Current Projects
Terms of Exclusion: Rightful Citizenship Claims and LGBT Political Identity Construction (Under contract with Oxford University Press)
Terms of Exclusion draws on intersectionality and scholarship from political science, sociology, queer theory, and gender studies to introduce a new theory of political identity group construction that focuses on the effects of within-group marginalization on what comes to be known of the group and its agendas. Examining social movement activism and interest group advocacy on behalf of LGBT people from 1968 to 2004, it argues that rightful citizenship claims, or the assertion by political actors that lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people are denied rights owed to them as citizens, created the conditions for recognizing White, gender-normative, and monogamously-partnered gay men and lesbians in institutions of citizenship, such as marriage or the military, while simultaneously foreclosing representation of interests that are most pressing for LGBT-identified people who are Black, Latinx, Asian, Native, transgender, non-Christian, undocumented, incarcerated, and/or subjected to intensified forms of surveillance. The manuscript advances this argument by using Critical Discourse Analysis on an extensive archive of institutional primary source documents and publications to show that within-group marginalization of these members is not an accident of political expediency or due to relatively fewer resources, but rather a discursive strategy employed by political actors to make the group palatable to lawmakers and the general public. Centering who is invited into LGBT membership, and who is erased or silenced, thus constitutes a significant revision to existing scholarship on LGBT politics in political science by pointing to the erasures and elisions that facilitate group construction.
Find me on Google Scholar
Terms of Exclusion: Rightful Citizenship Claims and LGBT Political Identity Construction (Under contract with Oxford University Press)
Terms of Exclusion draws on intersectionality and scholarship from political science, sociology, queer theory, and gender studies to introduce a new theory of political identity group construction that focuses on the effects of within-group marginalization on what comes to be known of the group and its agendas. Examining social movement activism and interest group advocacy on behalf of LGBT people from 1968 to 2004, it argues that rightful citizenship claims, or the assertion by political actors that lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people are denied rights owed to them as citizens, created the conditions for recognizing White, gender-normative, and monogamously-partnered gay men and lesbians in institutions of citizenship, such as marriage or the military, while simultaneously foreclosing representation of interests that are most pressing for LGBT-identified people who are Black, Latinx, Asian, Native, transgender, non-Christian, undocumented, incarcerated, and/or subjected to intensified forms of surveillance. The manuscript advances this argument by using Critical Discourse Analysis on an extensive archive of institutional primary source documents and publications to show that within-group marginalization of these members is not an accident of political expediency or due to relatively fewer resources, but rather a discursive strategy employed by political actors to make the group palatable to lawmakers and the general public. Centering who is invited into LGBT membership, and who is erased or silenced, thus constitutes a significant revision to existing scholarship on LGBT politics in political science by pointing to the erasures and elisions that facilitate group construction.
Find me on Google Scholar