This paper aims to queer evidence‐based practice by troubling the concepts of evidence, knowledge and mental illness. The evidence‐based narrative that emerged within biomedicine has dominated health care. The biomedical notion of ‘evidence’ has been critiqued extensively and is seen as exclusive and limiting, and even though the social constructionist paradigm attempts to challenge the authority of biomedicine to legitimate what constitutes acceptable evidence or knowledge for those experiencing mental illness, biomedical notions of evidence appear to remain relatively intact. Queer (...) theory offers theoretical tools to disrupt biomedical norms and challenges biomedical normativity to indicate how marginalisation occurs when normative truths about mental health classify those who differ from the norm as ‘ill’ or ‘disordered’. Queer theory's emphasis on normativity serves the political aim to subvert marginalisation and bring about radical social and material change. Reference will be made to mental health subjects within each discourse by indicating how the body acts as a vehicle for knowing. Deleuzian notions of the rhizome are used as metaphor to suggest a relational approach to knowledge that does away with either/or positions in either biomedical, or queer knowledge to arrive at a both/and position where the biomedical, constructionist and queer are interrelated and entangled in needing the other for their own evolution. However, queer does not ask for assimilation but celebrates difference by remaining outside to disrupt that which is easily overlooked, assumed to be natural or represented as the norm. The task of queer knowledge is to do justice to the lives lived in the name of evidence‐based practice and demands that we consider the relations of power where knowledge is produced. This pursuit creates different knowledge spaces where we identify new intersections that allow for socially just understandings of knowing or evidence to emerge. (shrink)

This article gauges the progress that sociologists of gender and sexuality have made in employing the insights of queer theory by examining four recent monographs that have utilized aspects of queer theory in their empirical work: Rupp and Taylor, Seidman, Bettie, and Schippers. The article uses the insights of queer theory to push the monographs in an even “queerer” theoretical direction. This direction involves taking more seriously the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, sexuality, resisting the tendency to essentialize identity or (...) conflate it with the broad range of gender and sexual expression and treating the construction of intersectional subjectivities as both performed and performative in nature. The analysis of these texts also insists that a queer sociological theory situate its emphasis on discursive power more firmly in economic, political, and other institutional processes. Ethnographic methods are proposed as the most useful way of combining queer theory with sociological analysis. (shrink)

The pragmatist revival of recent decades has in some respects obscured the radical emancipatory potential of Deweyan pragmatism. The author suggests that neo-pragmatists such as Richard Rorty have too often failed to grasp the ways in which Dewey's notion of social intelligence was bound up with the case for participatory democracy, and that recent efforts to bring out the potential of pragmatism for supporting certain forms of feminist and gay critical theory make for a more compelling reconstruction of pragmatism.

Despite its impact on public administration, policy development, education, philosophy and politics, American pragmatism has made a relatively small impression on the social sciences. In particular, American pragmatism has seldom influenced feminism, which is remarkable given the potentially striking affinities between these two disciplines. Drawing upon the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey and the work of feminists who support a pragmatist approach to the study of gender, this article discusses the chequered history of relations between the two disciplines. It also (...) focuses on the methodological possibilities of establishing a pragmatist-feminist position. Taking ethnography as a means to illustrate our ideas, we suggest that a pragmatist-feminist ethnography can help social scientists to rethink theory in terms of its practical application, articulate the value of an anti-foundational view of knowledge and promote investigating people's concrete experiences for understanding gender inequalities. (shrink)

Studies of heteronormativity have emphasized its normative content and repressive functions, but few have considered the strategic use of heteronormative and homonormative precepts to shape sexual selves, public identities, and social relations. Adopting an interactionist approach, this article analyzes interviews with homosexual elders to uncover their use of heteronormative premises to pass as heterosexual. Informants also used homonormative precepts, grounded in a postwar, pre-gay liberation assimilationist homosexual politics they adopted in their early years and maintained in later life, to justify (...) passing and to frame their understanding and evaluation of past and present homosexual practices. Viewed through a homonormative lens, heteronormativity provided the tools for personal survival in a hostile society and for the collective production of a respectable homosexual culture. Informants’ strategic use of heteronormativity can help explain heteronormativity’s survival despite the incoherence and fragility of its content. (shrink)

New pharmacological therapies, often dubbed `lifestyle drugs', demonstrate the enactment of yet another interface between technologies and bodies that promises a re-fashioning of the body with transformative, life-enhancing results. This article analyzes the emergence of one lifestyle drug, Viagra, from a technoscience studies perspective, conceptualizing Viagra as a new medical technology of the body. Through an analysis of promotional materials for Viagra, we argue that this pharmaceutical device performs ideological work through its discursive scripts that serves to reinforce and augment (...) dominant cultural narratives in relation to material bodies, particularly those of hegemonic masculinity and male (and female) sexuality. We conclude that Viagra carries the potential to reify and reinforce these dominant and hegemonic narratives, while at the same time, through ensuring an open market for heterogeneous users, it provides spaces for alternatives to these normative ideals and assumptions. (shrink)

Building on the advances made by feminist reconsiderations of methods, methodology and epistemology, this paper calls for an alliance between feminist social science and the emerging field of queer theory. By challenging traditional scientific approaches to research on sexual minority groups, a distinctly ‘queer’ approach is advocated that adopts a reflexive position on subjectivity and sexuality. While essentialist approaches privilege gay/lesbian, man/woman, and object/subject, this approach advances a framework of critical sexualities that moves social science into an arena of inclusivity (...) and multiple identities, rather than reductionistic categorical thought. The implications are clear: a rethinking of identity categories that transcend stagnant dualisms. (shrink)

Historians have linked the emergence of contemporary lesbian/gay identities to the development of capitalism. A materialist approach should also look atdifferentforms of sexual identity, and their connections with specific phases of capitalist development. Marxist long-wave theory can help us understand how the decline of Fordism contributed to shifts in LGBT identities, speeding the consolidation of gay identity while fostering the rise of alternative sexual identities. These alternative identities, sometimes defined as ‘queer’, characterised by sexual practices that are still stigmatised, by (...) explicit power-differentials and above all by gender-nonconformity, are particularly common among young and disadvantaged working-class strata. The growing diversity of identities is a challenge to any gay universalism that neglects class, gender, sexual, racial/ethnic and other differences, to the currently dominant forms of lesbian/gay organising, and ultimately to the prevailing division of human beings into gay and straight.1. (shrink)