Five Methodological Problems in Gayborhood Studies

• In Event: 2167 - Analyses of Urban and Rural Spaces, and Racialized Sexual and Gender Identities

Abstract

The study of urban gay districts—or “gayborhoods”—poses five methodological problems: how to sample hidden populations; how to interview like an ethnographer; how to bring demographic statistics into conversation with culture and meanings; how to move beyond a binary conception of urban space as either gay or straight; and how to identify creative indicators of sexual geographies. These conundrums suggest that scholarly sensitivity to misalignments, mutability, diversity, interactions, and silences can ease tensions between the systematic and orderly, which is prized by conventional social science, and the interstitial and chaotic, which is championed by queer theory.

Author

• Amin Ghaziani, University of British Columbia