I am quite grateful to Omar Encarnación for his incisive and insightful review of my book, Fragmented Citizens: The Changing Landscapes of Gay and Lesbians Lives. Indeed, I particularly appreciate the perspective offered by a scholar more deeply entrenched in comparative politics and thus beyond the boundaries of my own subfield of American Political Development even as we share mutual interests in social movement theory and political sociology.

Encarnación offers two substantive critiques. First, he notes that the book aims not to be an analytical narrative about LGBT social movement development as it intends to center sexuality politics within American political development. Little work, with some notable exceptions, i.e., recent scholarship by Margot Canaday, Richard Valelly, and Dara Strolovitch, among some others, has brought sexuality to bear upon American political development. Second, Encarnación contends that one of the book’s weaknesses is its lack of comparative perspective.

As Encarnación recognizes, my intention in Fragmented Citizens was not to offer a comprehensive analysis of the LGBT movements in the United States. I admit as much in the opening pages. Instead, I sought to evaluate why, in a context of changing public opinion that is increasingly favorable to many LGBT rights claims and a policy and legal environment that has also recognized and validated some of these claims, inequality persists. Traditional answers have emphasized the persistence of backlash or that public opinion and policy change is a matter of slow and steady cultural shift. Fragmented Citizens suggests that these accounts are not so much wrong as they are incomplete, and they are incomplete because they do not attend to the dynamics of policy change, the processes of political development, and the shape of institutional structure.

Drawing on developmental notions of the state as fragmented, as composed of multiple orders of authority—bundles of policy, laws, and norms—that may exist simultaneously in tension with one another, I contend that the status of the LGBT person or citizen in the United States is similarly fragmented. Depending upon the authority with which the individual is interacting, when she is interacting with that authority, and on what policy issue she is interacting, her status is fundamentally contingent. How she is recognized can fundamentally differ across space, across time, and by policy or legal issue. The fragmented state yields the fragmented citizen.

Approaching LGBT politics from a developmental perspective yields important insights for scholars of sexuality politics and scholars of American political development. Doing so can reshape our understanding of how courts have approached LGBT rights and reveal how the Supreme Court has hardly been activist or countermajoritarian. It can help us move LGBT studies beyond the scope of social movement studies or scholarship in public opinion change. These are important areas of study. However, when sexuality studies has been rendered into a category of secondary, if not tertiary, concern by many within the discipline of political science, the aim of Fragmented Citizens is, in part, to demonstrate how centering sexuality in the analysis of governing authorities helps us to recognize how important sexuality is to gaining the fullest understanding of why and how those authorities change over time. Finally, by approaching the topic of LGBT recognition not from the perspective of social movement action but from the citizens’ lived experience, Fragmented Citizens engages an approach—political development from the vantage point of the citizen—that is valuable, growing, and still underdeveloped.

As to Encarnación’s disappointment in the book’s lack of comparative perspective, I can only agree that comparative studies are necessary. In the conclusion of Fragmented Citizens, I call for that very kind of analysis, and I recognize that while the field of APD is focused on the U.S. politics, there is nothing in its theoretical insights that should limit their application to other cases. There may be matters of institutional design that are unique to the United States. Nevertheless, the dynamics of always incomplete policy change, which are highlighted in Fragmented Citizens as a fundamental reason why inequalities persist or why new inequalities are revealed as older ones are remedied through policy and legal action, can be usefully tested and verified by comparative analysis.