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Queer Acts and the Politics of “Direct Address”: Rethinking Law, Culture, and Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Lisa C. Bower
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A question intimated by some contemporary scholarship (but not yet fully explored) is how cultural practices that law both enables and limits might be related to new styles of politics and redefinitions of community. This query is first explored in the context of Queer Nation's response to the decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which reduced homosexual identity to a single behavior. Queers' subsequent embrace of a cultural politics of “direct address” suggests that the transformation of identities and communities must be built from social and cultural practices that seek to redefine citizens' affiliations. While “turning away from the law” is one strategy for redefining political practice, the case of Karen Ulane—a transsexual who was fired after having sex reassignment surgery—suggests another: The articulation of a queer notion of “nonidentity” within the legal field may afford possibilities for destabilizing dominant legal classifications such as “sex” and “gender.”

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 28 , Issue 5: Symposium: Community and Identity in Sociolegal Studies , 1994 , pp. 1009 - 1133
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

Research support for this article was provided by a postdoctoral fellowship (1993-94) funded by the Rockefeller Foundation at the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota and a Women's Studies Summer Research Award (1993) from Arizona State University. A preliminary version was presented at the Western Political Science Annual Meeting in San Francisco (March 1992). I thank my discussant at that meeting, Vivian Herman, whose initial comments and continued insights on this topic have been invaluable. Parts of the text were presented to the Theorizing Female Diversity Seminar at the University of Minnesota. Comments from the audience helped to sharpen my thinking on several aspects of the argument. Peter Siegelman alerted me to the existence of extensive archive materials on the Ulane case-the inclusion of these materials has allowed me to expand my preliminary arguments. Recent drafts have benefitted from conversations with Elizabeth Chambliss, Rosemary Coombe, Michael McGourthy, Elizabeth Mertz, Mandy Roll-Kuhne, and the students in Jacqueline Zita's Queer Theory seminar. The members of my writing group at the University of Minnesota, Lisa Disch and Jennifer Pierce, read several drafts and provided the kind of commentary that comes only from close and careful reading. Leigh Ann Wheeler provided invaluable research assistance.

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Archival Material

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