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1 1 The Challenge of Law Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Social Movements Mary Bernstein, Anna-Maria Marshall, and Scott Barclay this volumE ExaminEs the strategic ways in which the LGBT movement interacts with the law and the way those struggles, in turn, shape legal rules, public discourse, and the movement itself.1 Through an in-depth study of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement, we examine empirically the relationships among social movements, social change, and the law. Many of the most important issues for the LGBT movement are represented in these pages, including struggles for same-sex marriage and family rights, for protection from discrimination in employment, education, and housing, and for criminal law reform. These chapters address three main themes: the ways in which social movements engage with the law; the relationship among activism, discourse, and legal change; and the contradictory impact of legal symbols on progressive movements and their opponents. Most importantly, Queer Mobilizations examines 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. The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered movement has battled culturally and politically to reshape some of our most basic social institutions—the family, marriage, work. The LGBT movement’s multidimensional legal, political , and cultural campaigns reflect the complex debates about the relationship between law and social change. On the one hand, legal reform by itself is unlikely to provide effective remedies for deep-seated structural oppression. In fact, many argue that engagement with legal institutions simply reifies the practices and ideologies that gave rise to oppression in the first place. Yet, concepts enshrined in legal institutions, such as rights, equality, and justice, represent persuasive and powerful symbols for movements for social change. These legal arguments can offer oppositional frames that may eventually resonate with the public in political debates and can have concrete material consequences, as well. This collection of original essays draws on the expertise of contributors from the areas of law and society, sociology, political science, and legal studies to make several theoretical contributions to the existing literature on the relationships among law, social movements, and social change. The chapters in Part I,“Social 2 Mary Bernstein, anna-Maria Marshall, and scott Barclay Movement Strategies and the Law,” address a long-standing debate in the literature on law and social movements about the relative merits of legal strategies and other tactics. These chapters demonstrate the limits and possibilities of litigation and law reform for promoting structural and cultural transformation. The chapters also demonstrate that movements frequently call on legal symbols and frames when articulating their critiques of oppressive social conditions and formulating demands for change. In Part II, “Activism, Discourse, and Legal Change,” the authors demonstrate that even conservative legal institutions are susceptible to discursive strategies that challenge and undermine existing sources of oppression. Finally, the chapters in Part III, “Legal Symbols: Constraints and Possibilities,” show that law is at the center of fierce symbolic competitions where both movements and countermovements vie for the sympathies of the public and policymakers. By participating in these struggles over the meaning of law, social movements reinvent their vocabularies of harm, their theories of accountability, and their demands for redress. While many have analyzed the diverse ways that social movements rely on legal symbols, these chapters emphasize the multiple meanings of law, both liberatory and repressive, that get deployed in struggles for social change. By showing how legal strategies can thus reshape movements themselves, the chapters in this book reveal the constitutive relationship between law and social movements. And, by focusing on the LGBT movement across issue domains, across organizational structures, and across national boundaries, this book also provides a rich contribution to existing studies of the LGBT movement. In the remainder of this chapter, we situate the contributions of this book within analyses of the relationship between law and social movements generally and between law and the LGBT movement more specifically. The Politics of Naming We use the broad term“LGBT”movement when referring to the panoply of organizations and activists that are seeking to improve the lot of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people. Yet, references to a “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender” (LGBT) movement have often been a case of wishful thinking or a hopeful gesture toward inclusivity for a movement in which there have been numerous divisions among these various subgroups (e.g., Bernstein 2002; Seidman 1993; Vaid 1995...

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