on misconceptions of queer studies

what is "queer studies" and is it limited to studying people who self-identify or are identified by others under the umbrella of lgbtq+?

is "queer studies" somehow a narrow theme when placed alongside well-established sociological debates on media, healthcare, family, poverty, or social inequality?

I chose to write this short post because I encounter these questions again and again, and I feel that taking a step back to reflect on them in a form less than academic writing seems helpful, for my own thinking and for those who are curious about the field.

I want to start by simply disagreeing with the framing that sees “queer studies” as a narrower field compared to well-established sociological topics. this is not because I doubt the value of those fields, but because such a framing seems to overlook what queer studies has become: rooted in anti-colonial, feminist, and queer movements, it has grown into an interdisciplinary power that challenges not only the boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality, but also hegemonic understandings of the world and the very ways we produce knowledge and society. as a queer anthropologist, I simply cannot see this breadth as a side note.

queer studies is also in no way a small niche concerned only with the experiences of a particular community. built upon various anti-hegemony movements, histories, memories, and sacrifices, it offers an interventionist lens for examining and challenging canonical sociological understandings of equality, of rights, of culture, of ethics, of aesthetics...and indeed, of humanities at large.

it is therefore a critical way of thinking and an analytical framework that travels across disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political science, and cultural studies, opening up new ways of making sense of our lives as well as the world we live in.

so when I hear the claim that queer research is "narrow" or "niche", I tend not to read it as an assessment of scholarly scope, but see it as reflecting the persistent hold of binary and normative assumptions, and of heterosexist ways of knowing, that continue to shape how society sorts knowledge into what counts as "broad" or "narrow", "central" or "peripheral".

therefore, as a queer studies scholar, I refuse claims that try to tuck queer studies away in a corner. in a world where boundaries of bodies, borders, categories and institutions are constently blurred and contested, regardless of our disciplinary positionality, we, simply as living beings, continue to insist on the need for queer ways of seeing, thinking, and imagining.

the reason I care

for my students, readers, and community

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there is no doubt that queers, given our history and significance, have continuously drawn the attention and interest of scholars. for those of us who have attended or are currently enrolled in higher or further education, the struggle of “finding and filling the research gap” is likely a familiar one.

when I was a ph.d candidate, colleagues often told me I was “lucky” to study queers from a particular population—namely, trans people. “it’s a niche topic,” some would say. but as a queer scholar with a background in diaspora studies, I have never sought to “find the niche” by using this community as an object of study.

instead, I conduct participant observation research within the community I identify with because I want to contribute to documenting queers’ voices, cultures, and histories. my goal is to ensure that the study of this community is no longer treated as a question of validity or objectivity. scholars in dominant groups—cisgender and heterosexual people who study themselves—are never required to frame their work as research on “heteronormative people.” nor are they expected to compare their experiences to those of “the mainstream community.” their subject of study is simply assumed to be legitimate.

because of this normativity, their research is seldom questioned. in contrast, as a queer scholar, I do not study queers to “fill the gap” but rather to challenge the heteronormative assumptions embedded in academic knowledge. both my teaching and research are ways of contributing to queer activism and community histories. though I may not hold institutional power as an untenured, female, and queer scholar, I am committed to confronting heteronormativity and effecting change in every way I can—together with my students, readers, and community.

to my students

my personal background and research experiences have sensitised me to issues of diversity, disability, and accommodation. I understand that marginalisation is not inherent to the individual but rather emerges from social and cultural discrimination and exclusionary practices. in my classroom, I am committed to incorporating diverse pedagogical strategies and media to support different types of learners.

please feel free to share your learning needs or circumstances with me—whether it’s your preferred name and pronouns, whether you are a visual learner, experience anxiety or a learning disability, care for a disabled family member, work part-time or full-time, have children, or face other challenges. I especially welcome conversations about needs that may not be immediately visible. my goal is to support you to the best of my ability.

to regain the power to write

when I say “the power to write,” I mean the power to write as a person, not as an academic.

writing is the core of my professional life. I write to teach. I write to do research, and to be recognised for doing it. I also write to survive administratively. writing is how I justify my existence within the institution.

and yet, recently, when I tried to write something just for myself, something as ordinary as a diary, I was shocked by how difficult it felt.

