Politics, Groups, and Identities

Politics, Groups, and Identities is seeking submissions for a special issue broadly focused on LGBTQ politics. This issue comes amidst the global rise of far-right movements advancing a wave of laws and policies targeting queer and trans people. This politics of countermobilization and backlash against perceived gains in LGBTQ rights and equality raises critical questions about the future of queer and trans movements, civil rights, and social acceptance. Moreover, these challenges are connected to struggles for gender, reproductive, racial, climate, economic, indigenous, and sexual justice as well. Conservative parties and governments worldwide have increasingly targeted both reproductive health rights and gender affirming healthcare.

Within political science, this issue comes as the field of LGBTQ politics is quickly growing and becoming more visible in the discipline and beyond. As APSA prepares to host its first mini conference on LGBTQ politics and celebrates the first paper presented on the subject fifty years ago, this special issue reflects an increasing desire to create space for new scholarly discourse and analysis on queer and trans politics. Given the interdisciplinary scope of LGBTQ politics, this issue is also a venue to facilitate conversations among scholars of political sociology; feminist, trans, and queer legal and political theory; queer international relations and comparative politics; transgender studies; disability studies; critical race theory; socio-legal studies; history; religious studies; and political and legal anthropology.

Manuscripts on any topic connected to queer and trans politics are welcome, both internationally and in the United States, including the following:

• Victories and setbacks in the courts (e.g., marriage equality and trans rights) and how recent major victories are now encountering revanchist right-wing revanchist attacks.
• Legislative successes and failures (e.g., from ENDA to the Equality Act; state legislative protections, especially anti-discrimination laws and “conversion therapy” bans).
• Bureaucracy and LGBTQ+ politics (e.g., projects that address how administrative law and agency politics have helped or hindered sexual and gender equality).
• Economic inequality and LGBTQ+ politics and the relationship between the two. This could include projects that link new studies of inequality (see the American Political Economy subfield as well as the Class & Inequality section at APSA) with sexuality and gender politics.
• Race and LGBTQ+ politics such as the merger of attacks on both (e.g., the coincidence of bills that ban critical race theory and sexual and gender diverse topics in education).
• International and comparative LGBTQ+ politics and responses to neo-fascist and other far-right movements in gender and sexual politics. Projects might address why legal and extra-legal violence have been central to authoritarian political regimes or why and how international organizations promote certain sexual and gender justice policies.
• What’s in a category? Projects may address how “LGBTQ+ politics” as an analytic has been used/underused. What are its promises for political science? What has political science missed through its long neglect of these issues? Has political science been slower to pay attention to LGBTQ+ issues than related social science and humanities disciplines? How and why might that be the case?
• Trans politics and its relationship to reproductive politics (e.g., how can trans feminisms address intersectional struggles for bodily autonomy?).
• What accounts for the artificial separation of gender politics and sexuality politics? Where have trans issues thrived and/or been ignored in the gap?

Please send your abstract of a proposed submission (250-500 words) to Kathryn Perkins ([email protected]) and Joanna Wuest ([email protected]) by December 1^st.

Completed manuscripts should be no more than 8,000 words, inclusive of the abstract, tables and references, and formatted according to journal policy. When submitting your final manuscript, be sure to select the special issue "LGBTQ Politics" on ScholarOne.

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