Sexual Identities, Queer Politics. Edited by Mark Blasius. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 382p. $60.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and the Dilemmas of Citizenship. By Shane Phelan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. 232p. $59.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Extract

Shane Phelan and Mark Blasius have played a leading role in the development of a lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgender (LBGT) literature within political science, and their most recent texts enrich both this specialized field and the study of politics as a whole. Phelan's investigation of citizenship begins with the claim that LBGT people are “strangers” in American society. According to Zygmunt Bauman (Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 1991), the Jews in European history were strangers. Neither friend nor enemy, they were treated as an ambiguous and shifting figure of otherness that marked the boundary between us and them, but at the same time calling into question the very possibility of such a clear exclusionary division. Critical readings of anti-Semitic discourse can be quite fruitful for the study of homophobia because the demonized subject in both cases is an enemy within who is simultaneously excessively present but invisible; powerful and threatening but harmless and effeminate; physically close but spiritually remote; embodying the highest intellectual and aesthetic values but expressing modern urban decadence and decay, circulating in “mainstream” society and seductively corrupting the innocent, but shunning “mainstream” society and remaining an unassimilated difference within its own separatist cultural enclave. Phelan puts Bauman's stranger trope to good use as she explores the complex positioning of LBGT people in American official discourse and culture.