UCSF

Within medicine devoted to LGBTQ+ health, data are everywhere. Large databases teem with numbers waiting for evaluation, buggy online surveys offer rickety drop-down menus filled with identity terms, and clinic bulletin boards host calls for research participants to “stand up and be counted.” This dissertation will trace the life of what I will call “queer data” - that is, data documenting queer subjects as well as data that might potentially be understood as “queered” - as it is produced, analyzed, and mobilized. A rich moment for anthropological study emerges when quantification techniques requiring bounded categories are confronted by the foundational fluidity of queerness. This project draws from from anthropological fieldwork within research projects and clinical spaces in the California Bay Area, semi-structured interviews with individuals across the United States, as well as objects and virtual spaces that serve as ethnographic objects. Tracing such queer data through medical settings and discourses provides a unique opportunity to explore questions around the evidence-base of queerness and the ways in which queerness soaks into data processes in transformative ways.In this dissertation, I describe how this queer data production emerges as a co-constitutive process through which community norms and experiences shape the options for categorization, while at the same time such categories affect how individuals and communities make meaning around their identities, bodies, and desires. I examine how debates around the use of statistics within medical education reanimates counting as a contested space that exposes the political stakes of quantifying queerness and the affective impact of numbers. Data are also a potent force within clinical spaces. Through examinations of clinical intake forms, I describe how efforts to create healthcare spaces that are affirming to queer patients position data as a form of care. How such healthcare data are transformed by bureaucratic reporting requirements is discussed as an example of how queerness both resists and is subsumed by aggregation. The organ inventory is also taken up as an ethnographic object and explored for the ontological claims it makes around what a body is and how it should be cared for. By tracing such queer data, this dissertation explores how quantifying queerness is an act of transformation, but one that is necessarily incomplete. The ever-evolving nature of queerness leaves it in excess of static categories in a way that can productively draw attention to the generative work of quantification.