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🍃 Branches (key topics): Queerness
🍂 Roots (Status):
🌰 Source: Jones, A. (2018). Pornographics as Queer Method. In D. Compton, T. Meadow, & K. Schilt (Eds.), Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology (1st ed., pp. 95–108). University of California Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctv2n7kjc.9

Initial Notes

"too often, sociologists either ignore actual sex or, when sex is actually present, they discuss it in a clinical way that equates it with disease, erases pleasure, and is boring" (Jones, 2018: 95).

"Now, after analyzing the sociology of sexualities literature, I know just what it is. Our sociological imagination has almost no pornographic imagination. In fact, the only type of porn that seems to turn most sociologists on is trauma porn" (Jones, 2018: 96)

"In The Pornographic Imagination (1967), Susan Sontag convincingly made the case that literary texts that foray into the pornographic are, in fact, literature" (Jones, 2018: 96)

"Sociologists can write explicitly about sex without compromising the quality and value of their empirical and theoretical contributions. Such explicitness does not devalue the work. IN fact, it is quite the opposite — the use of pornographic questions, the inclusion of pornographic data, the use of pornographic language, and pornographic imagery gives us a deeper insight into humanity and human behavior" (Jones, 2018: 97)

"using autoethnographic accounts, I examine the implications of sexualities research that is construed as dirty work. Specifically, I explore both the institutional and the personal politics of doing sociological dirty work. This analysis is important because our reluctance to embrace a pornographic imagination can be explained by turning to both the institutional and personal costs of performing sociological dirty work" (Jones, 2018: 98)

"To manage the stigma of dirty work, scholars end up succumbing to what I call heteronormative respectability politics." (Jones, 2018: 101)

"In this chapter, I am calling on sociologists to harness a pornographic imagination" (Jones, 2018: 102)

"however, what a pornographically guided investigation uncovers is that what decades of sociological research on sex work has been missing is the sexual pleasure that many sex workers experience in their work, which is also an important contribution to sociological theories of motivation for work in erotic labor" (Jones, 2018: 103)

"During recruitment for both my survey and interviews I used pornographics and made queer methodological choices ... I am writing about sex work, and, as a retired sex worker now have decided to include autoethnographic vignettes in the book, which help to introduce important theoretical issues and, I believe, help make the prose engaging for readers" (Jones, 2018: 104)

"First, simply put, what academic writing there is about sex is usually dull and boring. Second, there are important ethical implications here. One ethical issues arises when we extract crass talk from our texts and translate our respondents' words into an ostensibly acceptable and respectable academic vernacular. Such academic colonialism is not justified and is unethical. If our respondents speak in the language of cocks and pussies, then that is the language we should honor in our texts" (Jones, 2018: 105)