Stephen Engel and Timothy Lyle’s Disrupting Dignity: Rethinking Power and Progress in LGBTQ Lives is a sweeping study of the ways that the concept of dignity—as it is linked to respectability and embedded within neoliberal ideology—developed over the last 40 years of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) political organizing and social life. Engel and Lyle draw on multiple strands of scholarship, including academic queer theory, cultural studies, Black queer theorizing, LGBTQ+ history, and legal scholarship, to make use of what they refer to as “disciplinary promiscuity” to peel back dignity’s promising veneer (p. 23). What emerges in their systematic investigation of dignity is that it is not the powerful weapon for achieving recognition and inclusion that the most prominent LGBTQ+ interest groups, former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, and Pete Buttigieg would like people to believe; instead it is a Trojan horse that contains within it a set of responsibilities and constraints that strip queerness of its distinctively radical approaches to space, community, relationships, borders, sex, time, and place. As a result, white, wealthy, and monogamous gay men (and some lesbians) are elevated as the prototypical members of the LGBTQ+ group, while all others are relegated to the sidelines of social and political life.

Engel and Lyle’s examination of dignity locates its nascent moments in the 1980s alongside the birth of neoliberalism and against the backdrop of the HIV/AIDS pandemic that would take the lives of more than a half-million people in the United States by 1999 due to government negligence. Municipal leaders in New York City and San Francisco filled the vacuum left by the federal government’s refusal to take the lead in addressing the disease with aggressive campaigns to shut down baths where gay men congregated to partake in contact, intimacy, and sex. Thanks to Engel and Lyle’s historiography, what appears at first blush to be a reasonable attempt to contain a disease that was raging out of control is revealed to be a neoliberal project with two goals: replacing social welfare programs with logics of personal responsibility—that is, dignified behavior and restraint—and clearing urban spaces such as New York’s Times Square and San Francisco’s Tenderloin for gentrification.

Whereas early deployments of dignity consisted of state actors foisting responsibility for HIV/AIDS onto gay men and intravenous drug users, the contemporary moment documented in the second chapter is characterized by the mutation of dignity as synonymous with having financial resources to access upper-tier, resort-style baths that surveil users to prevent the transmission of disease and infection during sexual contact. Obtaining life-saving treatments is also shown to be a mark of dignity and respect, even though the resources needed to acquire those drugs— such as education, employer-sponsored health insurance, and money—mean that Black and Brown people disproportionately are foreclosed from securing PrEP and TasP and, by association, dignity. The analysis in these chapters foreshadows claims that COVID-19 is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and invites critical inquiry into how the social, political, and economic landscape of neoliberalism continues to shape ideas about who deserves to survive a pandemic.

It is by now taken as axiomatic that positive—or dignified—pop culture representations of LGBTQ+ people lead to meaningful shifts in acceptance among the general public (see Phillip M. Ayoub and Jeremiah Garretson, “Getting the Message Out: Media Context and Global Changes in Attitudes Toward Homosexuality,” Comparative Political Studies, 2017). The second part of Disrupting Dignity urges readers to consider which depictions change opinions, for whom, and to what effect. The authors accomplish this through a sustained argument about the pitfalls of tailoring portrayals of queer life for mainstream heterosexual audiences in a chapter that contrasts the queer world-making promise of the young adult novel, Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda, against the dignified and thus apolitical and decidedly unsexy representation of a young gay man’s coming out in the popular film adaptation, Love, Simon. The stakes of considering which LGBTQ+ people are represented, and how, are illustrated quite clearly in the companion chapter that reads the television show, Pose, as an example of queer life in which the ethics of community care and queer excess do the work of refusing dignity’s normalizing pull. It is in this part of the book where what the authors refer to as “queer community” is clearest: it is those members of the LGBTQ+ group who find ways to survive through community, joy, and love precisely because they are forced to do so in the face of state and family neglect.

The final chapters will be most familiar to a political science audience. They examine the evolution of former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s dignity doctrine in the opinions he penned for Romer, Lawrence, Windsor, and Obergefell. Although these decisions are celebrated as marks of progress toward long-deferred recognition and inclusion of lesbians, gay men, and, in some cases, bisexuals in institutions of citizenship, Engel and Lyle show that Kennedy’s reliance on dignity operates as a double-edged sword that severs individuals from classes of people or histories of oppression. In this new, individual-focused, equal protection jurisprudence, the Supreme Court confers dignified status—and rights—on lesbians and gay men only if they tick all the right boxes: (re)productive, property-owning, wealthy, employed, and respectable. This chapter elucidates the perils of dignity for LGBTQ+ people, particularly in the hands of conservatives, when the authors turn their attention to the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision to capture Justice Kennedy’s difficulty in weighing competing claims to dignity. Is the dignity of the white, monogamous, gender-normative, and soon-to-be-married gay couple at stake before the Supreme Court, or is it the dignity of the baker who claims his religious beliefs are offended by the request to decorate a cake for their wedding? By now, the slipperiness of what exactly constitutes “dignity” is obvious. It is doctrine, ideology, prescription, personal aspiration, responsible behavior, neoliberal agenda, and yet also a politically vacuous—and thus extremely dangerous—concept all at once.

It is for these reasons that I was surprised that Engel and Lyle propose recuperating dignity via the state in the final chapter, writing, “Dignity conceptualized as an anti-stigma principle requires doing dignity differently. It can follow only if public officials and cultural authorities adopt policies and take actions that refuse to promote racial, sexual, or gendered hierarchies” (p. 309). My reaction is hardly a critique of the book, because the histories so richly documented by the authors emphasize that queer logics thrive when the state does not intervene; they explain, “If…the state achieves its work by ignoring, eliding, or even demonizing unruly forms of knowing with those that are coded as normal or natural or necessary, then failing at the state’s work—failing at dignity—might involve spotlighting or reconsidering or resuscitating queer knowledges that have been paved over or abandoned to reach for dignity” (p. 16). Disrupting Dignity provides one such peek into what is to be gained by refusing dignity, and my expectation is that it will serve as a valuable resource for future scholarship and political praxis oriented toward that queer world of possibility.