On July 2, 2010, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signed into law a bill that reduced the act of soliciting a “crime against nature” for compensation from a felony to a misdemeanor. A felony conviction had meant a fine of up to $2,000, imprisonment for up to five years (“with or without hard labor”), or both. Because of the change in the crime's classification to a misdemeanor, those convicted of a first offense now face lesser penalties: a fine of up to $500, six months in jail, or both. Thus, the penalty for a first conviction for solicitation of “unnatural carnal copulation by a human being with another of the same sex or opposite sex or with an animal” for pay is the same as the penalty for a first conviction for prostitution not deemed “unnatural.” (Regular prostitution is defined in the Louisiana criminal code as “indiscriminate sexual intercourse with others for compensation.”) Another reform: Before this bill was enacted, anyone convicted of soliciting “unnatural carnal copulation” for compensation was required to register as a sex offender. Now, one is not deemed a sex offender until a second conviction.Footnote ¹

What is noteworthy about this change to the law? That the Louisiana legislature has eliminated the discrepancy between penalties for soliciting “unnatural copulation” and penalties for soliciting “indiscriminate sexual intercourse”—at least for the first conviction? Or that in reforming the penalty discrepancy, Louisiana legislators have decided to keep the atavistic notion of a “crime against nature” on the books?Footnote ² That a second conviction for soliciting any type of genital-oral sexual contact for pay still results in harsher penalties than a second conviction for soliciting penile-vaginal intercourse for pay?Footnote ³ Or that a second conviction for soliciting same-sex sex for pay carries harsher penalties than a second conviction for soliciting heterosexual intercourse for pay? Is the focus of this legislation same-sex sex, sex not involving vaginal intercourse, or simply sex work?

For the study of sexuality in political science, this law might serve as a sort of Rorschach test for identifying how sexuality is or becomes political. For some, what might be thrown into sharp relief is that the legislation still labels any type of same-sex sex a “crime against nature.” From this perspective, what is significant is that even as the legislation adheres to the Supreme Court's 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas that finds unconstitutional legislation declaring same-sex sex a stand-alone punishable offense, the Louisiana law still manages to single out people who have same-sex sex (many of whom identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual) for state-sanctioned social opprobrium. For others, the primary point might be that laws policing sexuality reinforce a hierarchy of sexual acts, valorizing reproduction over pleasure, and thus inscribe gender norms through the legal code. For sex workers and their advocates, what matters about the law is that the criminal justice agencies can still subject sex workers to harsher penalties for soliciting oral or anal sex than for soliciting intercourse. For those who compare the facial neutrality of the law (on gender and race) to its effects, the most significant point is how race and gender figure in its deployment: before the law was reformed (when a first conviction required registration as a sex offender), 78% of those convicted of soliciting a crime against nature were black, and the vast majority were women (Flaherty Reference Flaherty2010). Although the law now requires a second conviction to turn sex workers into sex offenders, putting them on the same footing as convicted rapists and child molesters, advocates for sex workers believe that the new law will not improve the situation. As one advocate suggested, “It makes them [the sex workers] a bigger target, because after the first arrest[,] the police will think they got away with something and they will go after these women even more” (Flaherty Reference Flaherty2010).

From constitutional bans against same sex marriage to abstinence-only laws limiting what teenagers can learn about sex and the Louisiana legislation described here, sexuality is clearly a political matter. Sexuality is a high-stakes issue in contemporary electoral politics that is policed through legal codes and is the subject of policymaking in a wide range of areas. It is regulated through political institutions such as legislatures, courts, and administrative agencies as both a matter of identity (the sex of one's object of desire) and a matter of conduct (which body parts come into contact). Social movements and communities of resistance have emerged to challenge—and defend—its regulation.

