Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory

by Heather Love

A pathbreaking genealogy of queer theory that traces its roots to an unexpected 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 following 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 also 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 antinormative, antiessentialist 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory, Queer, Queer Studies, LGBT

238 pages, Paperback

Published September 17, 2021

Reviews

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can't have a 40 page introduction (and a preface!) if your book is only 172 pages

[Kathleen O'Neal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was originally assigned to me as part of the Gender and Sexuality Studies graduate seminar I took with Dr. Samuel Huneke in the fall of 2023. Because I didn't get to really read the book the week it was assigned in the way I wanted to, I went back and read it over the summer. I'm really glad I did and I had a feeling it would be a worthwhile experience. Ultimately, the book involves an excavation of the influence of mid-twentieth century sociologists and deviance studies scholars on the brand of queer theory that began to emerge in the 1990s. At times, one senses that Heather Love is too enmeshed in the jargon and pieties of queer theory scholarship to make as incisive of an analysis as she otherwise may have, but the book succeeds in spite of these flaws. Love's analysis of the work of Erving Goffman is particularly interesting. While I was familiar with Goffman, this book introduced me to the figure of Laud Humphreys and the controversies surrounding his work, which were also interesting. In fact, I wish Love had spent more time on Humphreys than she did. In the chapter on Humpheys's work, she makes the bizarre and inexplicable choice to spend most of the chapter writing about a scholar of animal behavior who spent the end of his career promoting discredited methods of "helping" Autistic youth. While Love tries to tie this scholar's work in with Humphreys (mostly by continually repeating in vaguely pretentious language that they both spent a lot of time watching stuff), it seems strange to take up so much limited space in a book of this sort to discuss an academic whose work had nothing to do with gender and sexuality studies, whose work with humans was at least vaguely suspect, and whose work has not been influential (even in unacknowledged ways) on anyone in the gender and sexuality studies field, maybe apart from Love herself. An awful lot of space was devoted to this aimless foray and as a result it made the entire project seemed far more unfocused than it otherwise would have. This seems like something an editor or university press reader should have talked the author out of early on in the project. The rest of the project is so clearly tied together and relevant that it makes this part of the book stand out very badly, particularly but not only because its discussion seems to take away from the discussion of the much more interesting and relevant Humphreys. I would have also enjoyed more discussion of Howard Becker, a figure that comes up repeatedly in the text but never receives an in depth exploration in the way in which Goffman or Samuel Delany does. The section of the book dealing with Delany is also fascinating and thought-provoking and it has convinced me that I need and wanted to read his "Times Square Red, Times Square Blue." The main contribution of this book for me was introducing me to other scholars who work I want to explore more or in helping me think more constructively about scholars I was already aware of.

[Mitchel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating book about the history of Queer Theory and the postwar sociological studies of deviance that provided its foundation. Love's blend of complex analysis and limpid prose is all too rare in academic texts. By its end, Love's argument becomes an impassioned plea for Queer Theory to move beyond the outdated notion of anti-normativity and to attend to the reality of contemporary queer lives in all their complicity and contradiction. Whether you agree with its thesis or not, "Underdogs" could very well become one of the decade's key texts of the field.

[Bastián Olea Herrera · Rating 4 out of 5]

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