De-Moralizing Gay Rights – an overview

ABSTRACT

In this overview, I begin by situating De-Moralizing Gay Rights within the field of queer studies/queer theory. I then delineate the book’s principal arguments. The book critically interrogates three sets of distortions in 21st century public discourse on LGBT+ rights in the United States. The first relates to the critique of pinkwashing, often advanced by scholars who claim to be proponents of a radical politics. I suggest that this critique sometimes suffers from analytical overreach. The second concerns a recent US Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), a judgment that established marriage equality across the 50 states. I argue that this judgment mobilizes the Court’s endorsement of two elements of homonormativity: amatonormativity and repronormativity. Instead of endorsing homonormativity, the Court should have employed an approach based on decisional minimalism. The third distortion occurs in Kenji Yoshino’s theorization of the concept of gay covering. Yoshino’s calls to dismantle cultural demands for gay covering turn out, I argue, to constitute an oppressive command to ‘gay-flaunt.’

KEYWORDS:

• Queer theory
• pinkwashing
• covering
• amatonormativity
• repronormativity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This is a claim I have come to revise in response to one of the critiques offered in this symposium.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cyril Ghosh

Cyril Ghosh is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and Politics, Wagner College, New York. Ghosh is the author, among other things, of The Politics of the American Dream: Democratic Inclusion in Contemporary American Political Culture (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013); De-Moralizing Gay Rights: Some Queer Remarks on LGBT+ Rights Politics in the US (Palgrave-Pivot, 2018); and Key Concepts in Political Theory: Citizenship (with Elizabeth F. Cohen, Polity, 2019).