What is the status of research on sexuality within political science? In the discipline, the study of sexuality is to a great degree identified with the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues, which appear to have broad support. Forty-one percent of respondents to a survey conducted for the APSA Committee on the Status of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and the Transgendered in the Profession deemed research on LGBT topics to be “very appropriate,” and 35% found it to be “appropriate” (Novkov and Barclay Reference Novkov and Barclay2010, 100). Yet, there is also some resistance to such research, partly based on the assumption that the field is organized around identity. One political scientist responded thus to the survey: “The biggest problem is [they're] not doing real political science research and just focusing in on themselves. The LGBT faculty whom I respect professionally the most are the ones who do real political science. We don't do heterosexual political science so why do … LGBT political science?” (2009 survey results, question 45; Novkov and Barclay Reference Novkov and Barclay2009). While this response was by no means representative of the range of comments made by the 2,215 individuals who participated, there were, as Novkov and Barclay point out, “strong and divergent opinions” on how the discipline of political science “should deal with sexuality as a factor in research and teaching about politics” (Reference Novkov and Barclay2010, 96).

This symposium, organized under the aegis of the Committee on the Status of LGBT in the Profession, brings together the work of five political scientists who research LGBT politics or sexuality.Footnote ⁴ Together, these short pieces are meant to give readers a sense of the depth and range of work examining LGBT and sexuality issues in political science, demonstrate the methodological range of work on sexuality and LGBT issues in the discipline, and challenge how the study of sexuality is often reduced to the study of LGBT issues. One assumption about LGBT research, revealed in some survey responses and common to critiques of identity politics, is that the presence of LGBT studies signals an identity politics–driven research agenda, while its absence signals political neutrality. Perhaps the absence of research on LGBT topics, however, signals the largely unquestioned presence of heteronormativity—defined by Cathy Cohen as “localized practices and centralized institutions that legitimize and privilege heterosexuality … as fundamental and ‘natural’ within society” (Reference Cohen and Blasius2001, 203). In the aggregate, these contributions show that scholarship investigating how heterosexuality is reinforced, produced, and promoted through institutions (including disciplinary apparatuses of knowledge production) could, and should, be integral to political science.

Gary Mucciaroni's review article, “The Study of LGBT Politics and Its Contributions to Political Science,” addresses the identity politics question head on: “LGBT studies are not only about the struggles of a single identity group,” he writes. “They lie at the intersection of sexuality and politics. Inevitably they are about the politics of heterosexuality and of gay-straight relations” (17). He takes issue with the notion that the lack of inclusion of issues often coded as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender means that sexuality is entirely absent from the knowledge production in the field: “If our decision to study LGBT politics is a political one, so too was our neglect of it for many years” (17). Mucciaroni then extensively reviews the field of LGBT politics, showing how it has deepened and broadened our understanding of core concepts in political science.

Marla Brettschneider's contribution shows how political theorists can use queer theory to broaden our approach to the study of policy questions. When faced with a binary—for example, natural/unnatural, straight/gay, identity/conduct—a queer theoretical approach is to figure out how the distinction itself advances particular political projects. Brettschneider illustrates this approach by examining the binary that poses queer families as unnatural and straight families as natural, and that renders politics invisible. She then summarizes her most recent research, which explores the relationship between policies that make it easier for gay, lesbian, and bisexual parents to adopt (including an expanded pool of transracial adoptees) and policies that make it harder for poor women (disproportionately women of color) to retain legal relationships with their own children.

If political science had a sexual orientation, Joe Rollins suggests, it would be straight. Pointing out that “heterosexual political science is a product of the heterosexual culture within which it took root,” Rollins points out in his article, “Political Science, Political Sex,” that “scholarship is much more popular when empiricism resonates with the belief systems that uphold a heterosexual norm” (28). For him, sexuality is a target of state intervention across many areas—the most important of which is reproduction. In a highly influential book, Epistemology of the Closet, literary scholar and queer theorist Eve Sedgwick identifies the understanding that homo/heterosexual definition is an “issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority” as “minoritizing” (Reference Sedgwick1990, 1). Conversely, she suggests, understanding homosexuality and heterosexuality as issues “of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities” reflects a “universalizing view” (Sedgwick Reference Sedgwick1990, 1). Her point is not that students of LGB issues or sexuality in general should hew to one approach or the other, but rather, they should understand the effects of the distinction. For Sedgwick, each approach generates “particular insights,” but those insights “at the same time are themselves structured by particular opacities” (Reference Sedgwick1990, 8). Drawing on these concepts, Rollins suggests that limiting our analysis to GLB issues obscures important shifts in the regulation of sexuality. Now that the “gay-straight distinction” is losing “its cultural potency,” other potential “targets of censure” such as teenage sexuality—Rollins points out that minors who engage in “sexting” have been prosecuted for distributing child pornography—have emerged. In the second part of his contribution to the symposium, Rollins explores the increasing importance that scholars working from a transnational perspective are giving to sexuality.

