How are interpretive methods feminist and queer? Four discursive methods for studying marginality

ABSTRACT

What is a queer feminist method? Both feminists and queer scholars attend to the issue of power, but in somewhat divergent ways. Feminist scholars focus social justice concerns on modernist notions of experience and agency within systems of inequalities, while queer theorists shun a modernist notion of rational actors and focus on the poststructuralist goal of demonstrating the organizing power of discourse. (How) Can social scientists translate these two epistemologies into empirical methods? We consider how traditional social science methods have not been conducive to studying power as everyday discursive marginalization and how interpretive methods can attend to feminist and queer analytical and activist goals. We identify four analytic methods (queer feminist discourse analysis, Loseke’s formula stories, queer feminist ethnography, and interpretive materialism) as potentially feminist and queer. In doing so, we find resonances between feminist and queer epistemologies, which, unlike some of our forebearers, we see as entirely compatible.

KEYWORDS:

• feminist
• interpretive
• methodologies
• methods
• queer

Acknowledgments

We deeply appreciate the thoughtful comments of our colleague, Maria Mayerchyk, and the insightful suggestions of the anonymous reviewers for the first draft of this paper. Olga Plakhotnik also thanks their doctoral supervisors, Darren Langdridge and Jacqui Gabb (Open University, UK), for working together on developing queer feminist methods in social research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Though Kitzinger (1987) was writing prior to what would later be called queer theory, her epistemological grappling with labeling and deviance theory of the time have many resonances with later queer work and similarly attends to some of the issues we raise in this article.

² McKittrick (2021, 3–4), in particular, exemplifies these tensions. Seeking to study ‘black life differently,’ proposing ‘contradictoriness’ as a methodology, which ‘allows us to observe that black life is not a static object of analysis (a black concept, a black body, a black community, a black idea) that is poised to be assessed, but rather a site (or sites) of sustained and/or provisional worldmaking activities that are invested in liberation’.

³ It is likely more accurate to say that forms of feminisms that were never modernist such as ‘French feminism’ and post-colonial theory prior to the 1980s have now morphed into what it is referred to in contemporary feminist collections as post-structural feminisms.

⁴ We use the word ‘postmodern’ as a shortcut umbrella term that comprises poststructuralist, queer, trans, and other theories (Mann 2012).

⁵ By legitimation, Rosa and Flores mean the common approach “to take racialized assessments of linguistic deficiency at face value as claims that can be disproved if we provide sufficient scientific evidence” (Rosa and Flores 2017, 641).

⁶ Barad (2003) uses the term ‘habits of mind,’ which we borrow here, to address similar questions of assumptions by poststructuralist scholars.

⁷ West and Zimmerman (1987) offer a very similar concept, yet it was based on interpretive sociological concepts rather than Austin’s performativity. Elsewhere, Crawley (2022) points out likenesses that drive our ultimate argument here that feminist, queer, and interpretive traditions have much in common.

⁸ Still, Loseke (personal communication, November Loseke 2021) has indicated that the objectivity of data analysis and handling does not preclude discussing the implications of the workings of power in empirical findings, as we do here.

⁹ One example is the ‘ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis’ method used by Tate for the study of Black beauty shame (Tate 2017). While analysing speech and extra-verbal expressions of the interviews, Tate considered the latter as ‘theoretico-active’ knowledge production meaning that ‘the data used here are interpretative but are also interpreted by speakers who produce theory in Alfred Schutz’s (1967) sense. That is, theory of the knowledge found in the thinking of people in everyday life’ (Tate 2017, 37).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

S.L. Crawley

S. L. Crawley (PhD) is Associate Professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL. They have published in such journals as Gender & Society, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Sociological Theory, The Sociological Quarterly, and Hypatia, and coauthored the book, Gendering Bodies, with Lara J Foley and Constance L Shehan. Some of their work has been translated to Ukrainian and Russian.

Olga Plakhotnik

Olga Plakhotnik (PhD) is a Chair in Ukrainian Cultural Studies at the University of Greifswald and a PI of the team project ”(Un)Disciplined: Pluralizing Ukrainian Studies—Understanding the War in Ukraine” (funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research). Considering themselves a scholar-activist and educator, Olga works in the area of feminist/queer epistemologies, critical citizenship studies, and feminist/ queer pedagogies. Olga is a co-founder and joint editor-in-chief of the refereed journal “Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies.