Lesbian, Feminist, and Other Queer Roles: Fifty Years of Inclusion and Exclusion in Sociology1 Arlene Stein Rutgers University A few decades ago, well-meaning scholars counseled those who considered researching sexuality, particularly homosexualities, that it was career suicide. Out gay and lesbian academics were regularly marginalized, held back for promotion, and with few exceptions their names, or their work, never became widely known. Today, in contrast, out LGBTQI scholars are visible members of the discipline, and queer lives and heteronormative social structures are generally seen as legitimate and sometimes even cutting-edge areas of investigation. We have seen a flowering of interest in queer life, and the beginning of the “queering” of the discipline—though we are not there yet. And whatever happened to lesbian feminism? When I entered graduate school at Berkeley in the 1980s hungry for ideas that would help me make sense of the world and my place in it, the “L word” was never uttered—even as formidable feminist sociologists were at work busily carving out a space for the critical study of gender. To systematically explore the sociology of female homosexuality, I turned to an undergraduate course entitled Sexual Diversity and Social Change that was taught by a brilliant occasional lecturer in the department.2 There I encountered Mary McIntosh’s “The Homosexual Role,” an article published in 1968 in the journal Social Problems, perhaps the first sociological analysis of samesex sexuality (McIntosh 1968). At the time McIntosh was writing, homosexuality was generally seen as a medical “condition” for which a “cure” was required. Not until 1973 did the American Psychiatric Association remove it from its list of illnesses. Even sympathetic liberals operated under the general belief that homosexuality 1
Thanks to Cynthia Chris, Janice Irvine, and Karin Lutzen for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Direct correspondence to Arlene Stein, Department of Sociology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Email: arlenes@sociology.rutgers.edu 2 The course was taught by Jeffrey Escoffier, an adjunct lecturer, activist, and economic historian by training. Like other pioneers of LGBT history and theory, he pieced together a living, and taught occasional courses to those who would eventually go on to obtain the academic jobs that were off limits to him. © 2023 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/728969
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AJS Volume 129 Number 3 ( November 2023): 1024–1030