In “'What's Wrong with Being Sexy?' Why Political Science Needs to Get Serious about Sexuality,” Alesha E. Doan argues that people who deviate from norms of gender and sexuality—from Hillary Clinton to welfare recipients to teenagers to Barney Frank—suffer political consequences. Doan uses Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz's notion of the “second face of power” to argue that “students of politics have been slow to seriously investigate” how apparently trivial matters—clothes, gender presentation—actually matter in politics (31). Connecting this concept to Judith Butler's work on the naturalization of social differences, Doan shows that the invisibility of some issues—such as the role of sexual and gender norms in influencing politics and policymaking—is an effect produced by politics, not outside of politics. Like the work of Anna Marie Smith, Doan demonstrates through her analyses of welfare reform and abstinence-only education that the study of sexuality requires an intersectional approach incorporating other aspects of identity such as race, gender, and class (Smith Reference Smith2007).

In “Gay, Straight, or Questioning? Sexuality and Political Science,” Charles Anthony Smith argues that the discipline of political science has a “bimodal” approach to sexuality that “treats sexuality as if there are only two categories: straight and not-straight” (35). As a result, Smith says, for the most part, “scholarly work in political science presents a heterosexual world that occasionally peeks around the corner at the perceived monolith of ‘the others’” (35). Existing research on LGBT topics, however, has required its practitioners to be both theoretically sophisticated and methodologically innovative. That expectation, Smith shows, has had many positive effects on the discipline. Indeed, after an extensive review of the many contributions of LGBT political science to the discipline, Smith suggests that LGBT political science is “post-Perestroikan.” He writes, “The methodological and approach-oriented cleavages that bedeviled the discipline for some time—and continue as hot debates in some quarters—have been bridged by LGBT political science and political scientists concerned with LGBT issues” (37).

These contributions do not definitively resolve the many questions raised by the study of sexuality and LGBT issues in political science. Must the study of sexuality be attached to identities? How can the gay-straight binary that now dominates discussions make room for other perspectives? Has political science as a discipline too easily and for too long succumbed to the normalizing and naturalizing discourses that place sexuality outside of the sphere of politics? If our research or teaching does not address LGBT concerns, does that mean that heterosexuality is not present in the production of knowledge about politics? Finally, there is that very large elephant in the room that appeared earlier: according to the APSA survey, LGBT academics are almost twice as likely to incorporate LGBT issues and topics into their research and teaching as their non-LGBT colleagues (Novkov and Barclay Reference Novkov and Barclay2010, 99–100). Are researchers who identify themselves as heterosexual more “objective” when studying sexuality? Or is their putative neutrality an effect of the same norms that position queer researchers as biased?

Taken together, however, the contributions to this symposium do challenge the notion that the production of difference only happens “in the field.” These differences are also produced in the field of political science. Indeed, just as the state of Louisiana continues to single out “crimes against nature” for special opprobrium and to punish “unnatural” forms of sexual activity more severely than others, the discipline of political science polices the distinction of what counts as political. It is no surprise that the apparatuses (departments, associations, journals) that ensure a discipline's coherence and sustain its boundaries necessarily render some questions unaskable and some phenomena improper objects of study: “The organization of knowledge production within academic architectures creates its own myopias” (Currah and Casper, Reference Currah, Casper, Casper and Currahforthcoming). But in a discipline that is still alive and roiled by debates about what to study and how, these boundaries are always in flux. This is an exciting time to be producing knowledge about sexuality in the field of political science.