Contemporary Queer Contributions to the Study of Politics

Abstract

In 2009, the American Political Science Association Committee on the Status of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and the Transgendered in the Profession conducted a survey of the APSA membership and discovered that while 41 percent of respondents deemed scholarship on LGBT topics to be ‘very appropriate’, there remains resistance. As one political scientist in the survey put it: “The biggest problem is [they’re] not doing real political science, [they’re] just focusing in on themselves. The LGBT faculty whom I respect professionally the most are the ones who do real political science. We don’t do heterosexual political science so why do ... LGBT political science?” The irony of this sentiment was captured by Paisley Currah, who remarked two years later at a symposium on “The State of LGBT / Sexuality Studies in Political Science,” that “perhaps the absence of research on LGBT topics, however, signals the largely unquestioned presence of heteronomativity” in the discipline. The lack of a similar survey of the membership of the European Consortium for Political Research alongside the absence of a standing group dedicated to the study of politics and sexuality suggests that in both the American and European contexts, we have been doing “heterosexual political science” all along. Yet, exactly how does a heterosexual bias manifest and or operate in the field of political science? How might norms of heterosexuality shape disciplinary choices of archives, methods to use, and the kinds of objects we study? Efforts to center sexuality have been underway in more empirically oriented research, such as investigations of the role sexual identity plays as a driver of political participation and discussions of new approaches to identifying non-straight individuals in large-scale surveys or register data. In political theory, there has been conceptual work around the concepts of queerness and heteronormativity, and efforts to analyze the importance of sexuality for the political. However, it remains largely unclear what exactly it would mean to queer political science? Is it enough to also do research on queer matters, or would it entail 'queering' the canon and methods of the discipline? And what exactly could that entail? What alternative methodologies, horizons, and sites of politics become possible when we center categories of gender and sexuality in our research? In an effort to cultivate the rich intellectual pluralism that much of the discipline already embraces and promotes, the panel brings together a range of political scientists working on issues of gender and sexuality to explore what foregrounding sexuality studies and queer theory contributes to the study of politics. For the following papers, sexuality serves not only as a direct object of study but also as a method to study political sites historically understood to be heterosexual. In this way, tracing queer sexuality functions alternately as both an object of curiosity and a horizon of intelligibility, a thing to be studied and a method of conducting research. Together, then, this panel contributes to pluralizing our contemporary practices of political analysis by highlighting queer methods of political interpretation and theorizing.

Title	Details
Strategies for Queering Quantitative Social Science Research	View Paper Details
Queering False Universalities. Why Research Should Re-Start From the Perspective of Minorities	View Paper Details
What is Intellectual in Intellectual History? On Discourse and the Body in the Study of Democracy	View Paper Details
Queering the French Sexual Revolution: Reflecting on the Use of Categories of Identity in the History of Sexual Politics	View Paper Details