Reviews

Books reviewed:
Minkkinnen, Thinking Without Desire: A First Philosophy of Law
Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
Clyde and Edwards, Judicial Review
Oliver, Common Values and the Public-Private Divide
Goodwin-Gill and Talmon (eds), The Reality of International Law: Essays in Honour of Ian Brownlie     

LGBTQ Youth in the Child Welfare System: An Overview of Research,Practice, and Policy

LGBTQ youth are largely overrepresented in the child welfare system. The experiences of LGBTQ youth have largely been overlooked. LGBTQ youth often encounter a number of challenges and disparities as they navigate the child welfare system. Many report experiences of discrimination, marginalization, and an overall lack of acceptance. The permanency and placement options have historically been limited for many LGBTQ youth, often leading to an over reliance on congregate settings and aging out of foster are. The current article provides a synthesis of the existing research on the experiences and outcomes of LGBTQ youth in care, as well as an exploration of the policy and practice initiatives aimed at creating a more inclusive system of care.     

Consuming Spaces: Clive Barker,William Gibson and the Cultural Poetics of Postmodern Fantasy

A significant trend emerges in contemporary fantasy-what might be called 'heterocosmic fantasy', as opposed to an older but still vital tradition of 'epic' high fantasy. The narrative forms of heterocosmic fantasy accord with the defining characteristics of contemporary media (particularly the Internet and contemporary television programming, and the practice of 'surfing' both of these), but this form of fantasy also rehearses certain ideological modes of behaviour. In particular, it rehearses in textual form the illusory alterity, the management of potential social unrest, and the frenetic consumption of 'late capitalist' society.     

APPLYING A GENERAL STRAIN THEORY FRAMEWORK TO UNDERSTAND SCHOOL WEAPON CARRYING AMONG LGBQ AND HETEROSEXUAL YOUTH

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and questioning (LGBQ) youth are at a higher risk for school victimization, social isolation, and school weapon carrying compared with their heterosexual peers, yet few studies have been conducted to investigate their experiences. By using a general strain theory (GST) framework, data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) statewide probability sample of Delaware heterosexual (n = 7,688) and LGBQ (n = 484) youth in grades 9–12 show that there are both similarities and differences in the factors associated with school weapon carrying among LGBQ and heterosexual youth. LGBQ and heterosexual youth's weapon carrying is related to school victimization, but social support does not moderate the relationship between school victimization and school weapon carrying as suggested by GST. Furthermore, being male is significantly related to heterosexual youth's weapon carrying, but sex is not related to weapon carrying among LGBQ youth. Overall, the results highlight a need to reconceptualize GST to help center the experiences of LGBQ youth, a historically marginalized group, within mainstream criminological literature. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.     

“Time to Speak Out”: The 1980s Australian Gay Press and Personal Accounts of Living with HIV

This article considers the significance of gay men’s personal accounts of living with HIV or AIDS that were published in the gay press across the 1980s. Editors utilised individuals’ accounts of living with the illness to challenge mainstream media representations of gay men’s physical and emotional demise in the “final stages” of the debilitating illness. Such accounts conveyed the message that it was possible to resume one’s life after receiving a positive diagnosis. Gay men’s personal accounts of living with HIV or AIDS evolved from anonymous anecdotes to articles accompanied by the narrator’s full name and photograph by the end of the decade. This shift is attributed to Australia’s Third National AIDS Conference in 1988, whereby people with HIV and AIDS publicly disclosed their positive statuses. This article locates gay men’s personal accounts of living with HIV in a broader transnational shift towards the visibility of people with HIV and AIDS that was underway at that time.     

Signs of Anthropomorphism: The Case of Natural History Television Documentaries

This article employs Peirce's triadic concept of the sign, and Deleuze's theory of the image-movement to propose a social semiotic account of the ways in which visual signs in British and US natural history anthropomorphicise 'nature'. Peirce's semiotic is employed to critique both realist and relativist accounts of anthropomorphism. Although there may be a causally indexical relation between photographic signs and object, the fact that all signs are constituted by a three-way relationship between sign, object, and interpretant means that natural history documentaries, like the scientific texts that purportedly inform them, are ineluctably anthropomorphic. Deleuze's account of the image-movement is employed to explain why, far from being a dispassionate capturing of 'any-instants-whatsoevers', natural history image-movements organise movement in ways that are mediated by the semiotics of the natural history genre. As such, image-movements also constitute a form of anthropomorphism.     

The Supreme Court and Issue Attention: The Case of Homosexuality

Previous studies have shown that a small number of Supreme Court decisions that “rearrange[d] the … distribution of political benefits” have drawn the media's attention to the underlying issues involved in those cases. This article provides an additional test of that empirical claim, examining the effects of the Supreme Court's gay rights cases on media coverage of homosexuality from 1990 to 2005. The data indicate that Supreme Court decisions that expanded the scope of gay rights increased coverage of homosexuality in both The New York Times and USA Today, while cases that affirmed the existing scope of gay rights had no such effect.     

Activist knowledges in queer politics1

Abstract

This paper examines the politics of knowledge production in the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activism. It situates the development of LGBT activist research capacity within a broader shift towards evidence-based policy-making. The paper presents case studies of LGBT organizing from the US and Canada to demonstrate how LGBT activists utilize established social science methodologies such as statistics to claim legitimacy and render queer worlds visible in the policy process. The paper argues that this development in LGBT advocacy is marked by struggles over the kinds of queer realities that may be enacted through social scientific inquiry. The paper also explores the deployment of auditing and benchmarking in LGBT activist knowledge production. It demonstrates the way in which LGBT activists are using these privileged modes of knowledge production to produce truths regarding the nature, extent and effect of homophobia and heterosexism. The relationship between such calculative technologies and the emergence of LGBT active citizenship practices is considered. The paper concludes by emphasizing the decidedly mixed political implications of the increasing reliance on social science and calculative practices in queer activism.     

Gay fathers,gay citizenship: on the power of reproductive futurism and assimilation

Edelman's new ethics of queer theory is focussed on the all-pervasive image of the child, which he argues provides the foundation for the hegemonic politics of ‘reproductive futurism’ (L. Edelman, 2004. No future: queer theory and the death drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). His searing criticism raises important questions for sexual citizenship, and particularly for the gay parent as citizen. Edelman's argument that queers should abandon accommodation and instead embrace their position as the figure of negativity offers a challenge to all those gay men that seek to be fathers. In this article, I critically engage with Edelman's arguments and explore the implications of a queer rejection of reproductive futurism and parental privilege through an empirical investigation of young gay men's stories about the possibility of becoming fathers. I argue that whilst Edelman's uncompromising stance serves to open a space for gay men embracing the jouissance that is increasingly being abandoned through an assimilationist desire for citizenship, it also, more problematically, closes down possibilities for gay men and thus further reinforces present inequalities in citizenship. Is negativity the only option in the face of the onslaught of reproductive futurism or might there be a dialectical solution that is at once radically queer but also reflective of the variety of claims for sexual citizenship?