ABSTRACT

This chapter argues several reasons for advocating an ethnographic approach to materiality. It argues the importance of an ethnographically based empiricism that is both naive and worldly, one that reveals the queerness of materiality. Queer methods, at least when addressing materiality, ought, then, to place themselves in the critical tradition that can trace its roots back to Marx on commodity fetishism and forward through the dereifying ambitions of the Frankfurt School. The queerness of matter and things, their inherent dis-location rests on exclusions found at all levels of materiality, from the basic components of matter to global manufacturing. Queer theories that focus on signification and resignification as strategies of resistance risk dealing only with final object and, without a stronger sociological approach, float atop, or are at least unable to grasp fully the inequalities that lie behind appearances. All methods can be put to queer political ends that disrupt normative alignments.