Cruising as Methodology: Toward the Ethnographic Viability of Fleeting Encounters

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.