"This book offers a genealogy of queer theory, tracing its roots to an unexpected source: empirical research on marginal sex practices and communities in the era before Stonewall. Scholars trained in the heady philosophical version of queer theory that emerged in the late 1980s and early 90s, have been slow to acknowledge this connection to postwar social science. For them, queer theory seemed to change everything, not only challenging gender and sexual norms but the nature of scholarship itself, allying it more closely with activism and popular protest. "Underdogs" is the result of one such scholar's reeducation. Heather Love shows that queer thought, even at its most critical and utopian, owes a great deal to studies of social deviance conducted in the postwar period, particularly the work of Erving Goffman. This perspective allows Love to inquire more deeply--if still sympathetically--into aspects of queer thought that have proven contentious: its stance against identity and legislative politics; its universalism and its comparative reach; its focus on individual experience, small-scale interactions, and the politics of gesture and self-presentation; its focus on the impact of homophobia, rather than more positive aspects of queer culture; and its reliance on strategies of exposure to shake the hold of gender and sexual norms. These aspects of queer thought, so strongly associated with the 1990s and early 2000s, have in each case important precedents in midcentury sociology. By staging an encounter between queer theory and this past, Love helps us see what aspects of queer thought continue to be most salient and effective in the twentyfirst century."--

Heather Love is professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History.