Disclosed and Willing: Towards A Queer Public Sociology

Abstract

This article contributes to recent debates on ‘public sociology’, expanding the notion and interrogating its utility for those who simultaneously carry out activism and scholarship. The idea of public sociology has underpinned the conviction that knowledge can contribute to inclusion or exclusion, depending on how it is used. This article argues that commitment to public sociology implies abiding by the guiding principles of accountability, intersectionality, reciprocity and reflexivity, and further represents commitment to activism, embracing politics as an intended effect of knowledge production. Building on personal experience as researcher and activist in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement in Portugal, I also explore the epistemological and ethical impacts of taking on the role of scholar-activist. This offers a ‘double agency’ through which one may build and disseminate empirically grounded knowledge whilst maintaining a sense of social responsibility and political engagement. Bringing these ideas together, this article advances the notion of a ‘queer public sociology’: a critical framework that accounts for sexual diversity, and that acknowledges its politically situated character at the same time that it contributes to the dismantling of sexual prejudice and exclusion.