2025/09/24 by Ghassan Moussawi, Jacob W. Richardson, Theodore Greene · 1 voice
Psychology · Social Sciences · #African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues #LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy #Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics
paper · doi:10.1177/30333717251375993
openalex publication_date 2025/09/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
In this essay, we critically reflect on how affective embodiments shape the knowledge we produce about LGBTQ+ space and placemaking in the field. While reflexivity has deepened our attention to researcher positionality and power dynamics, we argue that this often stops short of grappling with embodiment —how researchers’ bodies, aesthetics, and affective presences condition all aspects of the research we conduct, including accessing the field and interacting with interlocutors. Drawing on queer of color critique, we examine how queer spaces are structured through racialized, gendered, and aesthetic hierarchies that complicate prevailing narratives of inclusion, visibility, and belonging. By distinguishing positionality from embodiment and interrogating how queer researchers and communities navigate exclusion, ambivalence, and legibility, especially as they relate to urban studies and sexuality, we seek to reorient LGBTQ+ sociology away from neoliberal narratives of visibility, belonging, and progress toward a more complex, situated, and ethically embodied understanding of queer spaces and knowledge production.