Queer (In)justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States/African Sexual Diversity: Politics, Theory, Citizenship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Review of Queer (In)justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in United States by Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Beacon Press, 2011;African Sexual Diversity: Politics, Theory, Citizenship by S.N. Nyeck and Marc Epprecht (eds.), McGill-Queens University Press, 2013.Mechthild NagelQueer (In)justice is a bold book. There is no discussion of merits of marriage or of serving in U.S. military. Instead it castigates, perhaps at times too harshly, mainstream LGBT academics, lawyers and advocacy organizations for their complicity with injustice complex (noted here for good measure as criminal legal system). The authors claim that crime is a social construction as record shows that certain populations deserve to be singled out as criminals; hence justice is an elusive ideal in a web of mutually reinforcing institutions that favor rich, white, straight, able- bodied, socially connected person.Despite authors' protestations to contrary, brief history of sexual terrorization of indigenous peoples certainly recasts Foucault's famous History of Sexuality as a history of European sexuality with its central thesis that as late as Victorian age the homosexual was classified as a species. European were quite adamant about enforcing a gender binary and straight sex behavior among indigenous peoples in Americas. They committed grave atrocities left unmentioned in standard histories of conquest.Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock postulate three incriminating archetypes: gleeful gay killers, lethal lesbians, and deceptive gender benders and chronicle violent, humiliating police profiling practices, e.g. for crime of walking while trans.The show that death penalty cases are replete with overt homophobic statements to jury that sometimes even includes defense attorney. Gender nonconforming, not- convicted persons face probing eyes and touch of police even at point of emergency life-saving intervention by medical personnel. 19th Century sumptuary laws, regulating status-appropriate clothing (along class and gender lines), still haunt policing imagination. Transwomen and transmen face daily humiliation in nation's prisons, being ridiculed, taunted or raped. They may be thrown into solitary confinement for audacity of asking for a bra for health reasons or for refusing a bra (e.g., after breast removal).Several myths are discussed and confronted, which alone makes this book an important primer for understanding processes of criminalization of LGBTQ persons. For instance, there's an old conflation of female sex workers being lesbians, and Freudian anxieties are paraded for such justification. Secondly, walking while trans may also bring about an automatic prostitution charge with sometimes lethal consequences for transgender person. Prosecutors are known to have launched adage that prisons are queer havens, hence life imprisonment would not be felt as punishment; they have thus asked juries to consider death penalty! It is known that prisons are extremely dangerous places for LGBTQ and gender non-conforming persons, and unless one hooks up early, one may be prey to gang rapes. Controversially, authors also bring up myth of hate crime laws deterring crimes against LGBT persons. They note two problems with these reform laws: there is attention given to individual grievances rather than systematic oppression, and therefore, laws tend to backfire, as we have seen with anti- Black racism. Instead of prosecuting whites who commit racist acts against Black people, hate crime laws have disproportionately targeted Black people (p. 126-8). Clearly, laws will not protect us from homophobic or transphobic (speech) acts committed on streets or in courtroom.Turning a queer eye to evolution of police and prisons from colonial times to present reveals scope and impacts of law and order agendas-not just on LGBT people, but more broadly on all communities disproportionately impacted by policing and punishment. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".