Queer Production/Queer Reproduction: Sexual Panic and Politics in the 21st Century

This monograph critically examines origin stories about gay, lesbian, bi, and queer identity and unpacks the after-effects of such stories on what we imagine to be possible, both politically and emotionally. By analyzing a range of narratives that aim to explain the origins of homosexuality across the 20th century, I mine literary and popular culture archives to discern where the political history of queer lives overlaps with and diverges from the actual lived experience of sexual desire and identity. The book explores popular, legal, and literary narratives of queer etiology; it begins with sexologists, eugenicists, and fears that literature would provide a source of queer contagion in the early twentieth century and it ends with the anti-queer backlash and the rise of book banning and censorship in the early twenty-first century. I look at lesbian critiques of heteropatriarchy and the rise of #tradwife. I argue that the progressive “born this way” discourse dominant since the AIDS epidemic is insufficient, and that a revivification of lesbian feminist politics that prioritize autonomy and sexual freedom, not biology, is essential at the current conjuncture.