This book addresses two related inquiries important to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement: To what extent does litigation help the movement attain the ends it seeks, and how do legal reform and the adoption of a right-based discourse affect the movement?

Most social movements confront the question of the degree to which they should rely on legal strategies—primarily litigation—to further their goals, asking whether the courts will help or hinder their efforts to achieve the social and political reforms they envision. Not surprisingly, gay rights activists have also had to judge whether the courts would serve as allies in their attempts to bring about a more egalitarian society in which sexual orientation and gender identity do not play a role in structuring rights and opportunities. Such a decision is a difficult one and is subject to a good deal of debate within the ranks of the movement and among its leadership.

The LGBT movement, the most recent social movement on the scene in the U.S. political system, has followed in the path of earlier Civil Rights movements (for example, racial and ethnic minorities, feminists, and people with disabilities) in recognizing the usefulness of legal reform and adopting the language of rights. In hewing to the Civil Rights model, the LGBT community has emulated many of the tactics and long-term strategies of the earlier groups. At the same time, some members of the LGBT community question the wisdom of pursuing a litigation strategy to bring about societal reform. In particular, they argue that with the increasing conservatism of the judiciary, the courts represent the status quo and, indeed, their rulings often reflect society's antipathy toward gays. In their view, legal reform provides only a short-term fix at best, without achieving the transformation necessary to remove structural and cultural biases. Others argue, as well, that the pursuit of legal reform may have unanticipated consequences that will prove harmful to the movement.

The editors of Queer Mobilizations transcend the boundaries of traditional legal scholarship by examining the efforts of the LGBT movement to pursue litigation to order to create social change and the ways that legal reform efforts, in turn, affect the movement. They bring together a diverse group of scholars with backgrounds in sociology, law and society, political science, and legal and cultural studies to discuss the interactive effect of law and social change. The myriad legal issues subsumed in LGBT litigation, including same-sex marriage, decriminalization of sodomy, second-parent adoption, and employment discrimination, serve as a backdrop to the chapters in the book.

Employing a range of methodologies and approaches, the authors in this volume seek to shed light on the relationships among social movements, legal change, and social change. Toward this end, they assess the interaction between discourse and legal symbols in producing social change, as well as the transformational effect of the LGBT movement's legal strategy on societal views of sexuality, gender, and family relationships.

The book is divided into three parts. The first section, “Social Movement Strategies and the Law,” consists of chapters by Ashley Currier (the strategic decision to defer gay rights litigation in Namibia); Darren Rosenblum (the theory of intersectionality and Lawrence, Goodridge, and In re Marriage Cases); Nicholas Pedriana (content analysis of briefs filed in Lawrence and the framing of the Texas sodomy law); Courtenay W. Daum (the influence of organized interests as litigants and amici in LGBT litigation); and Susan M. Sterett (individual efforts by same-sex couples to adopt within the context of the LGBT social movement). These five chapters broadly focus on the effectiveness of litigation as an instrument of social reform, comparing it to other techniques that attempt to achieve the same results. However, although the authors discuss the role of law, they are primarily concerned with how legal issues are framed, articulated, and presented, rather than with their success in producing the reforms sought. They appear less concerned with victories achieved in the courts and the strategies behind them than with how legal formulations affect societal perceptions of the gay, bisexual, and transgendered community.

The use of legal analysis in the second section, “Activism, Discourse, and Legal Change,” will be more familiar to most political scientists, as these authors appear more focused on the outcome of the litigation and less so on how the issues are framed. The chapters by David John Frank, Steven A. Boutcher, and Bayliss Camp (the effects of global reform of sodomy laws on domestic sodomy policies); Amy L. Stone (the inclusion of transgendered individuals as a protected class in nondiscrimination laws); Charles W. Gossett (the effect of home rule on challenges to local antidiscrimination ordinances); and Marybeth Herald (a cross-national analysis of employment discrimination cases brought by transgendered individuals) seem more concerned with law reform on the ground than with the effect of law on the LGBT movement.

The last section, “Legal Symbols: Constraints and Possibilities,” represents an amalgam of the approaches taken in the two previous sections. These four chapters by Shauna Fisher (vying for control of a social movement's agenda through rhetorical devices); Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (capturing the rhetoric of victimization in battles over rights); Casey Charles (the use of antigay images by the defense lawyers in the Dan White trial); and Ellen Ann Andersen (understanding why the LGBT community avoids discussion of divorce in the battle over same-sex marriage policy) portray the use of legal symbols in the battles over legal reform as both movement activists and their opponents jockey for public support.

For the most part, the contributors to this volume achieve the editors' stated goals of assessing the interaction between social movements and legal reform efforts. As the foregoing suggests, the chapters vary in the extent to which law plays a central role in the analysis. The focus of the chapters in the first and third sections, especially the former, is on the role of the social movement in framing the legal issues and societal reactions to the framing process. The middle section comes closest to traditional legal analysis familiar to those who study law and litigation as a mechanism for achieving social reform.

Although political scientists who are primarily interested in litigation outcomes may be somewhat disappointed in the fact that legal reform does not play a more central role in the book, to be fair, the book does not seek to do that. By offering a broader perspective of the interactive relationship between legal change and the LGBT social movement, it presents a more holistic picture of the legal, political, social, and cultural obstacles facing members of the LGBT community and the extent to which the law shapes the views of those inside and outside the movement. Thus, it succeeds in accomplishing the task it sets out to do and is a welcome addition to the growing body of queer literature.

A final note: The editors are to be commended for including a comprehensive index and list of references—including case citations—something much appreciated but frequently omitted in edited volumes. It would also have been useful, however, had they added a concluding chapter to bring together the disparate findings and help the reader assess the degree to which the chapters contributed to the literature on social movements and law in general, and on the LGBT community in particular.