LGBTQ Politics

A Critical Reader

Marla Brettschneider, Susan Burgess, Christine Keating

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479800179
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: LGBT-Studien

A definitive collection of original essays on queer politics From Harvey Milk to ACT UP to Proposition 8, no political change in the last two decades has been as rapid as the advancement of civil rights for LGBTQ people. As we face a critical juncture in progressive activism, political science, which has been slower than most disciplines to study the complexity of queer politics, must grapple with the shifting landscape of LGBTQ rights and inclusion. LGBTQ Politics analyzes both the successes and obstacles to building the LGBTQ movement over the past twenty years, offering analyses that point to possibilities for the movement’s future. Essays cover a range of topics, including activism, law, and coalition-building, and draw on subfields such as American politics, comparative politics, political theory, and international relations. LGBTQ Politics presents the full range of methodological, ideological, and substantive approaches to LGBTQ politics that exist in political science. Analyses focused on mainstream institutional and elite politics appear alongside contributions grounded in grassroots movements and critical theory. While some essays celebrate the movement’s successes and prospects, others express concerns that its democratic basis has become undermined by a focus on funding power over people power, attempts to fragment the LGBTQ movement from racial, gender and class justice, and a persistent attachment to single-issue politics. A comprehensive, thought-provoking collection, LGBTQ Politics: A Critical Reader will give rise to continued critical discussion of the parameters of LGBTQ politics.

1

Introduction

MARLA BRETTSCHNEIDER, SUSAN BURGESS, AND CHRISTINE KEATING

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) activism has gained a good deal of visibility in recent years and has had some significant successes.1 Worldwide, the number of countries in which same-sex acts are illegal is decreasing. An increasing number prohibit employment discrimination, punish hate crimes, and recognize same-sex marriage and adoption. LGBTQ activism has also led to path-breaking scientific discoveries of life-saving treatments for people with AIDS. In the United States, hate crimes against LGBTQ people may be prosecuted under federal law, and LGBTQ people may serve openly in the military. Barriers to LGBTQ families adopting and fostering children have been lifted in many states. Many states and localities have added sexuality to antidiscrimination laws that protect basic civil rights such as equal housing, public accommodation, and employment. Indeed, this book was conceived as the United States Supreme Court recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry in Obergefell v. Hodges in June 2015. Readers will note the presence of that dramatic political turn of events in many chapters in this volume.

However, this history has been neither linear nor necessarily progressive, including in recent years. The killing of forty-nine people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida in June 2016 dramatically demonstrated that violence against LGBTQ populations persists despite legal and political gains. Also, as this book was about to go to press, Donald J. Trump was elected the forty-fifth president of the United States in 2017. While specific policy development remains open, it is clear that anti-LGBTQ elements worldwide have experienced a tremendous political boost from his election. The struggle for sexual and gender diversity and justice is far from over.

At the same time that the LGBTQ movement has gained greater visibility in local, national, and international politics, the study of LGBTQ politics has gained traction in the discipline of political science in the United States. This is distinctly different from the situation just twenty years ago, when research on LGBTQ political issues was scant and formal recognition of LGBTQ professional interests was virtually nonexistent. Today, in contrast, the American Political Science Association includes a committee that studies the status of LGBT people in the profession as well as a caucus that provides a place for LGBT scholars to organize their interests. Further, an organized section on sexuality and politics promotes scholarly research on a variety of topics. This critical reader gathers together contemporary essays in political science that address LGBTQ politics in the context of a variety of issues, including activism, law, coalition building, community, education, erotics, technology, marriage and families, globalism, intersections with other progressive movements, the politics of political science professional associations, teaching issues, public opinion, organizational strategies, right-wing resistance, and visions for the future. These themes are approached from a variety of subfields in political science as it is studied in the United States, including comparative politics, political theory, American politics, public law, and international relations. Taken together, these essays provide a snapshot of the contemporary study of LGBTQ politics in the discipline of political science in the United States.

This volume analyzes both the successes and obstacles involved in building the LGBTQ movement over the past twenty years, and offers analyses that point to potential directions that the movement might take in the future. Rather than aiming for a seamless narrative, the volume presents a wide range of methodological, ideological, and substantive approaches to LGBTQ politics that exist in political science. Essays that focus on more mainstream institutional and elite politics appear alongside contributions grounded in grassroots movements and critical theory. While some essays are celebratory of the movement’s successes and prospects, others express concerns that the democratic basis of the movement has become undermined by a focus on funding power over people power and on legal and state-centered rights over community solidarities. Some contributors suggest that mainstream successes have diminished the transformative potential of the LGBTQ movement and corroded its linkages to overlapping and allied progressive movements.

