Abstract
Stephen M Engel’s book, Fragmented Citizens: The Changing Landscape of Gay and Lesbian Lives, takes up a problem with which sexualities scholars are familiar – how are we to understand the fact that despite unprecedented levels of visibility and support, both in terms of public approval and legal rights, gay men and lesbians continue to face various forms of inequality and discrimination? Combining a conception of citizenship that foregrounds recognition rather than rights or responsibilities with the American political development (APD) framework, Engel, a political scientist, offers innovative answers to this question that will likely be of interest to many sexualities scholars. Engel draws extensively upon existing historical and theoretical scholarship, court cases, and news media to argue that gay men and lesbians’ ‘fragmented citizenship’ is produced in part by the American government’s system of federalism and by the fact that state agencies and institutions necessarily develop over time, with each new law or policy layering upon already existing ones and being taken up in divergent ways across contexts and issues. Identifying five distinct ‘modalities of recognition’ that have been employed throughout the American polity, often simultaneously, Engel shows how the development of various agencies and institutions has led to tensions in policies and practices that have manifested as fragemented, and indeed unequal, citizenship for gay men and lesbians.
After a robust introduction in which Engel lays out the central arguments of the book, Chapter 1 offers a more detailed description of the APD framework, which allows scholars to trace the historical development of different aspects of the American state by recognizing that the state is necessarily fractured. The framework attends to the tensions and contradictions that emerge as new policies and practices are adopted piecemeal, over time, and without a clear, guiding vision. Chapter 1 ends with a helpful discussion of military policy and marriage recognition that illustrates how competing modalities of recognition for gay men and lesbians have been utilized both simultaneously and over time within the American state. Throughout the rest of the book, Engel traces the unsteady and uneven development of these modalities over time. Examining various laws, ordinances, and court rulings, advocacy organizations, and the policies and practices of private corporations, he first shows that the homosexual was constructed as a gender non-conforming figure who threatened national security. Eventually, however, the agencies and institutions Engel examines all shifted from seeing homosexuality as a private behavior to seeing it as a personal characteristic that exposes some to unjust discrimination. Although this led to the decriminalization of homosexuality, it also perpetuated an understanding of gay men and lesbians as private citizens, rather than a social group, and thus facilitated denying them full state recognition. More recently, gay men and lesbians were designated by the Obama administration a suspect class, which played a key role in the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalizing marriage equality nationwide. According to Engel, this gave rise to a final modality of recognition, one in which gay men and lesbians are recognized as people with dignity on the basis of their relationships. Importantly, he makes clear throughout the book that although these modalities of recognition developed over time, they did so in a way that was never perfectly linear, with no clean breaks from the past and each subsequent modality existing alongside of and in tension with the last. This, he argues, is what ultimately accounts for the fragmented nature of gay men and lesbians’ citizenship status.
Overall, Fragmented Citizens makes a meaningful contribution. To be sure, Engel’s concept of fragmented citizenship will seem familiar to most sexualities scholars, given the extensive literature on sexual citizenship that has already developed. What makes Fragmented Citizens a meaningful contribution is Engel’s developmental account of the particular form of citizenship that gay men and lesbians currently face. Indeed, it is too easy to assume that the lack of substantive equality for gay men and lesbians, despite many profound and positive transformations to the social and legal landscape, is simply the result of gay rights successes being met with backlash from the Religious Right or other anti-gay forces. However, as Engel’s developmental account shows, such an explanation is insufficient. We must also take into account “the fragmented nature of the polity as its normal condition” (p. 19). If citizenship is fundamentally about recognition, and if the polity itself is characterized by discontinuity and tension among its agencies and institutions, then the problem of fragmented citizenship, which has puzzled sexualities scholars for some time now, becomes a bit clearer.
Despite this, Fragmented Citizens has a few weaknesses that will likely limit its appeal. Foremost among these is Engel’s thoroughgoing use of the APD framework. The book’s central contribution is a testament to the strength and utility of the framework, but Engel makes such extensive use of it that in the end, the book may be too disciplinary for non-political scientists. Throughout, Engel refers to many concepts from the APD framework and directly engages the existing APD literature, none of which is very clearly explained, and these sizeable parts of the book may be less interesting, or too difficult to follow, for a broader audience. In addition, Engel’s prose is unnecessarily dense throughout much of the book. For these reasons, Fragmented Citizens seems mostly unsuitable for teaching, except perhaps in graduate seminars. Still, for serious scholars only, the book is well worth reading.