UC Santa Barbara

Queer nightlife is receiving increasing recognition in a growing field of nightlife studies, yet its insights have been largely mined by humanists. In this introduction to a subfield-defining special issue, I blend arguments from the social sciences about “dirty work” with humanistic notions of “disidentification” as a survival strategy to amplify a sociological point of view. What theoretical opportunities arise from working on and against the conservative tendencies of the discipline, neither abandoning queer nightlife for something perceived as more legitimate nor refusing entirely to engage with other sociologists? A review of select multidisciplinary works distills three expressions of disidentification used by researchers to negotiate novel arguments. I describe these as conceptual renovations, deconstructive reframings, and epistemological affirmations. From this baseline, I classify special issue papers into additional clusters that articulate sociology-specific interventions that neither uncritically embrace nor strictly oppose normative standards but transform them from within, what I call reorientations, relational work, and regulated improvisations. These themes together contribute to a knowledge platform about queer nightlife that conveys both shared theoretical frameworks and disciplinary distinctions.