Vol. 21 No. 1 (January, 2011) pp.22-25
QUEER MOBILIZATIONS: LGBT ACTIVISTS CONFRONT THE LAW, by Scott Barclay, Mary
Bernstein, and Anna-Maria Marshall (eds.).
New York: New York University Press, 2009. 448pp. Cloth. $89.00. ISBN:
9780814791301. Paper. $28.00. ISBN:
9780814791318.
Reviewed by Matthew Dean Hindman, Department of Political Science, University of
Minnesota-Twin Cities. Email: hindm006 [at] umn.edu.
QUEER MOBILIZATIONS: LGBT ACTIVISTS CONFRONT THE LAW is an edited volume that
reflects the burgeoning voice and growing favorability of the LGBT movement
within the world’s court systems.
Demonstrating that legal battles have far-reaching social effects despite being
largely hidden from the public eye, the book’s contributors critically examine
how the LGBT movement and the law interact to shape discourses pertaining to
sexual justice, political rights, and political identity.
This collection of essays offers a welcome interdisciplinary supplement
to those areas of LGBT scholarship most closely connected to the LGBT movement –
namely, queer theory, queer history, and gender studies.
Additionally, QUEER MOBILIZATIONS scrutinizes both the theory and
empirics driving LGBT political and legal struggles worldwide by exploring how
legal structures simultaneously promote and hamper changes to our sexualized
social structures, adding much-needed perspective to the sometimes polemic
debates within various social movements between proponents and critics of legal
action.
As the editors of this volume, Scott Barclay, Mary Bernstein, and Anna-Maria
Marshall endeavor to fulfill a tall order – that is, to examine “how the LGBT
movement’s engagement with the law configures and reconfigures the very meanings
of sexuality, sex, gender, privacy, discrimination, and family in law and
society more generally” (p.1). In
their introductory chapter, they discuss debates that, though perhaps most
pronounced in the LGBT movement, affect a number of historically marginalized
groups. Specifically, this volume
engages – and, it claims, moves beyond – decades-old questions regarding whether
the legal system offers the most appropriate channel for initiating widespread
social change, and whether the inherited wisdom of devoting substantial
financial resources to pursuing legal change continues to be a prudent plan of
action. After all, as Barclay,
Bernstein, and Marshall confess, an intense focus on legal action (and the
rights discourse that accompanies it) necessitates a dependence on the state
that may position the LGBT community as a supplicant to governmental authority
rather than an agent of emancipation.
Nevertheless, political rights and the force of law tend to normalize
lifestyles, solidify gender binaries, and define family structures in ways that,
whether beneficial or menacing to LGBT peoples, social scientists sometimes fail
to recognize or comprehend adequately.
Rejecting a “simplistic approach to understanding law’s structural
power,” [*23] Barclay, Bernstein, and Marshall assure readers that the law is
neither a cure-all for the world’s oppressed nor, conversely, a guarantor of
conservative supremacy (p.17).
Rather, the law’s symbolic power provides a mixed normative bag by
simultaneously enabling and constraining possibilities for liberation.
QUEER MOBILIZATIONS is divided into three parts.
Part I, titled “Social Movement Strategies and the Law,” highlights “the
peculiar power of law to construct, define, limit, and empower social life”
(p.12). Chapters include a
discussion of a Namibian social movement organization’s decision to avoid
pursuing legal tactics due to fear of state repression, an advancement of a
“queer continuum” approach to legal argumentation and analysis, a content
analysis exploring the use of collective action frames in the watershed LAWRENCE
v. TEXAS sodomy case, and a general discussion of interest groups’
amicus curiae briefs before the Court
in the United States’ only five Supreme Court cases centering upon LGBT rights.
Tenuously held together under the general theme of “strategy,” this
section’s most valuable contributions come from Darren Rosenblum and Nicolas
Pedriana. Both authors illuminate
the power of frames and signifiers that activists use before the courts, and
argue that the courts’ chosen frames employed to endorse or deny their efforts –
whether mirroring the legal arguments of activists or not – matter highly as
well. The shape of the LGBT
movement and the identities it represents, then, are in part products of this
interaction between strategic litigants and the juridical order in which they
operate.
Part II proceeds under the broad banner of “Activism, Discourse, and Legal
Change” which, like Part I, presents a hodgepodge of topics ranging from
worldwide trends in the reform of sodomy laws to localized efforts to advance
transgender rights. In this
section, readers may find work on the courts’ approaches to transgender issues
most fascinating and valuable. Amy
L. Stone’s chapter “Like Sexual Orientation? Like Gender?” presents a compelling
case that local policy elites rely heavily upon social movement activists for
information about lesser known or publicly understood identities.
