Michael Pettit, York University, Toronto

Heather Love, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)

In Underdogs, Heather Love offers a densely argued, at times counterintuitive, and yet highly persuasive rereading of how her own field of queer theory relates to its own intellectual past. Love argues queer theory, despite its professed deep historicism, is in denial about its own history, much to its detriment when it comes to making both theoretical and political interventions. She offers Underdogs as something of a remedy to this collective amnesia. In her telling, queer theory as an anti-humanist humanities field is predicated on the notion of rupture: its leading practitioners see it as a field with neither a true academic parent nor a comfortable disciplinary home. Queer theory (and theorists) always stands alone, outside, without friend, kin, or even community. Love identifies this widespread sensibility with the field’s proximate roots in the radical oppositional politics of gay liberation, the women’s health movement, and especially 1980s AIDS activism. In this political crucible, the field disavowed any kinship with earlier social scientific, “empirical,” studies of sexuality (whether of the human animal or other species). Most importantly for Love’s story, queer theory denied its debts to mid-century, observational, qualitative, microanalyses of social interaction. Yet these sociologists of deviance profoundly informed how queer theorists understood both (social) normativity and their own outsider status as intellectuals. Her book seeks to excavate these lost linkages to challenge and enrich contemporary queer theory.

If Underdogs pivots around making uncomfortable kinship between deviance studies and queer theory, Love astutely traces how these two fields operate with very different politics of representation. Contemporary queer theory is predicated on the disruption of all norms and foundations. A profound, skeptical destabilization of all received notions is the field’s primary political intervention. In contrast, mid-century sociologists of deviance sought to uplift alternative forms of social life by making them legible. They related the minortized group to the majority through practices of immersion at the level of data collection and (thick) description as a mode of analysis. However, their sociology continued to traffic in postwar commitments to value neutrality. They staged this not through quantification but by adopting the methodological persona of the cool, hip, outsider observing a foreign scene. A later generation of queer theorists dismissed mid-century sociologies of deviance as hopelessly mired in normative assumptions and compromised by the demands of maintaining neutrality at the expense of explicit political commitment. In short, the sociologists of deviance sought to normalize the subversive, the countercultural, the stigmatized by representing them and their rituals of the world where queer theorists revel in their perennial outsider status as folks who forever operate under the sign of stigma.

Love’s book consists of a series of close and illuminating readings. This starts with her critical engagement with Eve Sedgwick’s highly influential reinterpretation of Cold War affect theory as a relevant framework for queer scholarship. Given the ubiquity of affect theory in the humanities, Love offers a timely reminder of how profoundly odd the reproachment was and remains. Erving Goffman with his theoretically light but richly conveyed ethnographies looms large over much of the book. He comes to serve as an archetype for the sociology of deviance as a body of knowledge and embodied persona. An intriguing chapter on “Just Watching” shows the surprising affinities between radical constructivist sociology and essentialist ethology when it came to their observational practices by juxtaposing Niko Tinbergen’s turn to human observation through his 1970s interest in autism with Laud Humphreys’ controversial, covert ethnography of male homosexual encounters in public restrooms. Perhaps Love’s most compelling case is her analysis of the Black American science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany’s relationship to queer theory. Delany entered the academic critical theory canon through historian and gender theorist Joan W. Scott’s influential reading of a key passage in his memoir The Motion of Light in Water (1988). In the passage, Delany relates his first visit to the Saint Mark’s Baths in New York City in 1963 when he became aware of the existence of a gay community. Writing at the height of the linguistic turn, Scott’s reading underscores the impossibility of an immediate, universal, transhistorical experience of identity, arguing instead for the mediating, reconstructive power of language as a mode of representation which structures consciousness and even the most inmate of identities. Scott exemplifies queer theory’s demand for disruption and destabilization, the critical humanities’ emphasis on interrogating the very categories of identity rather than populating texts with varied experiences of them. In contrast, Love reads Delany’s considerable writings on the changing sexual and political economy of New York City as a vivid exemplar of mid-century urban ethnography in the sociology of deviance mode. Throughout the book, Love plays with the dialectics of seeing but not being seen, of watching and (not) judging.

Love’s book also raises pertinent and disconcerting questions about why queer theorists and social psychologists have been so drawn to affect as a meta-theory for the past twenty years despite their very different political commitments. Certainly, Sedgwick offered an unfaithful reading of this psychology. However, critics like Ruth Leys have rightly point out how affect theory smuggles in with it deeply problematic notions about biology, universalism, and especially intentionality into critical, humanistic fields. Adding Goffman to the genealogical mix does interesting things to this debate. Despite their innumerable differences, queer theorists, the sociologists of deviance, and contemporary social psychologists all share the conviction that they are the smartest person in the room capable of detecting the cognitive failures of the rubes. It suggests these fields remain overly committed to their own coolness both socially and cognitively. As Love artfully demonstrates, this conviction has been as damaging to the kinds of interventions queer theory ought to make as it has been to social psychology. Adopting Goffman’s cruel coolness as the perennial outsider risks veering into the knowing smugness of the smartest kid in the room who conveniently directs the hermeneutics of suspicious at everyone but themselves. Denying the “evidence of experience” as another foundationalist trick means foreclosing oneself to experience of others. It results in a disposition both unkind and uncharitable.

I found Love’s book a challenging but inspiring read. It raises, if perhaps inevitably does not answer, important questions about how to create good relations between empirical research (both ethnographic and archival) and critical theory. In part, her book challenges a prevalent assumption in the humanities where theory takes precedence over method. Without succumbing to the methodolatry so common in many social science fields, Love’s genealogy problematizes the ways in which Theory is often left unresponsive and ultimately unresponsible to the world. Debunking queer theory’s origin myth that it was born whole cloth out of the AIDS crisis leads Love to challenge necessary alignments of the field’s activism with “paranoid” readings of (medical) authority and anti-foundationalist epistemologies. Underdogs is an insightful book for those seeking to repair the rift between the critical humanities and empirical social science.