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Sexual Strangers (Queer Politics Queer Theories) | 
| Author: Shane Phelan
Publisher: Temple University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy Used: $6.02
You Save: $17.93 (75%)
Rating:  1 reviews
Media: Paperback
Pages: 179
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.6
ISBN: 1566398282
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.906640973
EAN: 9781566398282
ASIN: 1566398282
Publication Date: January 15, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Expedited shipping is not available for this item. Items are mailed via USPS media mail within 2 business days and should arrive 4-14 business days later.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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 'equality' that it promises? In "Sexual Strangers", 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 'us' and 'them', 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 'mainstream'."Sexual Strangers" 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 "Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories". She is the chair of the American Political Science Association's Committee on the Status of Lesbians and Gays in the Profession.
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| Customer Reviews:
Excellent Book June 3, 2004
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book. Gay and lesbian issues are always best understood from a cool, level-headed social science approach. The question of whether or not gay people are citizens is very compelling. Clearly in America, gays cannot be considered real or full citizens because this is a country dominated ideologically by heterosexuals who demand that all people be heterosexual (or else!). Gays have the least amount of civil rights than any other group in America. What's more, if you are gay and black, you have to deal with racism and homophobia. If you are a woman, too; then you have sexism to also worry about. That's why it's silly to say that gay rights are not civil rights or that gay rights somehow dishonors the civil rights movement. First of all, there are gay black people, so how can gay rights dishonor the civil rights movement? It doesn't make sense. To say that calling gay rights civil rights dishonors the civil rights movement would, in effect, be saying that all black people are straight, which is simply not true. Gay people (of all races and ethnicities) have the least amount of rights in this country, and that should be enough to make us all seriously question just how free America really is.
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