I could not find a beginning. I did not know where to place myself on the page. this struggle is not limited to writing. it mirrors something I have not really been able to share with anyone, not even with people I trust: when I meet new people, even in spaces that are explicitly safe, I cannot talk about myself beyond my academic identity.

I can talk fluently about my research, my field sites, my arguments. I can explain who I am as an anthropologist. what I struggle to do is to speak about who I am as a person, and how my memories, desires, losses, and contradictions have shaped the being who stands in front of them. this is not the same as writing positionality in a journal article or a book chapter - I know how to do that. I have been trained to do that.

I can situate myself methodologically, theoretically, geopolitically. what I am talking about here is something else: a form of sharing that is more intimate, more vulnerable, and more emotionally exposed. a writing that is not accountable to reviewers, disciplines, or citation practices, but accountable only to the self that is doing the writing.

I began receiving formal training in academic writing in the final year of secondary education, the year before GCSEs in the british system. I remember how much I resented those classes back then. they were taught by a retired white male professor in Classics who was, for the most part, kind and patient, except when we failed to write “properly.”

properly, in this context, meant mastering the passive voice. we were repeatedly told that passive constructions were academic, objective, and british. the disappearance of “I” and “we” and “us” was not framed as a stylistic choice, but as an intellectual requirement.

looking back now, I think this may have been the moment when I began to lose the power to write for myself. writing stopped being something that served me, and instead became something that served an image of me - the image of a well educated student; the image of someone who had been "properly" trained.

this erasure of “I/us/we” was presented as neutral, but it was profoundly formative. even later, when I moved on to sixth form and started taking sociology and anthropology classes (where writing in the first person was allowed again), something had already shifted. I could write the "I" analytically, but I could not write myself. and as I moved from sixth former to undergraduate, from phd candidate to researcher and educator, this distance only widened.

I do acknowledge that my writing makes me grow. it allows me to reflect, to examine my positionality, and to ground myself intellectually. it also allows me to exist materially, to be recognised as a researcher, and to support myself socially and financially. but these texts were always about a projected version of me, and rarely me as a person.

if I am allowed to say this, and I am allowing myself to say it, I blame academia for this loss, because the forms of writing that would allow me to be fully present as myself are structurally unsanctioned.

they do not count.

they do not accumulate value.

they do not grant legitimacy.

we like to imagine education as a ladder, where we move upward by gaining deeper and broader knowledge. but we rarely ask what is lost in that ascent. the pursuit of knowledge has never been a liberal or neutral process. it demands alignment with regimes of authority that define what counts as knowledge, how it should be expressed, and who is allowed to speak. these regimes feed us their values, certify us through systems they designed, and reward us when we write, speak, and think in ways they recognise.

paradoxically, the more knowledge we acquire, the more articulate we become about identity, structure, power, and difference. and yet, I find myself wondering whether the self that I can so eloquently articulate is actually me. whether the ways I have learned to write are faithful to my lived experience, or whether they have slowly trained me to speak about myself only through acceptable abstractions.

to regain the power to write, then, is to reclaim a space where writing does not have to perform, justify, or translate itself into legitimacy. is to write without knowing where the writing will go, and to let writing be a place where uncertainty, contradiction, grief, and desire can coexist without being disciplined into coherence. it is about acknowledging that some parts of the self have been trained into silence, and that writing can be a slow, fragile practice of listening for them again.

this matters to me not only as a person, but also because of who I am within academia. as someone who teaches, supervises, and evaluates others, I am implicated in the very structures that once taught me to disappear from my own writing. I do not know yet what this form of writing will look like, or where it belongs. maybe it does not belong anywhere recognisable. maybe it is not meant to be shared, or maybe it is. but for now, it is enough for me to name the loss, to insist that it matters, and to insist that writing can once again be a way of being with myself, not only a way of being seen by others.