Beyond Positionalities: Moving Toward a Queer Embodied Approach to Researching LGBTQ+ Space and Placemaking

In this essay, we critically reflect on how affective embodiments shape the knowledge we produce about LGBTQ+ space and placemaking in the field. While reflexivity has deepened our attention to researcher positionality and power dynamics, we argue that this often stops short of grappling with embodiment —how researchers’ bodies, aesthetics, and affective presences condition all aspects of the research we conduct, including accessing the field and interacting with interlocutors. Drawing on queer of color critique, we examine how queer spaces are structured through racialized, gendered, and aesthetic hierarchies that complicate prevailing narratives of inclusion, visibility, and belonging. By distinguishing positionality from embodiment and interrogating how queer researchers and communities navigate exclusion, ambivalence, and legibility, especially as they relate to urban studies and sexuality, we seek to reorient LGBTQ+ sociology away from neoliberal narratives of visibility, belonging, and progress toward a more complex, situated, and ethically embodied understanding of queer spaces and knowledge production.