Caught in a Rainbow Trap! Queer Lives and the Politics of Categories
Venue
Teaching Room 07, Old CollegeDescription
Join writer and researcher Kevin Guyan to explore ideas from his new book Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Categories and the Dangers of Inclusion.
Rainbow Trap reveals how the fight for LGBTQ equalities is shaped – and constrained – by the classifications we encounter every day.
The book examines queer encounters with six different systems – stretching from hate crime reporting to dating apps – and highlights how the promise of inclusion requires LGBTQ people to locate themselves in an ever-growing list of classifications, categories and labels.
This requirement to be classified catches LGBTQ communities in a rainbow trap. Because when we look beyond the welcoming veneer of inclusive interventions, we uncover sorting processes that determine what LGBTQ lives are valued and what queer futures are possible.
Author bio: Dr Kevin Guyan is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Gender + Sexuality Data Lab. He is the author of Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) and Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).
Organised by the Gender Politics Research Group.