Drawing on my experience of “field work” within the web community qruiser.com, this presentation raises a number of questions related to the tension between sociological and queer modes of inquiry. Frequently, as Seidman suggests out, queer analyses consist of a “rendering of literary analysis into social analysis” (1995: 125). The social realm, however, is “often narrowed into categories of knowledge and culture while the latter is itself often reduced to linguistic, discursive binary figures” (ibid: 139). What are the possibilities of a queer sociological method and in what ways is it possible to overcome the problems that Seidman points out? It is my intention to further investigate these issues by turning to what Wakeford (2002) has named “cyberqueer research”. Is it a viable thought that web communities, as O’Brien proposes, make up “a site for studying the viability and implications of constructionist theories that emphasize ’doing gender’ as a social accomplishment” (2001: 79)? Following this line of thought, could a “cyberqueer research” help to overcome the inherent differences between sociological and queer modes of inquiry?

O’Brien, Jodi. (2001), “Writing in the body: gender (re)production in online interaction”, in Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock (eds.), Communities in Cyberspace. London & New York Routledge, 76-104.

Seidman, Steven (1995), “Deconstructing Queer Theory or the Under-Theorization of the Social and the Ethical”, in Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (eds.), Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 116-41.

Wakeford, Nina (2002), “New Technologies and ’Cyber-queer’ Research”, in Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman (eds.), Handbook of Lesbian & Gay Studies. London: Sage, 115-44.