Queering Expertise: Counterpublics, Social Change, and the Corporeal Dilemmas of LGBTQ Equality

Abstract

This essay considers how rhetorics of expertise constitute social identity in the lesbian gay bisexual transgender queer/questioning (LGBTQ) rights movement. While members of the mainstream gay rights movement typically emphasize conventional political channels, participants in the “radical” gay rights movement prefer transgressive enactments of non-normative sexualities. Because the resulting arguments over strategy are simultaneously debates about what it means to be a queer citizen, I conclude that discourses of expertise also function as nodal points for group identity within queer counterpublics. Furthermore, I argue that a more conservative queer rhetoric of expertise places constraints on queer subjectivity that are deeply problematic for those navigating the already murky waters of sexual identity in America.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.