More than words: Using qualitative video-recall procedures to contextualize queer couples’ communication and partnered gay men’s sexual communication

This thesis contains two manuscripts related to the study of queer couples’ communication. In the first manuscript, I discuss qualitative video-recall procedures as valuable tools for generating contextualized and queer-affirmative understandings of queer couples’ communication. I argue that these procedures address limitations of dominant approaches to couples’ communication research, enabling researchers to attend to important social and political factors that shape how queer couples communicate. In the second manuscript, I use these innovative research procedures to explore partnered gay men’s sexual communication. In this study, three diverse gay male couples had video-recorded conversations about their sexual relationships, followed by separate video-recall interviews. Findings explore how gay male couples collaboratively navigate complex sociopolitical contexts by resisting, creatively modifying, and negotiating dominant sexual scripts. I explore how dominant sexual discourses and interpersonal power dynamics shape these dyadic processes.