In preparation for this volume, we organized several roundtables at political science conferences such as the American Political Science Association, the Western Political Science Association, and the Midwest Political Science Association meetings. These roundtables brought together scholars working on LGBTQ politics across various subfields of the discipline in order to deepen our collective understanding of the LGBTQ movement and research on it over the past twenty years or so. During the panels we asked scholars to consider the history of the study of LGBTQ politics, where it is now, and where it might be headed in the future. One theme that emerged in the panels was the pressure that scholars often felt to deradicalize or “tone down” their work in the discipline of political science, a pressure that interestingly parallels the way in which LGBTQ activists often feel compelled to work within the politics of respectability. We encouraged authors to consider moving against that pressure in their contributions to the volume.

One common theme that emerges across many of the essays is that a focus on LGBTQ politics can help us to understand the complexities of politics more generally. For example, the rapid acceptance of marriage equality in the United States in recent years suggests that we need to rethink mainstream public opinion frameworks and models that do not account for the possibility of such a swift change. To be sure, even the study of mainstream LGBTQ political issues with the traditional tools of political science has challenged longstanding assumptions, allowing us to see the limitations of U.S. politics and political science more clearly, and providing a basis from which to anticipate new forms of politics and imagine new ways to study them. In addition, this volume includes several chapters that directly challenge the way politics has been defined and studied from within the mainstream, using analytic tools drawn from critical frameworks such as queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and global justice theory to destabilize and reimagine the boundaries of politics and political science.

Another central argument that runs through the essays in the volume is that a political science approach can usefully inform LGBTQ politics. To take the development of public support for marriage equality in the United States as an example again, the use of survey research allows us to chart its surprisingly quick rise and to pay attention to its complexity vis-à-vis other social movements. Further, a political science approach also helps us to think about the broader political contexts, motivations, and consequences of what often might seem to be individual preferences or attitude. For example, in LGBTQ political movements, anti-LGBTQ sentiment, sometimes referred to as “homophobia,” is often taken as a personal belief or attitude. Given its focus on political agendas, institutions, and structures, a political science approach can highlight the ways in which homophobia is mobilized politically, for particular political interests, even if the central political issue being addressed does not directly implicate LGBTQ people or concerns. Such sentiment can be mobilized within various modes of power in different historical and cultural contexts.

A third theme that echoes across the chapters is that the study of LGBTQ politics is best situated within an intersectional framework that takes up oppressions and identities as mutually constitutive, or co-created. This framework, developed over the past two decades primarily by feminists of color, underscores the analytic importance of looking at the ways in which systems of power such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and others work in conjunction with each other and the political importance of building movements that address such interconnections. Indeed, in addition to being at a crossroads for the LGBTQ movement, we are also at a critical juncture in progressive political activism more generally. Social media has enlivened movements for social change, with some lauding the ways digital technologies have widened conversations, facilitated organizing, and enabled people to share information across time and place, while others have warned that social media activism runs the risk of becoming a form of armchair politics. Environmental crisis and climate change have led activists to organize at the grass roots and press for change through more institutional channels around the globe. Further, building upon the antiglobalization protests in relation to the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, and gaining momentum through the 2000s, the Occupy movement has prompted a rethinking of questions of economic justice in terms of the 1 percent over and against the rest of us. In the United States, a vibrant #BlackLivesMatter network has drawn international attention for its sustained and vital work against police brutality and other forms of persistent racial inequality. In this time of intense social contestation, several of the contributors to the volume argue that intersectional approaches to the study of politics are vital in order to analyze and understand why progressive movements emerge and how they can be sustained.

This reader offers six main sections containing essays focused on the following themes: the politics of social movements and interest groups; LGBTQ politics within the discipline of political science in the United States; U.S. public opinion and politics; marriage equality politics; global politics; and visions for the future. Each section includes a short introduction that highlights key issues and questions raised by the essays offered therein. Each essay offers an in-depth analysis of an issue important to the LGBTQ movement, while self-consciously overlapping with other essays in the volume, to encourage connections across central analytic and conceptual categories that serve to structure (and often limit) the discipline of political science. The specifics of each of the six sections of the book are described below.

Part I: Building LGBTQ Movements

The Chicago Society for Humanb Rights (1924) is credited as the first main homosexual rights organization in the United States, followed by the Daughters of Bilitis (1955) and the Mattachine Society (1950). Historians and other scholars often date the explosion of a widespread popular LGBTQ movement to the acts of resistance at the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1969. That series of rebellions was multiracial, and participants emerged from a variety of diverse LGBTQ positionalities.

The contributions to this section update the exploration of movements and groups to more recent years with an interesting array of focal points for analysis and on-the-ground social justice work. Zein Murib examines social movements and interest-group advocacy related to LGBTQ people during the period 1968–2003. Looking at disputes regarding political objectives and coalition building, Murib demonstrates important divisions among organizations based on race, class, and gender. Using a critical discourse analysis, Murib articulates how movements for LGBTQ marriage and military issues came to obscure other significant agenda items in LGBTQ political movements. B Lee Aultman and Paisley Currah develop the concept of epistemic justice to critique the erasure of lives and experiences of trans politics, which remains largely illegible in more mainstream political science scholarship on LGBTQ equality movements. Providing an overview of trans political movements in the United States, the authors present a comprehensive history in the field as well as a cogent argument on the needs of trans politics today.

