ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Tom Boellstorff's anthropological research in Indonesia and also in the virtual world Second Life, as best represented by his monographs The Gay Archipelago, A Coincidence of Desires, and Coming of Age in Second Life. It explores two emphatically heuristic theses regarding what a queer method might look like. However, the focus on ethnographic methods is part of a broader trend, since 'often, queer methodology means little more than literature theory rather belatedly coming to social science tools such as ethnography and reflexivity. One element of queer methodology might thus be to trouble the distinction via a notion of 'emic theory'. Plummer honed in on this issue when noting how 'what seems to be at stake, then, in any queering of qualitative research is not so much a methodological style as a political and substantive concern with the gender, hetero-normativity, and the sexualities'.
