School of Social and Political Science

Description

Abstract:  I trace connections between the work of canonical queer critics such as Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Michael Warner to the writings of midcentury critics such as Erving Goffman, Howard Becker, and Harvey Sacks via both biographical and conceptual lines. Along with the profound political changes that defined this era, I also trace a transition from deviance as a descriptive category to a normative injunction.  

Bio: 

Heather Love teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory and Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Additionally, she is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”), and the co-editor of a special issue of Representations (“Description Across Disciplines”). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, the ethics of observation, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies.