Jody queer of color methodology

This week’s authors ask us to re-examine how we approach both sexuality and power.  As a methodology, queer of color critiques require both the deconstruction of categories and the analysis of how systems of power interpellate us into these categories. Jasbir Puar (2005) argues for moving away from intersectionality, which, “demands the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time,” (128).  Instead, she theorizes queerness as a Deleuzian assemblage.  “Queerness as an assemblage…instead of retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly is and does), it underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations [and] enables attention to ontology in tandem with epistemology, affect in conjunction with representational economies,” (121-22).

            Puar’s “queerness as assemblage” is both a powerful concept and a methodological challenge.  The shift from intersectionality to assemblage shifts the target of analysis.  Instead of focusing on identity constellations, assemblages emphasize temporality, space, bodies, and affect.  Queer assemblage has become increasingly central to my thinking about Grindr precisely because of this methodological challenge.  I entered the field with research questions based in intersectionality.  These questions proved surprisingly difficult to answer.  By focusing on the categories of race and masculinity, I was missing how power really operates on Grindr.  Race and masculinity are absolutely present and hierarchical, but to get at how this app is related to systems of power I had to step back from a focus on intersectional identities and think about space, time, and bodies.  Had I been familiar with Puar’s work prior to starting this project, I may have entered the field with different questions.  Online spaces are contingent, integrate unevenly with physical spaces, are temporally specific, and bring together affect and bodies in new ways that point to futurity and an “always becoming”.  By making these the focus of my analysis, I’m able to get at how Grindr is related to systems of power.

            What role should identity categories play in our research?  How do we structure research around categories while also recognizing their contingency?