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Gay Priori

A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform

Gay Priori

Book Pages: 288 Illustrations: Published: April 2018

Author: Libby Adler

Subjects
American Studies, Gender and Sexuality > LGBTQ Studies, Law

In Gay Priori Libby Adler offers a comprehensive critique of mainstream LGBT legal agendas in the United States and a new direction for LGBT law reform. Adler shows how LGBT equal rights discourse drives legal advocates toward a narrow array of reform objectives—namely, same-sex marriage, antidiscrimination protections, and hate crimes statutes. This approach means that many legal issues that greatly impact the lives of the LGBT community's most marginalized members—especially those who are transgender, homeless, underage, or nonwhite—often go unnoticed. Such a narrow focus on equal rights also fixes and flattens LGBT identities, perpetuates the uneven distribution of resources such as safety, housing, health, and wealth, and limits the capacity for advocates to imagine change. To combat these effects, Adler calls for prioritizing the redistribution of resources in ways that focus on addressing low-profile legal conditions such as foster care and other issues that better meet the needs of LGBT people. Such a shift in perspective, Adler contends, will serve to open up a new world of reform possibilities that the law provides for.

Praise

"Gay Priori is a signal achievement and perhaps the first book to give real legal-theoretical, lawyering, and critical legal studies substance to the debates in the humanities it addresses. Brilliantly executed and tightly argued, Libby Adler's book is a major intervention that may help produce a more economically redistributive LGBT social movement in the United States." — Janet Halley, author of Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism

“Libby Adler takes a smart, provocative, and fascinating approach to the question of law reform on LGBTQ rights. Proposing to upend the civil rights horizon formulated by the official representatives of the LGBTQ community, Adler makes a rigorous and radical critique of the conventional wisdom about what it means to 'win' gay rights. We desperately need these kinds of sustained and argued challenges to the mainstream gay rights agenda.” — Katherine Franke, author of Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality

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Author/Editor Bios Back to Top

Libby Adler is Professor of Law and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University and coeditor of  the fourth edition of Mary Joe Frug's Women and the Law.

Table of Contents Back to Top
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
Part I. LGBT Equal Rights Discourse
1. The Indeterminacy Trap  19
2. The LGBT Rights-Bearing Subject  60
3. Reformist Desire  100
Part II. A Step Off the Well-Lit Path
4. Bringing Legal Realism to Political Economy  145
5. Making the Distributive Turn  175
Conclusion  212
Notes  217
Bibliography  247
Index  259
Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional InformationBack to Top
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8223-7149-6 / Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-7118-2
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