Imagining Queer Methods

Amin Ghaziani, Matt Brim

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479884087
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Reimagines the field of queer studies by asking “How do we do queer theory?”

Imagining Queer Methods showcases the methodological renaissance unfolding in queer scholarship. This volume brings together emerging and esteemed researchers from all corners of the academy who are defining new directions for the field.

From critical race studies, history, journalism, lesbian feminist studies, literature, media studies, and performance studies to anthropology, education, psychology, sociology, and urban planning, this impressive interdisciplinary collection covers topics such as humanistic approaches to reading, theorizing, and interpreting, as well as scientific appeals to measurement, modeling, sampling, and statistics.

By bringing together these diverse voices into an unprecedented single volume, Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim inspire us with innovative ways of thinking about methods and methodologies in queer studies.

Part I

Subjecting/Objecting

1

Put a Little Honey in My Sweet Tea

Oral History as Quare Performance

E. Patrick Johnson

In her 2008 essay “Who Is the Subject? Queer Theory Meets Oral History,” a historian of queer San Francisco, Nan Alamilla Boyd, raises important questions about the challenges that queer theory poses for gay and lesbian history. Boyd, in her survey of key texts in what she names as a “fledgling” subfield of U.S. history, rightly questions whether oral history as a method can ultimately escape the trappings of subjectivity “because it is through coherent and intelligible subject positions that we learn to speak, even nonverbally, about desire,” which sometimes reifies notions of sexual identity rather than sexual desire (2008, 189). She summarizes John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983), Allan Bérubé’s Coming Out under Fire (1990), Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis’s Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (1993), Esther Newton’s Cherry Grove, Fire Island (1993), George Chauncey’s Gay New York (1994), and John Howard’s Men Like That (1999), and finds that only Howard’s text represents a truly queer example of how historians might chronicle same-sex desire by moving “beyond the limits of intelligible speech, that is, racially coded articulations of desire, in order to produce a more complex accounting of the history of sexuality and sexual communities” (2008, 186). While I agree with Boyd’s assessment, I believe the “challenges” to oral history posed by queer theory are less about oral history as a method per se, and more about the disciplinary protocols of history as a field. In other words, history as a field trains researchers, including oral historians, to capture a narrative that provides insight about a particular time and place—training that Boyd notes sometimes gets in the way of tracking a libidinal economy of desire outside of identity politics.

Coincidentally, my book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History, appeared in the same year as Boyd’s essay. In the introduction I, too, laud Howard’s intervention in queer historiography, while also marking the difference between my approach to oral history as a performance theorist as opposed to a historian’s. Unlike historians who, according to historian of the U.S. South Nell Irvin Painter, are invested in creating “historical narrative” (2005, iv), I am committed to attending to the storytelling act itself by “co-performatively bearing witness” (Conquergood 2002, 149) to the story. Oral history in conjunction with performance, then, calls attention to the fictive nature of oral history, but not necessarily as a methodological “problem,” as it were. Rather, it situates oral history as an index of the meaning-making process of history itself, what cultural anthropologist Allen Feldman calls “historicity” (1991, 2). In other words, the narration is a recollection of historical events and facts in relation to an “authentic” self or “identity”; and it is at the same time a phenomenological experience—the moment of storytelling itself is an epistemological and embodied experience of the self as same, the self as other, and the intersubjectivity between teller and listener. The performance frame exposes not only the erotics in/of narration, but also the erotic tension between the researcher and the teller, which has enormous implications for queer history. Rather than a “transhistorical and cross-cultural interpretation of history that conflates same-sex behavior with the ipso facto existence of sexual identities” (Boyd 2008, 179), the performance approach to oral history resists linear, progressive, or stable renderings of any one “history” by what Della Pollock calls “making history go” (1998, 1).

Since I have responded in my earlier work to some of the anxieties about queer historiography that Boyd expresses, in this essay I wish to engage a different set of methodological conundrums based on my current research. My book Black. Queer. Southern. Women.—An Oral History (BQSW) focuses on the oral histories of African American women who express same-sex desire who were born, reared, and continue to reside in the American South. It is meant as a companion text to Sweet Tea. As with Sweet Tea, my desire in BQSW is that the oral histories collected account not only for the way the narrators embody and relay historical material about race, region, class, sexuality, and gender, but also for how storytelling as a mode of communication is simultaneously a quotidian form of self-fashioning and theorizing. Although they do not always overcome the challenges of being black quare Southern women,1 their oral narratives stand as testaments to the power of voicehood, self-determination, and tenacity in how one simultaneously navigates and mediates the conflicting, complicated, and confounding ideologies of the South while at the same time indexing a quare history of same-sex desire.

