twin: normality.

Foucault’s work resists the kind of superficial linguistic constructionism that would suggest homosexuals
have always existed and that what mattered then, in the late 19th century, is that scientists came up
with a word to describe them. Much more radically, Foucault (1978) investigated the history of science,
religion, education, and the law to explicate how sodomy (i.e., illicit sexual practices sometimes associated
with anal sex between men) had shifted from a domain of the church (i.e., a sin, a behavior) to medicine

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(i.e., a psychiatric condition) to a kind of person (i.e., an identity). To Foucault, discourse does not just
describe things; it is actually productive of things. Further, he showed how even progressive attempts
to resist oppressive regimes of sexuality have mischaracterized the discourse on sexuality as essentially
“repressive.” Foucault described the modern discourse on sexuality as cacophonous, multiplicative, and
pervasive, rather than characterized by silence, prohibition, and taboo. Put another way: The discourse on
sexuality is everywhere—in schools, prisons, churches, hospitals, governments—but it disguises itself well
through the rhetoric of health, education, and management (see also Foucault, 2008, for more on what he
terms “biopower”).

Discourse was central to all of Foucault’s scholarship insomuch as he conceptualized discourse as the
practices—not limited to spoken or written language—through which knowledge–power is created,
transformed, and distributed (Foucault, 1972). His linking of knowledge and power, as well as the primacy
of discourse in power–knowledge relations, helped queer theorists to reconsider how and why institutions
exercise control even in the absence of overt force. Again, this exemplifies queer theory’s relevance beyond
the study of sexuality. Foucault (2008) developed the concept of governmentality to explain how the state
and other institutions compel individuals to self-monitor and self-regulate. This modern form of social control
trades totalitarian violence for more subtle, coercive forms of domination. Foucault’s broadly influential work
on governmentality has provided an incisive critique of contemporary forms of social inequality, including
neoliberal policies that shift responsibility for social welfare from the state onto individual social actors, who
are encouraged to engage in practices of self-cultivation and self-entrepreneurship with a commitment to
personal responsibility. As an analytic, governmentality can help social researchers identify how structural
forces operate nonconsciously to compel actors to adhere to dominant norms while retaining feelings of
agency and empowerment.

Intersectionality and the Queer of Color

Critique
Since Stein and Plummer (1994) identified the missing sexual revolution in sociology, queer theory’s travels
have established its relevance far outside the realm of sexuality and gender studies. But queer theory’s
popularity does not mean it is without vocal critics, including scholars who assert that queer theory’s political
ambitions are ironically exclusionary. One of the most robust of these critiques has become a powerful
movement in its own right: the queer of color critique. Situated at the intersection of critical race studies and
queer theory, the queer of color critique was inaugurated by scholars of color—specifically those working
in Black studies—including E. Patrick Johnson, Cathy Cohen, Kara Keeling, Roderick Ferguson, and José
Esteban Muñoz. From disciplines as disparate as performance studies and political science, they saw both
dominant strands of queer theory and Black studies as failing to account for the intersectionality of race,
gender, sexuality, and other dimensions of difference. For example, Jasbir Puar (2007) noted that Foucault’s
work has been used differently by mainstream (i.e., White) queer studies’ scholars and by critical race

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scholars, even when they draw from the same text. She suggested that queer theorists have historically
paid more attention to Foucault’s rejection of the repressive hypothesis in the History of Sexuality, Volume 1,
while critical race scholars have found more analytic utility in his theorization of biopower, which has direct
application to the study of White supremacy, colonialism, and racial genocide. The queer of color critique
demanded and articulated a third way: A thoroughly intersectional approach that rejected single-axis analysis
that foregrounded race or sexuality at the expense of the other. Critically, the queer of color critique is not
a multivariate or additive analysis that starts from race or sexuality and then incorporates other aspects
of identity; the queer of color critique is an epistemic one with far-reaching implications for how scholars
approach the study of sexuality and race. Recently, scholars, activists, and artists have argued that queer
theory and Black studies have effaced the significance of transgender issues in the study of sexuality, race,
and gender; these interventions are all more pertinent in light of the continued, disproportionate violence
against transgender people of color and the failure of queer theory to grapple with intersecting dimensions of
race and gender identity (Gossett, Stanley, & Burton, 2017).

