Pluralizing Political Theory: Contemporary Queer Contributions (Pre-Recorded)

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In 2009, the APSA Committee on the Status of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and the Transgendered in the Profession conducted a survey of the APSA membership discovered that while 41 percent of respondents deemed scholarship on LGBT topics to be ‘very appropriate’, there remains resistance. As one political scientist in the survey put it: “The biggest problem is [they’re] not doing real political science, [they’re] just focusing in on themselves. The LGBT faculty whom I respect professionally the most are the ones who do real political science. We don’t do heterosexual political science so why do . . . LGBT political science?” The irony of this sentiment was captured by Paisley Currah, who remarked only two years later at a symposium on “The State of LGBT / Sexuality Studies in Political Science,” that “perhaps the absence of research on LGBT topics, however, signals the largely unquestioned presence of heteronomativity[.]”

If indeed the dearth of sexuality studies within political science actually suggests that we have in fact been doing “heterosexual political science” all along, then this panel explores what foregrounding sexuality studies and queer theory contributes to the study of politics. In an effort to cultivate the rich intellectual pluralism that much of the discipline already embraces and promotes, “Pluralizing Political Theory: Contemporary Queer Contributions to the Study of Politics,” brings together a range of political theorists working on issues of gender and sexuality.Charting out contemporary queer contributions to the study of politics, this panel showcases the work of political theorists mobilizing queer theory to broaden our study of political movements – how they organize, how they develop, and also how they fail to protect those who they claim to speak for.

For the following papers, sexuality serves not only as a direct object of study, as presented in Anne Caldwell’s analysis on 20th century LGBT political strategies, but also as a method to study political sites historically understood to be either heterosexual, such as in aylon cohen’s study of the bourgeois public sphere, or lacking sexuality altogether, as in Samuel Galloway’s account of the Critical Mass bike protests. In this way, tracing queer sexuality functions alternately as both an object of curiosity and a horizon of intelligibility, a thing to be studied and a method of conducting research.

In her study of political strategies of inclusion in the LGBT political movement, Anne Caldwell’s work questions not only dominant methods of struggle in the LGBT community, but broaches questions concerning political practices of movement mobilization more broadly. In Samuel Galloway’s research on what he calls the institution of the Critical Mass bicycle ride, an urban and environmental protest that occurs once a month, he showcases how a political analysis attentive to queer practices of the fleeting encounter and anonymous cruise can illuminate political logics that have become common to 21st century protest politics. Attending to queer concerns of homosocial intimacy in the 18th century institution of the masonic lodge, aylon cohen demonstrates how freemasonry cultivated new gendered bodily practices of equality between men in the 18th century.

Together, this panel contributes to pluralizing our contemporary practices of political analysis by highlighting queer methods of political interpretation and theorizing. By displacing the heterosexist presumption to "real" political science, we instead queer our disciplinary expectations that the political be taken straight. Instead, we seek to trace the sexual in the struggles we conduct, how come together in contest and consensus alike, and the boundaries of belonging that connect us, historically and in ways still to be imagined.

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Individual Presentations

• “Why Isn’t It Better Yet?”: How the LGBT Movement Failed Queer Existence - Anne I. Caldwell, University of Louisville

• Queer Velocities: Critical Mass, Recurrent Institutions, and Political Trust (Pre-Recorded) - Samuel R. Galloway, Purchase College

• Masonic Contracts, Fraternal Contact, and the Intimate Public Sphere - Aylon Cohen, University of Chicago

Chair

• Elena Gambino Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Discussant

• Elena Gambino Rutgers University, New Brunswick