As a result, she argues, local activists largely shape the types of
successes that the movement incurs by interpreting and explaining transgender
issues as, on one hand, “like sexual orientation” or, on the other, as “like
gender.” The manner in which these
understandings are incorporated and codified into the law, then, largely
structures the types of legal protections – i.e., whether sexual orientation or
gender-based rights – offered to transgendered individuals.
Marybeth Herald’s chapter, “Explaining the Difference,” demonstrates the
limitations of this framework on the national stage, explaining the durability
of binary understandings of sex and gender in the United States court system.
In the United States, one’s sex assigned at birth largely determines the
courts’ definition of one’s sex at all points in one’s life, with minimal if any
flexibility even for those who have undergone sexual reassignment surgery.
The result is a struggle “to fit transgender persons into ill-defined and
narrow concepts of male and female,” and a corresponding reliance upon
“heterosexual marriage scripts” to determine whom [*24] transgendered
individuals can or cannot legally marry (p.196).
For this reason, Herald suggests, “a transgender person’s ability to
marry becomes intertwined with the fate of same-sex marriage,” despite concerns
that these two movements are not necessarily natural companions (p.203).
As a result, transgenderedness becomes a matter “like sexual
orientation,” whether or not activists on the national stage represent the issue
in those terms. (European courts,
it is worth noting, have proven themselves more flexible than their counterparts
in the United States.)
Part III of the book, “Legal Symbols,” confronts how discourse and framing
effects variously constrain and enable the strategies or cultural understandings
used by LGBTQ social movements. The
book’s final chapter, “The Gay Divorcée,” written by Ellen Ann Andersen,
provides the most clear and prescient exposition of this point.
According to Andersen, among the various benefits and rights linked to
marriage, one issue remains off limits for LGBT advocates to use as a point of
mobilization – that is, “access to the courts to determine the rights and
responsibilities of each spouse after a relationship’s dissolution,” or, “[i]n a
word, divorce” (p.282). This issue,
Andersen points out, rarely gains consideration by the Human Rights Campaign or
other groups advocating on behalf of same-sex marriage.
Despite the obvious benefits of having the same legal recourse as
heterosexual couples upon a relationship’s termination, it is unwise and perhaps
even dangerous for advocacy organizations to highlight these benefits because of
the continuing stigmatization of divorce as marriage’s failure.
Though Andersen’s specific argument about divorce benefits and the LGBT
movement is important in its own right, her broader point about the relationship
between prevailing symbolic orders and mobilization is both compelling and
underappreciated within the social movement literature.
Social movements advocating for marginalized social groups are
constrained in the symbolism that they undertake, as some arguments, while
legally sound and of potential benefit to a movement, “diverge too radically
from prevailing cultural understandings” to be of much strategic political use
(p.283). To take Andersen’s
argument a step further, we might also posit that LGBTQ individuals’ own
understandings of their interests and identities are shaped by prevailing
cultural symbols, extending the importance of her point beyond strategy.
In other words, this section provides inroads to deeper considerations
about how movement strategies feed into the very core of political
subjectivities.
Taken as a whole, QUEER MOBILIZATIONS reads as a scholarly mishmash of work
concerned with the direction of the LGBTQ movement.
This edited volume will provide a useful tool for anyone wanting to stay
current on the latest scholarship on the group’s struggle against and within a
largely unyielding heteronormative legal order.
However, despite a strong introductory chapter, the volume lacks a
conclusion that summarizes the book’s conceptual additions and substantive
challenges to the literatures in which these essays are situated.
To be fair to Barclay, Bernstein, and Marshall, this shortcoming is not
the mark of a book without a clear message, but rather of a literature without a
clear set of central, [*25] canonical texts.
Whereas much of the literature connecting social movements (particularly
the civil rights movement) and the law cites, for example, Gerald Rosenberg’s
THE HOLLOW HOPE (2008) – and indeed, several chapters in this volume do just
that – and whereas queer theorists in the humanities typically cite Judith
Butler’s GENDER TROUBLE (1999), empirically-minded scholars of LGBTQ politics
have no similar standard-bearer to center the scholarly conversation.
To this end, QUEER MOBILIZATIONS helps to identify a lacuna within the
burgeoning field of LGBTQ studies.
Barclay, Bernstein, and Marshall’s collection, in this regard, should not just
be read as an edited volume on LGBTQ politics and the law, but as an invitation
for the field’s next canonical text to emerge.
REFERENCES:
Butler, Judith. 1999. GENDER TROUBLE: FEMINISM AND THE SUBVERSION OF IDENTITY,
2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Rosenberg, Gerald. 2008.
THE HOLLOW HOPE: CAN COURTS BRING ABOUT SOCIAL CHANGE? 2nd ed. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
CASE REFERENCES:
LAWRENCE v. TEXAS, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).
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© Copyright 2011 by the author, Matthew Dean Hindman.