In Aberrations in Black, Roderick Ferguson (2004) argues that the sociological canon reproduces White
supremacy and heterosexism through its epistemic elision both of people of color and of sexual and gender
diversity (except to study their supposed deviance, as noted earlier). The queer of color critique functions as
a corrective to such sociological reductionism and emerges from the lived experiences of queer people of
color, imagining critical social science and social justice otherwise. Philip Brian Harper (2000), for example,
theorized the evidence of felt intuition to denote the forms of knowledge that are simultaneously “real” and
meaningful while failing to meet standardized norms of what constitutes evidence. Echoing both W.E.B.
Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness—African Americans’ simultaneous experience of Whiteness and
Blackness in the United States—and queer theorists’ intolerance of essentialism, Harper suggests that queer
people of color’s knowledge and experience of racism and heterosexism does not always “fit” into normative
notions of evidence. When rigid boundaries of what counts as knowledge are constructed and buttressed by
dominant forms of academic knowledge production, these forms of evidence are systemically marginalized.
Accordingly, Harper—a literary/cultural critic—offers a profound critique of the (positivist) social sciences.
When surveys and other methods fail to account for the subject positions of individuals who are situated at the
intersections of multiple forms of inequality, how might social science inadvertently erase these experiences?
How might normative methods produce results that reliably misrepresent human experiences, especially
experiences that cannot be neatly placed into single categories?

While the queer of color critique has experienced greater uptake in the humanities than in the social
sciences, a substantial and growing number of social scientists are drawing upon these ideas to offer
important methodological innovations in disciplines such as psychology and public health. Lisa Bowleg’s
interdisciplinary work is notable for its elaboration of traditional quantitative and qualitative methods’ failure
to account for the intersectionality of race, class, and gender. Bowleg (2008) argued that the variable-driven
focus of traditional applied social research methods affects the ways that social scientists ask questions even
when they attempt to capture the complexity of intersecting identities. She summarizes aptly named additive
approaches thusly: If you ask an additive approach, you are bound to get an additive answer. In her own

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research on Black lesbians’ experiences of discrimination, she describes how she initially asked respondents
to rank the salience of their identities, producing hierarchal responses that better reflected how she asked
the question than how they experienced their multiple marginalized identity statuses. A focus on constructs,
such as perceived discrimination, may better attend to these multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination
than survey questions that prematurely seek to parse racism, sexism, and heterosexism. For example, the
questions “How do you experience discrimination as a woman? As a Black person? As a lesbian?” epitomize
an additive, variable-centered approach even as they attempt to account for multiple social identities. An
intersectional approach, on the other hand, could ask “Do you experience discrimination in __________
environment? And if so, how?” Bowleg’s work shows how deemphasizing identities—which social scientists
are trained to reduce to variables—may allow the lived intersections of identities to emerge. Her work is one
example of how the insights of the queer of color critique can be applied in social research to produce more
inclusive and valid forms of knowledge that are grounded in the lived experiences of queer people who also
experience other forms of systemic inequality.

Queer Methods: A New Revolution?

