(Data) Visualizing Lesbian-Queer Lives

To overcome early positivistic approaches studies of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) spaces and lives, research in and beyond social science historical approaches have been driven by or at least contained a component of qualitative work since the 1980s. Building upon recent work that seeks to return to yet cautiously queer quantitative analyses, I suggest a step further: to queer the difficult binary of and choice of conducting qualitative or quantitative research.

In this paper, I use both qualitative-quantitative data in conversation in order to draw out deeper understandings of oppressed and invisibilized populations and spaces that cannot be fully grasped by using only one form of data. My research draws upon both qualitative in-person and online group interviews with self-identified lesbians and queer women who came out between 1983 and 2008 in New York City, and quantitative data visualizations of archival research of political and/or social organizational records of these women spanning the same period and place. I turn each dataset into a lens from which to read the other.

In the process, my presentation demonstrates how both datasets are necessary to bring to life rare and complex portrayals of lesbian-queer experience from the multi-dimensional narratives of the individual, groups, and the multitude.