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Bad Queers: LGBTQ People and the Carceral State in Modern America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2021
Abstract
The war on sex offenders was an American campaign against sex crime that began in the 1930s and is still ongoing. In this review essay, I argue that the architects and opponents of that war engaged in political struggles that—especially during the pivotal era of the long 1970s—produced, criminalized, and hierarchized multiple new categories of “good” and “bad” LGBTQ legal subjects. In making this argument, my aim is to bring the field of LGBTQ political and legal history—especially the work of George Chauncey ([1994] 2019) and Margot Canaday (2009)—into closer conversation with scholarship by queer theorists who are not historians—especially Gayle Rubin ([1984] 2011a) and Michael Warner (1999)—about the stigmatization of non-normative gender and sexual practices. While historians have examined the policing of multiple queer behaviors in the early twentieth century, their examinations of the post-1945 period have been concerned primarily with the consolidation of a starker social and legal binary between homo- and heterosexuality. As their narratives get closer to the present, the most stigmatized “bad” queers become more and more tangential. At least in part, this has been because historians have been under the same pressure as LGBTQ activists to distance LGBTQ identity from the stigma of sexual “deviance”—especially sex that violated age-of-consent statutes—in order to promote the political project of LGBTQ rights. Placing bad queers at the center of LGBTQ political and legal history diversifies who counts as a subject of this history and reveals an even bigger carceral state that governed them.
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- © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation
Footnotes
The original inspiration to write this essay came from the transformative conversations I had with the other participants in the 2017 Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin Law School. The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN) provided material support while I was working on the project and an amazing community of people. I presented portions of this work on a panel about child protection chaired by Gillian Harkins at the 2018 American Studies Association convention; a legal-history panel led by Serena Mayeri at the 2019 American Historical Association annual meeting; and at the 2020 symposium at Yale “From Cradle to Grave: Histories of the Life Course, Histories of Sexuality” organized by Kelsey Henry. Henry Abelove, Roger Grant, Matthew Lassiter, Sandy Levitsky, and Mark Schulte provided invaluable feedback. Special thanks to David Halperin for generously engaging with a lot of drafts.
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