Cruising as Methodology: Toward the Ethnographic Viability of Fleeting Encounters
本文提出“巡航”作为方法论模型，借鉴酷儿理论中短暂亲密关系的实践，解决组织民族志中因长期田野关系规范导致少数群体经验被抹除的问题，适用于研究边缘群体和组织排斥现象。
ABSTRACT This article presents “cruising” as a methodological model that responds to the challenge of thin data. Organizational ethnographic norms idealize projects that produce “rich” data and “thick description” collected from long‐term, committed fieldwork relations. Yet, this norm precludes research questions that may address those of minorities whose organizational exclusion is manifest in the erasure of their experiences. As a practice in seeking fleeting intimacies with strangers, queer theorists have argued that the practice of cruising sheds ontological, epistemic, and ethical insights into intimacy with objects made possible in precisely the contexts where long‐term commitment is precluded. This article draws from queer theoretical insights to suggest a model that takes seriously ethnographic encounters made possible through fleeting, short‐term encounters. As a mobile, multisited, and highly embodied act, cruising is theorized as a model for a methodology that draws inspiration from two otherwise disparate approaches, namely, that of feminist reflexivity and that of what I call the “cartographic approaches” of mapping diverse actors and objects, typically associated with descriptions of networks. Cruising as a methodology, at once, draws on these approaches while interrogating norms that presuppose how intimacy with objects should proceed in the field and be represented later in the write‐up.