A pathbreaking genealogy of queer theory that traces its roots to an unexpected source: sociological research on marginal communities in the era before Stonewall.
The sociology of “social deviants” flourished in the United States at midcentury, studying the lives of outsiders such as homosexuals, Jews, disabled people, drug addicts, and political radicals. But in the next decades, many of these downcast figures would become the architects of new social movements, activists in revolt against institutions, the state, and social constraint. As queer theory gained prominence as a subfield of the humanities in the late 1980s, it seemed to inherit these radical, activist impulses—challenging not only gender and sexual norms, but the nature of society itself.
With Underdogs, Heather Love shows that queer theorists inherited as much from sociologists as they did from activists. Through theoretical and archival work, Love traces the connection between midcentury studies of deviance and the anti-normative, anti-essentialist field of queer theory. While sociologists saw deviance as an inevitable fact of social life, queer theorists embraced it as a rallying cry. A robust interdisciplinary history of the field, Underdogs stages a reencounter with the practices and communities that underwrite radical queer thought.
A pathbreaking genealogy of queer theory that traces its roots to an unexpected source: sociological research on marginal communities in the era before Stonewall.
The sociology of “social deviants” flourished in the United States at midcentury, studying the lives of outsiders such as homosexuals, Jews, disabled people, drug addicts, and political radicals. But in the next decades, many of these downcast figures would become the architects of new social movements, activists in revolt against institutions, the state, and social constraint. As queer theory gained prominence as a subfield of the humanities in the late 1980s, it seemed to inherit these radical, activist impulses—challenging not only gender and sexual norms, but the nature of society itself.
With Underdogs, Heather Love shows that queer theorists inherited as much from sociologists as they did from activists. Through theoretical and archival work, Love traces the connection between midcentury studies of deviance and the anti-normative, anti-essentialist field of queer theory. While sociologists saw deviance as an inevitable fact of social life, queer theorists embraced it as a rallying cry. A robust interdisciplinary history of the field, Underdogs stages a reencounter with the practices and communities that underwrite radical queer thought.
Preface
Introduction: Beginning with Stigma
1 The Stigma Archive
2 Just Watching
3 A Sociological Periplum
4 Doing Being Deviant
Afterword: The Politics of Stigma
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Heather Love is professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History.
“What might we learn about queer studies by exploring its
intellectual debts to midcentury social scientists’ interest in
underdogs, underworlds, and the dynamics of stigma? Heather
Love’s provocative and defamiliarizing analysis asks us to see
queer studies—its limitations and its transformational
possibilities—anew. A critical intellectual history, teeming
with ideas and unlikely engagements.”
*Regina Kunzel, Yale University*
“Underdogs is a well-crafted, subtle, and beautifully written foray
into the worlds of mid-twentieth century social science by a
humanities scholar who uncovers, in the fine details of descriptive
empirical research, the largely unrecognized precursors of today’s
queer studies. With keen focus, Love reveals new possibilities for
scholarly, ethical, and political commitments to the defense of
outcasts and outsiders. Love makes an impassioned claim that
humanists and social scientists need one another—and need to set
aside the tenacious methodological dogmas that keep them
apart.”
*Steven Epstein, Northwestern University*
“Underdogs clarifies how the social science of deviance, like the
queer theory that superseded it, depended on the figure of the
outsider. Love asks queer theory to take social science
methodologies, especially ‘underdog methods,’ seriously. At their
best, these methods promise to keep queer theory open to surprise
and alert to the potentialities of everyday life.”
*Elizabeth Freeman, University of California, Davis*
"Heather Love’s Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer
Theory (University of Chicago Press) is an intervention into
the field of queer studies. But it is also an important work of
intellectual history, tracing a surprising new genealogy that
locates the origins of 1990s ‘queer theory’ not in literary
studies, but in mid-20th-century empirical social research. It will
appeal to readers invested in the nascent effort to historicise
queer studies, but also to those interested in the history of the
social sciences."
*History Today*
"Underdogs seeks to rethink Queer Theory's ideological
contributions through an excavation of the field's unacknowledged
predecessors in the postwar social sciences. . . .
[Love's] lucid prose and well-grounded interpretations make
Underdogs a book that should interest readers who are immersed in
Queer Theory and those who are not at all."
*Gay & Lesbian Review*
"Underdogs presents a thorough argument for queer theorists to
understand the way their problematic forebearers have left
indelible marks on the field. . . . Underdogs presents a
careful, close reading of deviance studies, and invites theorists
and scholars to reconsider their intellectual heritage."
*LSE Review of Books*
"This book concisely addresses the modern queer movement as Love
challenges readers to critically consider that holding on to what
is most valuable in queer critique may mean letting go of what is
not... Highly recommended."
*Choice*
"This book has important implications for social work and social
work education."
*Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work*
"Underdogs is a meticulously researched study of postwar social
scientific writing and its
founding influence on queer studies. Its focus on method provides a
potentially productive way to bring questions of politics and
ethics back into a field that has lost
much of its social and theoretical momentum since the late 1990s.
Moreover, the
sustained critique of the liberal humanist claim to integral
subjectivity forms a timely
intervention at the current moment, when younger generations
increasingly appear
invested in the type of sexual and gender identitarianism that both
postwar social science
and queer theory, in however diverging ways, have so persistently
been trying to
overhaul. For this reason alone, Underdogs is a powerful and
important achievement."
*American Literary History Online*
"Underdogs offers a thoughtful and clear analysis. .
. a first step in recognizing and untangling queer
ideals for a more complete intellectual history on queer
thought."
*American Journal of Sociology*
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