Explores the Christian Right’s use of tailored rhetorics to advance multiple and varied antigay political projects.

This book discusses the context for and arguments in favor of same-sex marriage in the United States.

In this book, Zillah Eisenstein continues her unforgiving indictment of neoliberal imperial politics. She charts its most recent militarist and masculinist configurations through discussions of the Afghan and Iraq wars, violations at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 US Presidential election, and Hurricane Katrina. She warns that women’s rights rhetoric is being manipulated, particularly by Condoleezza Rice and other women in the Bush administration, as a ploy for global dominance and a misogynistic capture of democratic discourse. However, Eisenstein also believes that the plural and diverse lives of women will lay the basis for an assault on these fascistic elements. This new politics will both confound and clarify feminisms, and reconfigure democracy across the globe.

This book examines the rights to expression and equality, and the restraints on government power, as they both limit and allow control of our personal choices.

As developments in the European Union and elsewhere make the re-examination of citizenship a pressing issue, this book reflects on the persisting "masculine" character of contemporary democracy and the measures taken in the EU to combat it. Combining a theoretical approach with a specific critique of EU gender policy, The Gender of Democracy argues that substantial democracy as a social project cannot co-exist with the existing system of gender relations ,which are inherently dichotomous and thus demarcate social categories of superior and inferior status. Drawing on utopian thought, Maro Pantelidou Maloutas proposes a re-examination of the notion of the gendered subject and a revision of the dominant perceptions of the relations between sex, sexuality and gender. The book contains a critique of specific EU gender policies and shows how in seeking to do away with gender inequality, simply formulating policies that are pro-women is not enough. In order to approach democracy’s emancipatory component, far-reaching policies which deconstruct rather than modernize gender relations are needed.

Queer Democracy undertakes an interdisciplinary critical investigation of the centuries-old metaphor of society as a body, drawing on queer and transgender accounts of embodiment as a constructive resource for reimagining politics and society. Daniel Miller argues that this metaphor has consistently expressed a desire for social and political order, grounded in the social body’s imagined normative shape or morphology. The consistent result, from the “concord” discourses of the pre-Christian Stoics, all the way through to contemporary nationalism and populism, has been the suppression of any dissent that would unmake the social body’s presumed normativity. Miller argues that the conception of embodiment at the heart of the metaphor is a fantasy, and that negative social and political reactions to dissent represent visceral, dysphoric responses to its reshaping of the social body. He argues that social body’s essential queerness, defined by fluidity and lack of a fixed morphology, spawns queer democracy, expressed through ongoing social and political practices that aim to extend liberty and equality to new social domains. Queer Democracy articulates a new departure for the ongoing development of theoretical articulations linking queer and trans theory with political theory. It will appeal to both academic and non-academic readers engaged in research on political theory, populism, US religion, gender studies, and queer studies.

Drawing on the example set by feminists, this textbook explores the problems of pursuing lesbian and gay political agendas within the present structure of democracy. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the author connects the analysis of lesbian and gay identities in sociology and cultural studies with the analysis of democracy in political theory. This paves the way for a consideration of the implications of sociological theories of sexuality for democratic theory and practice. Engaging with queer theory, the dominant perspective in the area of sexual identity and politics, the author offers a critique of many of the theorists - including Judith Butler and Diana Fuss - and directions within this field. This approach offers a broad focus on the issues of citizenship and legal, social and political policies with which queer theorists are involved. Up to date with current debates, this book reflects the need to return from an inaccessible level of abstract theory. It grounds ideas about sexuality in material and political realities by assessing the possibility of articulating a sociological view of the sexual self which can be translatedinto effective political strategies.