Researching Dissident Subjectivities: Queering the Grounds of Theory and Practice

Abstract

Can gay male and lesbian academies conduct queer research within the heterosexual epistemological frameworks prevalent in the academy? In this article, Kenn Gardner Honeychurch argues that lesbian and gay male researchers need to challenge the ways in which the exclusionary epistemologies, methodologies, and texts of a heterosexually constructed social order have denied the possibilities of non-heterosexual knowledges, practice, and texts. He points the way toward the construction of a new epistemology, and in the process shifts the territories of research by advocating that research be designed, conducted, and analyzed from a "queer position." By taking a "queered position" in social research, the researcher challenges the dominant worldview in what may be known, who may be the knower, and how knowledge has come to be generated and circulated. In this way, lesbian and gay male researchers who declare their sexualities and study a subject of homosexualities contribute to more expansive cultural discourses.