These theorists posited that society at large and its constraints were the real social problem, rather than problematising the marginalised individuals living outside strict cis and heteronormative social scripts. In this context, the field of queer theory seized and reconfigured the researcher’s tools to produce work by and for LGBTQ people.
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In the intervening decades a movement had sprouted from the energy and agency of LGBTQ people across the country, from the Compton Cafeteria and Stonewall anti-police brutality riots in 19 respectively to the irreverent camp subculture distributed via mass media in the comically grotesque films of Divine and John Waters. Queer theory emerged decades later in the midst of the devastation wrought by HIV/AIDs and the subsequent political action demanding research and medical care led by ACT UP! and radical queer political activists committed to social transformation. Critique of these shortcomings is implicit within queer theory – an unapologetically activist field that rejects the precepts and epistemology of the social sciences as fundamentally dehumanising. Deviance researchers had no horse in the race, beyond their opportunity to make a mark on their chosen field. These theorists observed and examined the lives of LGBTQ people, frequently without their knowledge, in an era when to be outed as such often resulted in dire threats to personal safety, social standing and job security, if not actual jail time.ĭespite these ever-looming risks for its LGBTQ research subjects, deviance research was rooted in the ideals of objectivity and neutrality: the researcher’s role was to document the phenomena of LGBTQ individuals and the seemingly ‘peculiar’ lives of their community. The tension between these two fields is seemingly fundamental, and queer theory’s rejection of its intellectual parentage is an understandable reaction to deviance theorists’ methods, framing and aims.ĭeviance research emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as the study of supposed ‘problem populations’: drug addicts, homosexuals, drag queens, circus performers and others who lived outside of the ‘Leave it to Beaver’ values and lifestyle that dominated in the post-war era. In Underdogs, Heather Love invites the still-adolescent field of queer theory and the Cold War-era world of deviance studies to a proverbial family therapy session, urging queer theorists to first acknowledge and then reconsider the contributions of their ostracised intellectual forebearers. Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory. Presenting a careful, close reading of deviance studies, this book invites queer theorists to reconsider their intellectual heritage how the field of queer theory will make meaning of these connections remains to be seen, writes Dani Slabaugh.
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In Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory, Heather Love explores how queer theory was shaped by the Cold War-era world of deviance research.