In his criticism of queer theory, Harper (2000) argues against the term queer theory itself for its elitist and
exclusionary overtones. Harper instead uses the term queer studies to describe the field, which is arguably a
more accurate descriptive of the wide range of approaches that draw inspiration form the work outlined in this
entry and many other scholars who have played an integral role in contributing to what is variously described
as a queer theory. While the term queer theory remains alienating to many, it also semantically reiterates the
theory/methods binary introduced as the start of this entry. Apropos of this discussion in a major reference
work on research methods and methodology, scholarly discourse over methods and methodologies has
experienced a marked uptick in queer studies. A recent special issue of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly
represented the apex of this “methodological renaissance” (Brim & Ghaziani, 2016), in which queer studies
scholars engaged difficult questions about the degree to which traditional humanistic and social scientific
inquiry can accommodate queer theory, and the extent to which queer theory and method may be antithetical
or incommensurate. Although it is somewhat oxymoronic to speak of any part of queer theory as “typical,”
Matt Brim and Amin Ghaziani’s contributors tended to settle on a kind of sustained ambivalence on the
question of “what is queer method?” Queer theorists have embraced the productive capacities of uncertainty
and failure as modes of knowing and doing, which are inextricable from the phenomenology of being queer
in a heterosexist and gender-normative society. A comfortability (or even pleasure) with uncertainty—the
kinds of which drove Sedgwick to argue about the centrality of the closet to Western thought and that
engendered Harper’s theorization of felt intuition beyond the empirically decipherable—is one of the queer
theory’s most enduring and challenging contributions to social and cultural inquiry. Because uncertainty
is the archetypical enemy of postpositivist approaches that privilege confidence intervals and significance
testing, queer theory is hardly an easy complement to the methodological frameworks into which most social
scientists are indoctrinated. But such an uneasy alliance between queer theory and social research need
not be viewed as unproductive. Recent scholarly debates about queer method have underscored how queer
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theory remains an aggravating force in the social sciences and the humanities because of its unwillingness to
cede radical potentials for mainstream inclusion and incorporation. Queer methods are less about how to do
research and more about how to ask difficult questions about research methods: Why pursue some questions
(and not others), why use some techniques (and disparage others), why include some data (and exclude
others), and why draw some conclusions (and reject others). The methodological implications of queer theory
are boundless because queer theorists have insisted on the power of viewing the empirical universe through
alternative frameworks and in creating new frameworks when the existing tools fail. This commitment to the
unpredictable is quite consonant with some of science’s most sacred tenets, including an ethical commitment
to asking hard questions, especially when one has no idea what the answer will be.

Further Readings
Browne, K., & Nash, C. J. (Eds.). (2010). Queer methods and methodologies: Intersecting queer theories
and social science research. New York, NY: Routledge.

Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” New York: Routledge.

Cole, E. R. (2009). Intersectionality and research in psychology. American Psychologist, 64, 170–180.
doi:10.1037/a0014564

Grzanka, P. R. (2018). Intersectionality and feminist psychology: Power, knowledge, and process. In C. B.
Travis & J. W. White (Eds.), Handbook of the psychology of women: Vol 1. History, theory, and battlegrounds
(pp. 585–602). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Johnson, E. P. (Ed.). (2016). No tea, no shade: New writings in black queer studies. Durham, England: NCL
Duke University Press.

Johnson, E. P., & Henderson, M. G. (Eds.). (2005). Black queer studies. Durham, England: Duke University
Press.

Parent, M., DeBlaere, C., & Moradi, B. (2013). Approaches to research on intersectionality: Perspectives on
gender, LGBT, and racial-ethnic identities. Sex Roles, 68, 639–645.

Pettit, M. (2011). The SPSSI Task Force on Sexual Orientation, the nature of sex, and the contours of activist
science. Journal of Social Issues, 67, 92–105.

Seidman, S., Fischer, N. L., & Meeks, C. (Eds.). (2016). Introducing the new sexuality studies (3rd ed.). New
York, NY: Routledge.

Waidzunas, T. (2015). The straight line: How the fringe science of ex-gay therapy reoriented sexuality.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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References
Bowleg, L. (2008). When Black + Woman + Lesbian ≠ Black lesbian woman: The methodological challenges
of qualitative and quantitative intersectionality research. Sex Roles, 59, 312–325. doi:10.1007/
s11199-008-9400-z

Boyd, N. A. (2008). Sex and tourism: The economic implications for the gay marriage movement. Radical
History Review, 100, 223–235. doi:10.1215/01636545-2007-032

Brim, M., & Ghaziani, A. (Eds.). (2016). Queer method [Special issue]. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly,
44, 3–4.

Duggan, L. (2003). The twilight of equality?: Neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy.
Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Epstein, S. (1994). A queer encounter: Sociology and the study of sexuality. Sociological Theory, 12,
188–202.

Ferguson, R. A. (2004). Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color critique. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.

Foucault, M. (1972). The discourse on language. In A. M. S. Smith (Trans.), The archaeology of knowledge
and the discourse on language (pp. 215–237). New York, NY: Pantheon.

Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, volume one: An introduction. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (G. Burchell,
Trans.). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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