Law Commons^™

Illegalized Sexual Dissent: Sexualities And Nationalisms, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, Katherine Franke explores how dissent becomes a different, and in some ways more interesting, phenomenon when the dissenter emerges not from outside the political horizon drawn by the state, but rather from within it, and as an integral part of the state's project of governance. In these cases, the state calls up a set of subjects who are in some fundamental sense positioned to gain state, if not public, disfavor. These subjects are then isolated, excised or otherwise managed in ways that further state interests. Three cases are discussed in which the production of sexual outlaws proves …