J. Ricky Price examines the links among race, gender, and sexuality within contemporary HIV activism and prevention efforts, exploring these issues from a feminist-science and criminal-justice standpoint. Kimala Price offers her expertise on queer reproductive-justice politics by women-of-color activists beginning in the 1990s, exploring the direction of coalitions and agenda setting between LGBTQ and reproductive-justice movements when many LGBTQ activists were claiming that reproductive issues were not pertinent to their movement. Moving through the divides, Price offers a rich analysis of difficulties and possibilities associated with such coalitions for activists and theorists.

Charles Anthony Smith, Shawn Schulenberg, and Eric A. Baldwin discuss critically how political science often overlooks the bisexual members of the LGBTQ community. Countering a common presumption in political studies of bi-, multi-, and pansexuals, the authors demonstrate that the community is significantly politically engaged.

While much scholarship identifies and relies on binary understandings of sexuality, Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis and Ben Anderson-Nathe complicate this typology, analyzing models of redistributive agendas of class-based LGBTQ movements and recognition-based frameworks of organizations led by queer people of color. We see in these contributions the crucial roles movement and activist politics play in interacting with action in more formal and legal arenas on LGBTQ political issues. Sean Cahill works with LGBTQ and questioning incarcerated adults and with youth examining issues that emerge from the frame of LGBTQ experience in the criminal justice system.

Part II: LGBTQ Politics in the Discipline of Political Science

The essays in this section focus on LGBTQ politics and movement issues in professional political science associations and academic institutions. Here we ground the examination of the role of LGBTQ politics in the discipline of political science, focusing on the American Political Science Association, the central professional organization for the study of politics in the United States. Angelia R. Wilson and Martha Ackelsberg critically survey the development of the Sexuality and Politics Section and the LGBT Caucus in the American Political Science Association, integrating interviews from key participants who have led the development of this field over the last twenty-five years. Susan Burgess and Anna Sampaio offer an intersectional reflection on the controversy over whether to hold the 2012 APSA meeting in Louisiana, which presented a variety of conflicting interests that threatened to undermine fragile alliances among groups representing LGBTQ, racial, gender, and class interests, in part due to persistent attachments to single-issue politics.

Barry L. Tadlock and Jami K. Taylor survey trends in publishing articles on LGBTQ topics in the top fifty journals in political science and the top twenty journals in public administration and international relations, as well as books published by the top ten university presses in political science. Jyl Josephson and Thaís Marques then examine the relationship between LGBTQ politics and its study in political science and the development of the field of feminist political theory, arguing that mainstream LGBTQ politics and political science have shaped feminist political theory more significantly than did queer theory. In this section, readers will note familiar themes in LGBTQ studies and see how knowledge production in the academy forms and contributes to the contours of political activism and examination in the broader civic and governmental arenas. From here we can critically take up the most active area of LGBTQ research in the discipline of political science, which includes public opinion research, given that subfield’s centrality to the discipline.

Part III: LGBTQ Politics and Public Opinion in the United States

This section contains essays that explore public opinion regarding LGBTQ politics and its relation to mainstream politics in the United States. It is now legal for gays and lesbians to marry, serve in the military, and express their sexuality privately without fear of criminal prosecution, leading some activists and scholars to suggest that the LGBTQ movement has reached a victorious conclusion, an end to marginalization. Yet, as many critical scholars have noted, LGBTQ people who do not or will not conform to mainstream sex, gender, race, and class norms continue to be politically marginalized. The chapters in this section use the tools of mainstream political science to assess recent developments in LGBTQ politics, providing evidence that sometimes supports and at other times challenges the discipline’s understanding of American politics. Taken together, these essays suggest that integrating the study of LGBTQ politics into the standard subfields of political science (such as public opinion, public policy, the presidency, campaigns and elections, and Congress) can both confirm and disrupt what the discipline thinks it knows about how politics works in the United States.

Jeremiah J. Garretson begins by offering a critical analysis of various explanations that political science has offered to explain growing support for LGBTQ rights in the United States, focusing on unexplained variance among subgroups such as African Americans and conservatives. Donald P. Haider-Markel and Patrick R. Miller suggest that survey data reveals a longstanding division between individual policy preferences for marriage equality and broader movement priorities. They argue that such divisions undermine mobilization towards more transformative political goals, such as alternative gender and family structures, calling for a broader approach to public opinion. Through interviews, a discussion of Victory Fund support, and an analysis of various campaign materials, Ravi K. Perry and X. Loudon Manley argue that President Obama’s decision to support marriage equality in 2012 was a crucial factor not only in changing Black public opinion on marriage equality but also in promoting a number of electoral victories for LGBT African American candidates from 2012 to 2014. Paul Snell explores the establishment of the LGBT Equality Caucus as a means of addressing the underrepresentation of such interests in Congress. He suggests that the institutionalization of the caucus contributes to a transformation of LGBTQ politics from morality to interest-group politics. In the final chapter of the section, Mandi B...