This collection could not have existed five or ten years ago. While collections of gender, sexuality and law scholarship have periodically been produced since the 1990s, it is arguably in the past decade or so that this area has matured into a developed field. This edited collection forms part of Edward Elgar's Law and Society series (edited by Austin Sarat and Rosemary Hunter). This particular collection seeks not only to document the prodigious debates of the present, but to point the way to future sociolegal scholarship in the area of gender, sexuality and law. We sought to bring together scholars from different generations and different viewpoints to provide a sense of the current gender, sexuality and law research landscape. This is a field that is in many ways defined by contested concepts and ongoing debates: within feminism, between feminism and other concepts; between queer theorists, liberationists and those who embrace the equality movement; and between those who resist these temptations to label and define perspectives and those who do not. While many collections inevitably betray editor or author viewpoints in assembling collections, this book seeks to bring together a range of differing perspectives to truly reflect the field of gender, sexuality and the law. The authors will often not agree with one another, let alone the editors, but we feel this is critical for the development of the field and to enable a rich engagement with the research in this area by those new to this area of scholarship.
This article explores ‘bad’ sex in an age of same-sex marriage, through an analysis of the ‘homoradical’ as a rejection of both hetero and homo-normativities. Drawing on qualitative data from 29 LGBTQ interviewees, the article considers resistance to the discursive privileging of same-sex marriage in the context of Gayle Rubin’s theories of respectability and sexual hierarchies. These hierarchies constitute a ‘charmed circle’ of accepted sexual practices which are traditionally justified by marriage, procreation and/or love. It examines non-normative sexuality through the example of the lived experiences of non-normative, anti-assimilationist identities, particularly non-monogamy, public sex, and kink sex, showing how the ‘homoradical’ deviates from the normative practices that same-sex marriage reinforces.
Book Review:
The Queer Outside in Law: Recognising LGBTIQ People in the United Kingdom, P Dunne and S Raj (eds), [Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, 277pp, £89.99 (hardback)]
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