Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming critiques the assumption common to mainstream LGBTQ advocacy that to improve their access to rights, queer and trans people must replicate a narrow definition of visibility. In the book, Carly Thomsen argues that expectations of visibility rely upon metronormativity. Metronormativity is a concept introduced by Jack Halberstam in the mid-2000s that refers to the conflation of visible queerness with involvement in stereotypical forms of urban gay life. Thomsen is invested in how expectations of metronormativity fail most queer people. She is specifically interested in how these expectations fail rural queers.
Visibility Interrupted focusses on Thomsen's ethnographic research with rural queer women in Minnesota and South Dakota, who, Thomsen argues, “become illegible through visibility discourses” (x). The book draws on fifty interviews with women in Minnesota and South Dakota that Thomsen conducted between September and December 2011. Thomsen's interviewees range from eighteen to seventy-three in age and come from a wide range of class backgrounds. Many of her interlocutors identify as disabled, and eight identify as women of colour. In addition to conducting interviews, Thomsen also situates her analysis in rural queer studies and a discussion of how mainstream LGBTQ rights campaigns have misconstrued and misrepresented rural queer people. Thomsen describes the lives of her interlocutors to provide an effective representation of the complexity of lesbian queer life in the rural Upper Midwest and to refute the assumption in mainstream LGBTQ advocacy that visibility discourses improve life for all queer people.
The project intervenes in broader critiques of visibility politics in queer and trans studies. Thomsen describes this intervention by arguing, “Those readers well versed in queer studies, particularly queer anthropology, transnational queer studies, and queer of colour critique, will recognize as familiar the position that the approaches of mainstream Western gay rights groups do not work for ________ group in ________ place. (Go ahead, fill in the blanks!)” (xxxii). As she explains elsewhere in the framing of the book, visibility discourses do not just fail to work for specific groups of queer and trans people in specific locations. Instead, they actively invite surveillance and misrecognition for the many queer and trans people who relate to their sexuality and gender in ways that exceed the expectations of normative LGBTQ visibility.
In her analysis of how expectations of visibility have been used to harm queer and trans people, Thomsen extends an argument common to several decades of work in queer and trans studies. For instance, C. Riley Snorton discusses what Judith Butler refers to as the category of “humanly visible choice” in a 2009 essay entitled “The Psychic Life of Passing.” Snorton argues that “the relation between what is human and what is visible/legible is problematic as it seems to preclude the possibilities for other communities to validate the lives of those who may be culturally illegible elsewhere.”Footnote 1 As Thomsen writes of her interlocutors, framing visibility as an immutable common good for queer people devalues the way that rural queers in the Upper Midwest support one another. This is an example of the problem Snorton raises: to conflate visibility and the human (or, as Thomsen argues, to conflate visibility and queer life) is to disavow how queer people make each other legible in ways that often turn away from how mainstream LGBTQ advocacy defines visibility. Thomsen seeks to disaggregate a sense of queer community from normative LGBTQ visibility in the lives of her interlocutors. As Thomsen writes of one interlocutor, “an interviewee quickly and casually responded that yes, indeed, she had a gay community, but they were all just straight” (146). For this interlocutor, as for many other people with whom Thomsen spoke, feeling supported as a queer person is not synonymous with having a community that defines itself as queer.
Visibility Interrupted argues that expectations that frame visibility as a precondition of queer rights are important to unseat because they turn queerness into a constitutive part of normativity. As Thomsen argues, quoting the work of Jordana Rosenberg and Amy Villarejo, “we cannot create a queer ‘world other than the one in which we find ourselves currently mired’ without rethinking demands for LGBTQ visibility” (87). As Thomsen explains throughout the book, visibility discourses misframe the lives of most queer people in the service of trying to make queer life legible and appealing to the heteronormative and neoliberal structures to which a critical queer orientation is definitionally opposed.
After its introductory discussion of how visibility discourses occlude rural queer life, the book addresses the case of the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. Thomsen explains how the murder of a young gay man in the third-largest city in Wyoming has perpetuated biased ideas about rural queer life. As Thomsen argues, “metronormativity depends upon and benefits from dominant constructions of the rural as white, which comes to stand in for the ostensible safety and backwardness of the rural” (30). Thomsen uses this framework to address the assumptions that visibility discourses make about how sexuality relates to identity, as well as how sexual identity often exceeds racialized expectations of geographic context.
As Thomsen argues in the book's second chapter, “the women with whom I was in conversation craft their identities in ways that neither centralize nor ignore their sexualities. This form of crafting implicitly rejects mainstream gay rights advocates’ assumption that visibility is the key to self-actualization” (44). The book's third chapter considers what Thomsen refers to as the “post-spatial” dimensions of metronormativity. As she explains, “When the metaphysics of the metropolis become normative, prescriptive, hegemonic – always already assumed to apply transgeographically – we are, I suggest, imagining post-spatially” (65). Thomsen uses the concept of the “post-spatial” to explain how homonormative ideas of identity assume normative ideas of urban space that flatten the actual complexity of both urban and rural contexts.
The book's fourth chapter, “Queer Labors,” reads “calls for LGBTQ visibility” as they “relentlessly demand constant laboring” and “thus reflect and affirm capitalist relations” (87). The final two chapters focus on how advocacy oriented toward rural queers often misrepresents “the specificity of rural queer life,” and on a documentary that Thomsen made in the mid-2010s in collaboration with her students and her interlocutors (138). As the book's later chapters clarify, when Thomsen critiques visibility, she is specifically objecting to the compulsion to frame queer visibility as a public speech act. As she writes in her discussion of queer visibility as labour, “Even in the case where one works to present their sexuality to the world via a nonnormative gender presentation, this is no longer enough to be viewed as ‘out’ as LGBTQ – at the workplace or otherwise” (96). Visibility, as Thomsen critiques it, refers not to having queer relationships or to nonverbal expressions of queer identity, but to explicitly articulating the fact of one's queerness to one's friends, colleagues, and neighbours.
Thomsen's analysis suggests that the homonormative conception of LGBTQ people espoused by many dominant queer and trans rights organizations functions like any other type of normativity as it projects the collective relevance of a set of social expectations to which almost no one can conform. As Kadji Amin argues in his discussion of the category “cisgender,” “Contamination is the companion of categorization. It is all but impossible to feel entirely unambivalent about, entirely described by, a social identity category.”Footnote 2 Visibility, as Thomsen argues, fails in large part because it asks queer people to suture their identity to an inflexible version of queerness. This strong attachment changes queerness from a social category organized around ambivalence about the premise of comprehensive social categories into a static marker of neoliberal diversity.
Questions of to whom queer life is and should be visible also animate Anna Lvovsky's Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall. Vice Patrol attends to how the legal system's conflicting approaches to public performances of cis-male homosexuality, media narratives of gay life, and gay public culture informed one another in the mid-twentieth-century United States. The book focusses on three contexts of antihomosexual policing between the 1930s and the 1960s in cities throughout the United States: “liquor board proceedings against gay-friendly bars, plainclothes campaigns to entice sexual overtures, and the use of clandestine surveillance to uncover sexual acts in public bathrooms” (4). Lvovksy traces the development of urban police departments’ vice squads, which targeted both people engaged in public homosexual intercourse and people socializing in bars associated with queer life.
The book focusses on “the law's many ways of understanding, and misunderstanding, the nature of gay life” (18) and posits that the complex legal history of urban police forces’ and courts’ approaches to gay cis-men is integral to medical, ethnographic, and social histories of gay sexuality in the mid-twentieth-century United States. Vice Patrol draws on extensive legal-history research in local and state archives, as well as national legal history, gay and lesbian history, and media history. Lvovsky also engages queer urban history, criminology, psychology, and the history of policing. The book draws most extensively, however, on legal and journalistic accounts of antihomosexual policing.
Vice Patrol seeks to provide a legal-historical context for debates about queer public life in the four decades before Stonewall. Lvovsky intervenes in what she refers to as “the broader cultural battle lines undergirding the search for some intuitive hallmarks of queerness at midcentury” (62). Lvovsky explains that many psychiatrists, amid their postwar rise in cultural power, sought to describe homosexuality as a medical condition. In contrast, homophile groups like the Mattachine Society sought to describe homosexuality as a sexual culture. Social scientists sought to describe homosexual practices as part of broader studies of deviance. And law enforcement agencies insisted that homosexual behaviour represented a pathological violation of the law, even as the courts often disagreed. One important contribution of the book is its discussion of how different arms of state power disagreed with one another in the mid-twentieth century about how to address homosexual conduct. Where other work in queer studies has addressed the state as a monolith, Vice Patrol details the discrepancies between law enforcement and the courts, which reveal the mid-twentieth-century state as an uneven patchwork of approaches to a changing set of cultural norms about homosexuality.
The first two chapters of the book address how the debates about the role of expertise in identifying homosexuals shaped conflicting conceptions of what homosexuality was. Where psychiatrists and ethnographers increasingly argued that identifying homosexuals required specialized training, Lvovsky notes that “if not in the doctor's office or even in the press, the liquor boards preserved the standing of the layman as the ultimate arbiter of deviance” (89). Liquor boards insisted on “the public's shared, inalienable wisdom about sexual difference” (96). Vice squads used this argument to justify the targeting of people presumed to be homosexual because of their dress, body language, hairstyle, social behaviour, choice of beverage, or merely their presence in a particular bar.