Because I am a cisgender, black gay man conducting research on mostly cisgender, black quare women, the performative frame of oral history I employed in Sweet Tea became even more prescient in BQSW. Issues of power, difference, and self-disclosure all came to the fore. In what follows, I recount how I navigated these methodological hurdles in collaboration with the narrators. Specifically, I situate my approach as decidedly quare and feminist, while also highlighting how framing oral history as performance elides some of the challenges to queer historiography.2

Quare Beginnings

I started collecting oral histories of these women because I wanted to learn more about the interior lives of Southern black lesbians and their journey toward selfhood in the South. As a child, the concept of “lesbian” was not in my consciousness, nor necessarily in the lexicon of my western North Carolina black community. The typical slang of “funny,” “that way,” and “sissy” were certainly common but were mostly used in reference to men who were thought to be gay. I sometimes heard at the barbershop the oblique reference to a woman as a “bulldagger” but had no idea the meaning of that term, only that it was negative. In hindsight, I realize that I actually grew up with quite a few black lesbians, one of whom is Anita, whose narrative I include in my book. In fact, it was not until I was much older that I realized just how many women in my community were “sweet” on other women. Thus, I was curious to hear the stories about same-sex desire from these women’s early childhoods to see if there were overlaps with the black Southern gay men with whom I have spoken, and my own story, or if there are significant differences based on gender. For example, a few of the young girls with whom I was friends growing up were what many would refer to as “tomboys,” girls who were more interested in climbing trees, building hot rods, and playing basketball than they were in caring for dolls, playing house, or making mud pies, as I so loved to do. I don’t recall them being teased about being tomboys, however. I, on the other hand, was often called “sissy” because of my soft, soprano voice, big butt, noticeable lisp, and interest in art and “girly” things. What explains this difference in treatment based on gender expression and play interests? Conducting these interviews gave me some insight and perspective on that question, as many of the women in BQSW revealed that they believe that tomboyish girls are generally tolerated—at least until they are a certain age and expected to become Southern “ladies.”

And even after adulthood, some women—at least in my community growing up—were not bound by a narrow sexual “identity” when they engaged in nonnormative sexual behavior or expressed same-sex desire. Although folks may have whispered about them, their dalliances with the same gender did not necessarily make them “lesbian” as much as it made them just another eccentric whose membership in and contributions to the community outweighed their sexual behavior.

One humorous story in this regard involves my now deceased uncle, Johnny “Shaw Man” McHaney. For all intents and purposes, Uncle Johnny would have been considered a “dirty old man.” He never seemed to discriminate in his attraction to the other sex, but he definitely had a quare sensibility about him—both in his attraction to nonnormative women (i.e., women who did not fit within or even aspire to traditional standards of beauty within white or black communities) and his linguistic play with gender (e.g., he often called me “Baby Doll”).

Uncle Johnny was always taking pictures at family gatherings and holidays with his Polaroid camera. Unsurprisingly, many of the photos were of women guests at our family events or of women whom he had met at his favorite barbershop where he hung out every day after work and on the weekends. Several years ago my mother asked him to bring some of his pictures over to our house so that she could look through them and find ones that she could use as part of a photo collage for an upcoming family reunion. Mixed in with the photos from past family reunions were pictures of various women—some in compromising positions, scantily clad, or nude. Aunt Marylee stumbled across a picture of Sylvia, a woman who I remembered lived up the road from us when I was a child and who was the mother of two daughters close to my age. Trying to needle Uncle Johnny, Aunt Marylee asked in a shrill voice, “Johnny, ain’t this a picture of Sylvia?” Uncle Johnny slipped the picture out of Aunt Marylee’s hand and studied it as if lost in an erotic reverie: “Yeah, that’s Syl. You know she’s half and half,” he replied. “Well, if she half and half, what YOU doin’ wit’ ’er then?” Aunt Marylee responded incredulously. “I was with the half I could be wit’,” Uncle Johnny quipped without missing a beat. Although totally scandalized and clutching her pearls,3 even my mother joined the rest of the family in the room in the uproar of laughter.

