Queer Theory and Sociology: Locating the Subject and the Self in Sexuality Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I revisit the relationship of queer theory and sociology in order to address some critical issues around conceiving the subject and the self in sexualities research. I suggest that while sociology and queer theory are not reducible to each other, sociology has its own deconstructionist impulse built into pragmatist and symbolic interactionist analyses of identity and subjectivity that is often overlooked by or reinvented through queer theory. But, conversely, queer theory has a very specific deconstructionist raison d'etre with regard to conceiving the sexual subject that marks its key departure from Foucault and sociology more generally. This deconstructionist mandate, by definition, moves queer theory away from the analysis of self and subject position—including those accruing from race, class and gender—and toward a conception of the self radically disarticulated from the social. This “anti-identitarian” position has been a source of criticism among some sociologists who find in queer theory an indefensible “refusal to name a subject” (Seidman 1993:132). But this criticism, I suggest, stems from a misplaced effort to synthesize queer theory and sociology when, in fact, the two approaches to the subject are founded on incommensurable methodological and epistemological principles. Rather, I argue that the very promise of queer theory rests in a strong deconstructionism that exists in tension with, rather than as an extension of, sociological approaches to the self.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".