Difference Troubles: Queering Social Theory and Sexual Politics
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Steven Seidman examines the implications for social theory and sexual politics of taking difference seriously. He explores the troubles difference can make for the social sciences and for the very people--feminists, queer theorists, postmodernists--who champion difference. This is a wide-ranging and sophisticated discussion of contemporary social theory and sexual politics, focusing on difference, knowledge and power. It also argues persuasively for a pragmatic approach to questions of difference in theory and politics.
PrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction: the contemporary reconfiguring of social theory11The political unconscious of the human sciences212The end of sociological theory433Relativizing sociology: the challenge of cultural studies614The refusal of sexual difference: queering sociology815Difference troubles: the flight of sociology from "otherness"976Identity and politics in a "postmodern" gay culture1097Deconstructing queer theory, or some difficulties in a theory and politics of difference1398Transfiguring identity: AIDS and the cultural politics of sexuality and homosexuality, 1981-19861659From gay ethnicity to queer politics: the renewal of gay radicalism in the United States18510Postmodern anxiety: the politics of epistemology19811The politics of sexual difference of late twentieth-century America21212Difference and democracy: group recognition and the political cultures of the US, Holland, and France237Epilogue: pragmatism, difference and a culture of strong democracy255Notes266References282Index304
