The "Not Sociology" Problem

Kristen Schilt

In the 1973 supplemental issue of the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) titled "Changing Women in a Changing Society," an intergenerational assembly of scholars weighed in on the problems facing women in the United States and on the place the study of gender held within the broader discipline. Publication of an issue edited and authored almost exclusively by women in the longest running and most historically significant sociology journal — and the fact that this issue was then printed separately as a book that sold over 25,000 copies — suggested a turning point in which feminist inquiry was becoming a central area of sociology. Almost fifty years later, Gender & Society, the feminist sociology journal started in 1987 by Sociologists for Women in Society, has nearly tied with AJS in terms of impact. The Sex & Gender Section of the American Sociological Association also has emerged as the organization's largest member subgroup. At the same time, a quick perusal of JSTOR shows that feminist scholarship — and even research on any gender topic — continues to be underrepresented in most high-impact sociology journals that advertise their mandate as publishing research of "general interest" to the discipline. Taken together, these trends suggest that while feminist theories and research might not yet be at the center of sociology, feminist scholars have staked out an influential claim in the discipline.

The evolution of a feminist community within the broader discipline of sociology exemplifies a dynamic that I wish to explore about "queer work" — and here, drawing on Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell's writing about queer archives, I invoke the older meaning of queer as something "odd and perplexing" that can disrupt the status quo of a social milieu, such as an academic discipline (2015: 3). In the 1970s and 1980s, feminists presented such a queer challenge to sociology with their investigation into how normative gender ideologies infused traditional research methods and theories in ways that perpetuated institutional and interpersonal gender inequality (see Smith 1989; Stacey & Thorne 1985). When faced with opposition from disciplinary gatekeepers, they developed a community of scholars who served, first, as emotional support and interlocutors and, later, as feminist institutions gained ground, as editors, reviewers, and tenure-letter writers (see Laslett & Thorne 1997). A similar process of community and institution building in response to disciplinary marginalization is evident in the experiences of scholars of color working in critical race studies who have to navigate what Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva term "white logic, white methods" (2008), and exemplified as well by queer scholars pushing back against long-standing sociological associations between nonheterosexual identities and practices and social deviance (see Seidman 1996). The growing body of writing about the importance of community building from scholars working in areas of sociological inquiry that have been relegated to the margins of the discipline gives valuable insight into the varied strategies for resisting such marginalization, and presents a historical record from which future generations can evaluate disciplinary change.

In this chapter, I shift the focus from a discussion of how we navigate academic marginalization to an examination of the strategies used by disciplinary gatekeepers to keep us marginal. In thinking through how to conceptualize these strategies of resistance to queer work, I have come to think of them as bolstering what we might call the "not sociology" problem. I borrow this concept from Marjorie DeVault's writing about how, early in her career, sociological gatekeepers often dismissed her feminist research with the statement "But that is not sociology" (1999: 15). Thissentence struck a chord with me because it is a pithy synthesis of academic resistance that I have faced — and that I have seen many others face — while doing research in the area of transgender studies. And it captures the resistance my colleagues and students have encountered when doing social justice–oriented work on a number of other "queer" areas of inquiry, such as sex work (see Hoang, this volume). While we may discuss these marginalizing experiences in small groups in dark bars at conferences, we often keep silent about them in public talks or in print because the cost of calling out the ideological character of these responses to our work can be so high. Yet there is something to be gained from transforming these reactions from embarrassing personal incidents into a politically situated analysis about how sociological gatekeeping works — and how we might disrupt it.

THE THREE R'S: RESISTANCE, REDUCTION, AND RIDICULE

In mapping out the interactional and institutional strategies that push queer work to the sociological margins, I identified the Three R's: resistance, the attempt to erect boundaries against an emerging area of inquiry (e.g., transgender studies, fat studies, critical heterosexualities) that pushes up against an established canon or theoretical frame; reduction, the attempt to dismiss scholarship on group X as too "fringe" to sociologically matter; and ridicule, the attempt to devalue scholarship on...