It was my memory of Aunt Marylee and Uncle Johnny’s repartee and description of Sylvia as “half and half,” meaning that she had sex with both men and women, that brought into clarity the ways in which black Southern women’s sexual desire, sexual practice, and sexual identity are not always one and the same. As a scholar of gender and sexuality, of course I know intellectually that this is not the case, but I had not thought about it experientially in the context of my own upbringing and family history until now. “Half and half” in this context signifies quare sexual desire rather than “bisexual” or “lesbian” identity per se, for the phrase exemplifies the verbal play of black folk vernacular that eschews fixed meanings. Aunt Marylee already knew that Uncle Johnny did not discriminate when it came to women. Thus, she already assumed what he was “doing” with Sylvia, especially given some of the other photos of women sprawled across my mother’s kitchen table (e.g., a picture of Uncle Johnny and a woman with one breast and another of a naked woman with a very large behind standing in front of Uncle Johnny’s television). And Uncle Johnny’s coy response about being with only one “half” of Sylvia also cannot be read literally in terms of his denying a “lesbian” side of Sylvia in order to be with a “straight” side. More likely, the “half” to which Uncle Johnny, given his proclivities for kink, refers is nonnormative sex. The point here is that Sylvia did not refer to herself as a lesbian and the community did not project that identity onto her; they only knew that she engaged in quare sex without the encumbrance of a label or identity to accompany this behavior or desire. This was common among many of the women that I interviewed. While the same phenomenon was true for some of the men I interviewed for Sweet Tea, it certainly was not the dominant narrative, as many of the men typically did identify under some label or category. This phenomenon made me think differently about the particularly vexing problem of how to conduct research on sexuality beyond identity “in order to produce a more complex accounting of the history of sexuality and sexual communities” (Boyd 2008, 178). Ultimately, this is why “lesbian” does not appear in the title of the book.4

“Outsider Within”: On Quaring Positionality

Unlike my experience with the men in Sweet Tea, I was never asked to “do” anything during my visits with quare women, such as help cook dinner or run errands. This may have been due to the gendered ways in which women in the South are socialized to “serve” men, particularly with some of the older women I interviewed who treated me like one of their own children or nephews. Nonetheless, a few of the women prepared dinner in anticipation of my visit. One of the last women I interviewed, Lenore Stackhouse, unfortunately passed away unexpectedly just three months later. She prepared a lovely “Sunday dinner” for me of potato salad, collard greens, baked chicken, rolls, and—of course—sweetened iced tea.

In general, my interactions with these women—most of whom I was meeting for the first time—were familial and familiar, not in the sense that I knew them but in the sense that we were kin based on our Southern roots, our queerness, and, I believe, my “soft” masculinity. In fact, during some of the exchanges a few women would refer to me as “girl” or “honey,” when responding to a question, and then become embarrassed by the slip of tongue. I was heartened by these easy interactions, given the warnings from friends and colleagues that I might not be able to find women to talk to me for the book and, if I did, they would not be forthcoming about the intimate details of their lives because I am a man. I did have a few women cancel at the last minute or stand me up altogether, but this only happened in Tallahassee, Florida. I have no explanation for this, for it was the only city where this occurred. A total of four women failed to follow through with the interview there after agreeing to be a part of the book. They have yet to respond to my follow-up calls to find out what happened or to reschedule.

Before embarking on this research, I understood that the stakes were different because of the gender difference between the researcher and the subjects. Rather than view this as an obstacle, however, I viewed it as an opportunity to engage questions of gender, sexuality, and region across the gender divide. Moreover, I grew up in a single-parent home with a mother who instilled in her children Southern manners, grace, and respect for others. And, it was lesbian-of-color feminism that brought me into my consciousness around my own sexuality. So, it was not a matter of my not knowing how to act around these women. It was more about me understanding how my male privilege—despite my upbringing and personal politics—might influence not only how I collected these oral histories, but also how my gender might reinscribe some of the very structures and institutions that these women critique in their narratives. Thus, I want to take some time here to walk through my process of collecting these narratives as a way of engaging what performance and communication studies scholar Bryant Keith Alexander calls “critical reflexivity,” which he defines as “both a demonstration and a call for a greater sense of implicating and complicating how we are always already complicit in the scholarly productions of our labor, and the effects of our positions and positionalities with the diverse communities in which we circulate” (2006, xviii–xix).

In this respect I am an “outsider/within,” to borrow black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins’s phrase (1991, 11), since my interlocutors and I share many of the same identity markers (e.g., queerness, Southernness) and not others (e.g., gender, class position). This experience of conducting research within a community to which I belong, albeit across gender bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introductions. Methods/Mess
• Part I. Subjecting/Objecting
• Part II. Narrating/Measuring
• Part III. Listening/Creating
• Part IV. Historicizing/Resisting
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index