In 1968, Mary McIntosh published an article entitled “The Homosexual Role” in a sociology journal called Social Problems which argued that gay men and lesbians (she used the term “homosexuals”) are created through social processes that emerge at a certain time in history (Reference McIntoshMcIntosh, 1968). In the decades that followed, other scholars in a variety of disciplines made similar claims (Reference Foucault and HurleyFoucault, 1978; Reference Gagnon and SimonGagnon & Simon, 1973; Reference PlummerPlummer, 1975), some making the more sophisticated point that the same is true of heterosexuals and people of other sexual orientations as well. A debate about the nature of the categories of sexual orientation between such social constructionists and essentialists emerged (Reference SteinStein, 1990), with essentialists claiming that sexual orientations were appropriate categories of scientific study much like blood types or neurological conditions. In the 1980s and 1990s, this debate was at the theoretical core of the then-emerging interdisciplinary field of study known as lesbian and gay studies (Reference Abelove, Barale and HalperinAbelove et al., 1993). Some essentialists and some social constructionists claimed that their view would help pave the way to an improved social and legal situation for LGBT people, or at least that the opposing view would undercut the quest for LGBT rights (Reference SteinStein, 1999, pp. 303–304).
Much has changed about the social scientific study of sexuality since McIntosh's early exploration of the emergence of the homosexual. Stefan Vogler's recent book follows in her footsteps but with scholarly and theoretical sophistication and nuance unimaginable in 1968. Vogler's book has a strong and well-articulated meta-sociological foundation but even more impressive is the cogent analysis of a wide array of materials including interviews, documentary evidence, case studies, and observations of legal proceedings lacking in early sociological and historical scholarship about sexuality.
Vogler's interdisciplinary study focuses on the emergence of sexual subjects in two distinct and specific U.S. legal settings: (i) LGBTQ foreign nationals seeking asylum in the United States in virtue of their sexual orientation or gender identity and (ii) the forensic evaluation of sex offenders for purposes of determining the form and length of their incarceration. Some readers might bristle at the idea of putting these two groups—LGBT people generally and those found guilty of sex crimes—together for conceptual and epistemological analysis. This reaction is understandable given the troubling elision of these two distinct groups both historically and continuing today in certain homophobic discourse. Chapter 1 (“Kissing Cousins: Queerness, Crime, and the Politics of Knowing”) of Sorting Sexuality is Vogler's 13-page answer to this concern. Vogler argues that the multifarious historical and rhetorical connections among these two categories and what he calls the “epistemic logics” (pp. 10–12) that created and undergird them justify studying them together. Evidence of these connections can be found, for example, in the late 1960s in one of the earliest LGBT cases to come before the U.S. Supreme Court, Boutilier v. INS, which was decided in 1967 (Boutilier v. INS, 1967). The Immigration and Naturalization Service sought to deport Clive Boutilier, a Canadian living in the United States, because his presence in the U.S. violated a federal law prohibiting those “afflicted with psychopathic personalit[ies]” from entering the country. Boutilier admitted to same-sex sexual attractions and activities but denied that he had a psychopathic personality. The Supreme Court upheld Boutilier's deportation on the grounds that Congress understood that “homosexuals and other sex perverts” were clear instances of psychopathic personalities. As Vogler is interested in how the state, through law and science, develops systems of sexual classification and sorts people into them, his joint and comparative focus on how the legal system since Boutilier came to understand LGBT people as deserving of asylum and, thus, as being appropriate candidates for U.S. citizenship, on the one hand, and how it came to distinguish people guilty of sex crimes who were chronic sex offenders and those who were not but who just so happened to commit sex crimes, on the other, is convincingly justified.
What emerges from Vogler's detailed study of the various materials related to these two legal classification systems is an impressive constructionist story about how law and psychology, medicine, and science operate together to create, reify, and maintain systems of sexual classification. That the legal system plays an important role in how people are classified generally is evident if we think about the myriad of ways the law has and continues to endorse and maintain racial/ethnic and sex/gender classifications. We may not be used to theorizing the construction of sexuality like we do the construction of race and gender, but Vogler makes that case for doing so; he also shows the linkages and interactions of race and sexuality classification systems (pp. 46–50 and 204–206). Even as the social and legal situation for LGBTQ people has improved, the legal and scientific communities work together to justify and sustain sexual categories and the process of doing so involves is a significant exercise of governmental power over people. Vogler effectively and powerfully demonstrates how this exercise of the power of the state has led to the extension of rights for some LGBTQ people, in certain social and legal contexts, while at the same time has led to the increased punishment and surveillance of some sex offenders in other such contexts. Especially effective and engaging is the discussion throughout Chapters 3, 6, and 8 of how the field of forensic psychology emerged to fill a gap created by the reluctance of clinical psychiatry to speak definitively about how to assess which sex offenders were likely to be recidivists and how to treat those who are so deemed. This impressive book will surely reward readers of this journal with an interest in sexuality. Furthermore, this book makes important contributions to the sociology of scientific and social-scientific knowledge and the sociology of legal knowledge generally by charting the divergence of these two quite distinct legal and scientific classifications of sexuality. For this reason, among others, Sorting Sexuality deserves a very broad readership.
