Queer (In) Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (review)

The 2003 Supreme Court case Lawrence v Texas, which struck down sodomy laws in the United States, tends to stand in the cultural imagination as the moment in which queer criminalization formally ended. With the repeal of this antiquated law, it seemed to many the criminal legal system could now fully protect rather than punish queer and gender-nonconforming people. And indeed, it is now commonplace for local police to shepherd gay pride marches and for hate crimes legislation to sit atop the gay agenda, while cases of continued queer criminalization come to seem individualized and anomalous.

Turning “a queer lens” on law and order in the United States, Queer (In) Justice powerfully demonstrates how non-normative gender and sexuality are pervasively linked with crime both historically and currently. Drawing on extensive case studies, interviews, court records, and academic works, the authors argue that the policing of gender and sexuality is central to all facets of the criminal legal system, from police profiling and courtroom arguments to sentencing and incarceration practices. In each case, they stress the ways that gender and sexuality are mutually constitutive with race, class, disability, citizenship, age, and religion—a focus that not only accounts for the varying ways queer and transgender people experience the criminal legal system, but also complicates popular narratives about that system. For example, the common story of sodomy laws casts them as outdated relics of homophobic oppression, analogous to discriminatory laws for racial or gender segregation. The book addresses this story early on, explaining how sodomy laws are not singular or isolated, but emerged and shifted in various religious and colonial contexts that had as much to do with shoring up race and gender hierarchies as with forbidding particular sexual behaviors. By describing these laws’ complex cultural underpinnings as well as their punitive measures that varied along lines of race, class, and gender, the authors lay groundwork for two of the book’s major themes: that the criminalization of “deviant” gender and sexuality is always racialized and classed, and that this criminalization is systemic rather than born of a biased individual or single problematic law.

Queer (In) Justice builds these arguments first by laying out a series of queer criminal archetypes, such as the sexually degraded predator upon which Anita Bryant’s 1977 “Save Our Children” campaign depended, or the contagious disease spreader, a figure that links fears of HIV transmission with rhetoric of contamination long associated with sex workers, immigrants, and people of color. The authors then show how these figures come to justify criminalization in contexts ranging from the profiling of transgender women as sex workers to the policing of gay bars and public bathrooms. The book also covers the use of these archetypes in criminal courts (as reasons for harsher sentencing or the application of the death penalty) and in the prison system (as justification to ignore or perpetrate cases of sexual and physical abuse or to house LGBT people in isolation). Likewise, components of the criminal legal system, from court cases to prisons, produce and maintain myths about particular populations, such as the hypersexual person of color or deceptively predatory transgender person—archetypes that frequently overlap.

Stressing that the violent criminalization of queer and transgender people is deeply embedded in U.S. culture and politics, the authors note that efforts to merely reform police forces, courts, or prisons will necessarily fall short. In a chapter focused on hate crimes legislation, Queer (In) Justice argues for a queer politics that seeks justice in spaces other than those of the criminal legal system, which is already a site of violence against marginalized people. They point out that hate crimes laws are easily used to further criminalize bodies already marked as deviant—particularly people of color—and often result in the expansion of policing and prisons. This is a particularly useful section of the book, and though it stops short of taking an explicitly abolitionist...