Sexual Identities, Queer Politics (review)

Political scientists have come to the study of LGBT topics somewhat later than neighboring disciplines in the social sciences and humanities but have recently been making up for lost time. This volume is part of a small wave of recent publications done primarily from a political science perspective. This is both a welcome and perhaps somewhat ironic development, given the declining attention to politics in most of the gay and lesbian press over the last decade.

Sexual Identities, Queer Politics is a collection of fourteen papers that began with a special issue of GLQ; at least a third of the papers were previously published in either GLQ or elsewhere. The chapters address a wide range of topics and make up something of a progress report on political studies today but lack any overall thematic unity or coherence. The opening two chapters by David Rayside and Jan Willem Duyvendak offer interesting comparisons of the ways in which state structures shape movement strategies and demands. Both authors reprise previously published work: Rayside contrasts the limited access afforded by the centralized U.K. government with the more decentralized U.S. and Canadian systems. What still must be explained is the greater success of gay and lesbian movements in Canada in securing legislative change when compared to the United States. Duyvendak contrasts the exclusionary structure of the French state with the inclusionary approach of the Netherlands, where dissenters are quickly embraced and co-opted. Still, from a U.S. viewpoint, both France and the Netherlands are remarkably friendly places for LGBT people. Both articles, then, leave open the question of what other factors influence the movement's success, since state structure seems only a small part of the story.

Juanita Díaz-Cotto offers a fascinating look into the emergence of lesbian voices at a series of Latin American feminist encuentros from 1980 to 1993. This is an important primary document of lesbian history, but the story breaks off in 1993, leaving no indication of what has happened since. Also included in this section is Dennis Altman's GLQ article, "Global Gaze/Global Gays," which wrestles with many difficult issues concerning post- and neocolonialism in the proliferation of gay identities in Asia. Finally, Rosalind Petchesky reviews the difficulties of raising "sexual rights" in international forums, showing how an unholy alliance of Islamic nations with the United States and the Vatican has conspired to limit these issues to reproductive rights.

In the second section of the book, Mark Blasius includes his well-known paper "An Ethos of Gay and Lesbian Existence" along with two papers that identify some of the pitfalls and dilemmas of contemporary movement strategies. Paisley Currah argues against choosing the path of least resistance by securing gay and lesbian rights through the affirmation of conventional constructions of sex and gender, thereby leaving transgendered people, among others, out in the cold. She calls for a more radical vision with the warning that "putting too much time and energy into making arguments that are implicitly premised on the dominant gender norms (and their relationship to anatomy) merely because they are intelligible in terms of the disciplining powers of the school, the psychiatrist's office, and the family court means that we ignore the larger project of transforming just what is intelligible" (192). Cathy Cohen warns against single-issue politics that fail to recognize cross-cutting oppressions and potential alliances, especially in regard to African Americans.

In the third section, Robert Bailey provides a précis of the demographics of 525,000 same-sex households in the United States (which are reported at greater length in previously published work). This is one of the best-founded portraits of the characteristics of gay and lesbian Americans that has been done and should open the way for more research. In addition, Rebecca Mae Salokar attempts to derive...