The book's third and fourth chapters focus on the decoy and ethnographic policing, in which police officers studied homosexual culture and then aimed to imitate it to entice men into sexual activity for which those men could be arrested. In these chapters, Lvovsky focusses on how vice squads came to study the homosexual cultures they planned to infiltrate, but also “the gap that such insights opened up between different legal agents who shaped gay men's rights and freedoms at midcentury – the divergence between what the policemen responsible for arresting gay men and the judges responsible for overseeing their arrests knew about the nature of gay life” (178).
The book's fifth chapter focusses on restroom surveillance, and the disconnect between “vice officers surveilling restrooms” who “patiently waited for suspects to commit a felony offense” and “Los Angeles judges,” for instance, who “resolved nearly 99 percent of those charges as misdemeanors” (196). The book's final chapter addresses media coverage of queer life in the 1960s as it raised public questions about the ethics of vice squads’ approaches and involved readers in a voyeuristic interest in urban gay sexual cultures. Media coverage of gay life exposed the methods of vice squads, which were rendered ineffective by becoming public knowledge. Vice Patrol's impressive legal-historical archive suggests that the metronormativity that Thomsen critiques, which takes white gay cis-men in cities as a metonym for all queer people, has precedent not only in mainstream LGBTQ advocacy but also in the targets of vice policing.
One area of the book's focus about which it would be helpful to have more information is its engagement with how race and sexuality together have shaped the history of policing. The book's introduction suggests that the subjects of antihomosexual policing were largely white, gay, cis-men, “middle-class suspects who otherwise rarely crossed paths with the police” (21). The book frames the legal history it provides as an accompaniment to recent histories of racialized policing. As Lvovsky writes, “the story here can be seen as a complement to the eye-opening histories of racialized policing published in recent years: a study of the very different project enforcing a largely white-identified morals offense” (21). Lvovsky's analysis recalls the formulation of what Roderick Ferguson refers to as the “one-dimensional queer,” in which “gay politics responded to the intersectional potentials of queer liberation by cleaving struggles over sexuality from similar struggles over race, poverty, and gender oppression.”Footnote 3 A more explicit grappling with how race functions in the book's archive would clarify the implications of this archive for understanding how sexuality and race have been entangled in the history of antigay policing as well as in the opposition to punitive state power.
Visibility Interrupted and Vice Patrol offer two very different examples of recent work under the umbrella of queer studies. Vice Patrol is a historical project grounded in legal studies. Visibility Interrupted is a contemporary ethnography of lesbian queer life. Vice Patrol also focusses almost entirely on white cis-men in mid-twentieth-century US cities and Visibility Interrupted on a group of largely white queer women in the rural Upper Midwest in the early 2010s. Both books, however, are invested in how dominant regulatory systems – antihomosexual policing in Vice Patrol and mainstream LGBTQ activism in Visibility Interrupted – work to create the social categories with and against which queer and trans people identify. Vice Patrol draws out a long history of queer visibility in US cities, a history located in debates about the kind of knowledge required to speak with authority about the visibility of queer people.
In Thomsen's context, queer visibility has shifted from a tool used by police to a reclaimed means of asserting the right to inclusion within normative social structures. Thomsen argues that the compulsion to be visible actively misrepresents the lives and communities of queer people whose relationships to their queerness do not conform to the kind of being queer that counts as being visible. In Thomsen's assessment, visibility is a strategy for limiting the complexity of queerness. In the pursuit of normative visibility, articulations of sexual difference serve to make queer people into a repetition of a heterosexual with the difference of identification. Visibility discourses turn queerness into a nonthreatening variation on the expectation of cis-heterosexuality rather than an orientation premised on refusing the inequitable distribution of resources in accordance with sexual, gender, and racial norms.
Taken together, these books encourage their readers to revisit how both the nominal mainstream support and punitive targeting of queer people have been used to reinforce systemic inequality. Visibility, as Thomsen explores, assumes the possibility and benefit of a single, collective understanding of queerness. And yet, as Lvovsky makes clear, queer life and its relationship with regulatory systems have long been animated by disagreements about what queerness is, and how queer people engage with public life. As these books demonstrate, it is not visibility but rather the opacity of queerness that has been most useful to queer people. Both Lvovsky and Thomsen speculate about some of the many ways this queer opacity has manifested, largely among white queers in the US. Thomsen especially considers how “collective queer political action” might begin from a place of opacity.Footnote 4 The question of how all people marginalized by norms of racialized gender and sexuality can advocate collectively without assuming equal or shared experiences of marginalization and without mandating visibility has been and continues to be the animating question of queer coalition politics.
