Shane Phelan - Böcker

We Are Everywhere brings together the key primary sources relating to the politics of homosexuality. Tracing the evolution of the lesbian and gay movement, We AreEverywhere includes writings from the beginnings of the gay and lesbian movement in the 19th century ; legal and government studies concerning rights of gay and lesbian citizens; articles from the early US liberation movement publications; documents from the first days of the AIDS epidemic to current activism; statements and writings from the movements within "the movement"; and finally, alook at the future of lesbian and gay politics.

We Are Everywhere brings together the key primary sources relating to the politics of homosexuality. Tracing the evolution of the lesbian and gay movement, We AreEverywhere includes writings from the beginnings of the gay and lesbian movement in the 19th century ; legal and government studies concerning rights of gay and lesbian citizens; articles from the early US liberation movement publications; documents from the first days of the AIDS epidemic to current activism; statements and writings from the movements within "the movement"; and finally, alook at the future of lesbian and gay politics.

The last five years have witnessed the birth of a vibrant new group of young scholars who are writing about queer law, politics, and policy--topics which are no longer treated as of interest only to lesbians and gay men, but which now garner the attention of political theorists of all stripes. Playing With Fire--the first scholarly collection on queer politics by US political theorists--opens the intersection of lesbian and gay studies and political theory to a wide audience. It covers a wide range of issues, including: the theory of queer identities; the contrasts among ethnic, racial, and sexual identities; the debate between liberals and communitarians; the right to privacy; and the meaning of equal citizenship.

The last five years have witnessed the birth of a vibrant new group of young scholars who are writing about queer law, politics, and policy--topics which are no longer treated as of interest only to lesbians and gay men, but which now garner the attention of political theorists of all stripes. Playing With Fire--the first scholarly collection on queer politics by US political theorists--opens the intersection of lesbian and gay studies and political theory to a wide audience. It covers a wide range of issues, including: the theory of queer identities; the contrasts among ethnic, racial, and sexual identities; the debate between liberals and communitarians; the right to privacy; and the meaning of equal citizenship.

"Lesbian feminism began and has fueled itself with the rejection of liberalism.... In this rejection, lesbian feminists were not alone. They were joined by the New Left, by many blacks in the civil rights movement, by male academic theorists.... What all these groups shared was an intense awareness of the ways in which liberalism fails to account for the social reality of the world, through a reliance upon law and legal structure to define membership, through individualism, through its basis in a particular conception of rationality."In tracing how lesbian feminism came to be defined in uneasy relationships with the Women's Movement and gay rights groups, Shane Phelan explores the tension between liberal ideals of individual rights and tolerance and communitarian ideals of solidarity. The debate over lesbian sado-masochism—an expression of individual choice or pornographic, anti-feminist behavior?—is considered as a test case.Phelan addresses the problems faced by "the woman-identified woman" in a liberal society that presumes heterosexuality as the biological, psychological, and moral standard. Often silenced by laws defining their sexual behavior as criminal and censured by a medical establishment that persists in defining homosexuality as perversion, lesbians, like blacks and other groups, have fought to have the same rights as others in their communities and even in their own homes. Lesbian feminists have also sought to define themselves as a community that would be distinctly different, a community that would disavow the traditional American obsession with individual advancement in the world as it is.In this controversial study of political philosophy and the women's movement, Phelan argues that "the failure to date to produce a satisfying theory and program for lesbian action is reflective of the failure of modern political thinking to produce a compelling, nonsuspect alternative to liberalism."In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.

Is the United States a heterosexual regime? If it is, how may we understand the political position of those who cannot or will not align themselves with heterosexuality? With these provocative questions, Shane Phelan raises the issue of whether lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people can be seen as citizens at all. Can citizenship be made queer? Or does citizenship require the exclusion of those who are regarded as queer to preserve the i??equalityi??' that it promises? In i??Sexual Strangersi??, Shane Phelan argues that, in the United States, queers are strangers - not exactly the enemy, since they are not excluded from all rights of citizenship, but not quite members. Rather, they are ambiguous figures who trouble the border between i??usi??' and i??themi??', a border just as central to liberal regimes as to other states. Life on this border structures both the exclusion of sexual minorities and their ambivalence about becoming part of the i??mainstreami??'. i??Sexual Strangersi?? addresses questions of long-standing importance to minority group politics: the meaning and terms of inclusion, respect, and resistance.Phelan looks at citizenship as including not only equal protection and equal rights to such institutions as marriage and military service, but also political and cultural visibility, as inclusion in the national imaginary. She discusses the continuing stigmatization of bisexuals and transgendered people within lesbian and gay communities as a result of the attempt to flee from strangeness, a flight that inevitably produces new strangers. Her goal is to convince students of politics, both academic and activist, to embrace the rewards of strangeness as a means of achieving inclusive citizenship, rather than a citizenship that defines itself by what it will not accept. Author note: Shane Phelan is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico. She is the author or editor of several books on lesbian and gay politics, most recently i??Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theoriesi??. She is the chair of the American Political Science Association's Committee on the Status of Lesbians and Gays in the Profession.