Kay Whitlock

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The first comprehensive work to turn a “queer eye” on the criminal justice system, providing an eye-opening study of LGBTQ+ rights and equality.

Drawing on years of research, activism, and legal advocacy, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences as “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes—from “gleeful gay killers” and “lethal lesbians” to “disease show more spreaders” and “deceptive gender benders”—to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities.

An eye-opening study of LGBTQ rights and equality, Queer (In)Justice illuminates and challenges the many ways in which queer lives are criminalized, policed, and punished.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE GOODREADS M/M GIFT EXCHANGE. THANKS!

My Review: Back in the innocent days of 2020, when I received it, this was a mind-blowing read. In 2025, a mere five years later, its infelicities are brought into sharp relief by the spotlight the current US regime is shining on issues of social justice by trampling on, trying to bury, and (where possible) expunge progress made.

I have trans friends and family members. I'm guessing that was either not the case for the authors, or they simply did not delve deeply into those folks' experience. Importantly, though it might seem trivial to some, referring to trans women as "trans" and cisgender women as "women" just perpetuates their othering. The terms "gender non-conforming" and "genderqueer" are not synonyms for "transgender." "Genderqueer" is a different thing, its own category of queerness. I grant you that, when I first saw it codified in the 1990s, it did not have the sense of meaning it does now. "Gender non-conforming" includes anyone, cisgender or even heterosexual, whose manner of self-presentation falls on the edges or outside of a specific culture'e gender norms.

It is a case of the times being unkind to a solidly researched and competently argued (and footnoted!) work of scholarship.

That lacuna, addressable if Beacon Press brings out a second edition of this thirteen-year-old work, aside, I have the greatest respect for this genuinely informative scholarly examination of why decriminalization of same-sex sexual acts is only one small step for humankind. It is a project worth examining in the current horrifying recrudescence of the intolerant ignorance of our never-distant past. When frightened by change, humans routinely find scapegoats and the cynical, power-hungry would-be tyrants feed that base, appallingly cruel need in our ape-brained characters.
An admirable facet of this treatment of the legal system's weaponization of power is that it never isolates the causes of victimization. Race, biological sex however expressed, and socioeconomic class are all very explicitly brought into the conversation. The extent of violence against transfem and gender non-conforming queer men around the world...I'm specifically thinking of the violence committed on the US-Mexico border, though it is by no means the only place this occurs...is often exacerbated by socioeconomic pressures leading these vulnerable people into prostitution. No such threats of violence appertain to their clients. Why would that be, if it is the act of having sex with another man that is being scapegoated here?

I'll leave that thought to marinate with y'all.

In many ways it is the abolitionist movement's intersection with queer-rights groups that powerfully reinforce each other's main thrust: Reform. The system is, as the looneys on the political right constantly complain, rigged. They do not see that it's been rigged for a purpose, and that purpose is also served by impoverishing and immiserating them. Reform for selectively applied to benefit some and exclude others is the antithesis of fairness, justice, equitable distribution...all those things everyone likes until the language they're couched in gets politicized. show less

It's important to contextualize this book in the time it was published. This book is from 2011 and does not account for the past ten years. However, it is an important study in how queer people are treated in the criminal justice system. This book shows us just how unsafe it is to be gay, queer, POC, and/ or gender non-conforming in America, and how our political climate has affected and changed the treatment of queer people in the last hundred years. As a queer person trying to learn about show more the history of my community, I think this is an essential read to understand what our community has had to do to survive and to seek out equity. If anything, I think this book is a little repetitive and maybe, wouldn't appeal to the people who NEED to read it. I.e. right-wing, blue-lives-matter touting, gay-hating people.

I really appreciate that the authors pointing out that POC queers and immigrant queers are in more danger than white queers. And, in fact, are often abused by white queers, their families, and police. The authors will not let you forget the hierarchy in the queer community, how it was forced on us, and also how we are perceived by non-queer folk. I had never before thought of prisons as queer places, but now I understand the ways in which queers are abused in prisons, how queerness is viewed in prison, and the amount of victim blaming that occurs. It's really very upsetting and scary and I highly recommend reading it if you need to contextualize the abuse the LGBTQ has faced. show less

Considering Hate is a meditation on restorative justice—that justice that “seeks to replace the adversarial nature of legal proceedings with a survivor-centered focus on the harm that has been done,” that allows “those who do harm [to] acknowledge the full impact of their actions, and agree to make amends or repair the harm to the extent possible.” In other words, restorative justice is about abandoning vengeance as the model for healing the wounds of those who are wronged.

Hatred show more is a consequence not a cause, they assert. More than half the text is devoted to expanding on that simple, but surprisingly novel idea. The authors explore the nature of hate and haters and how politicians and others in powerful positions exploit fear to gain and hold on to power—and how that fear cripples justice. The implication is that human nature is itself a collaborator in the unfairness that permeates our society: “People have always more easily motivated themselves and others through fear than through positive visions of change,” they write. Their history and analysis of hatred includes a careful and illuminating examination of a changing American culture and how it has been expressed in film and influenced by shifts in political power.

Whitlock and Bronski make several points that inspire me to revise my thinking. For one, they have reframed for me the meaning of “public lands.” I have othered “the government”—separated myself from it—for so long that I have forgotten the obvious: public lands belong to the people—to me and my family and my friends and all those people who shop at my grocery store and everyone who sends their children to the school near my house.

This point is intimately related to another very important one, that “privatizing public holdings and services” stifle the collective rights of ordinary citizens—you, me, us! Would I be so complacent if they were to seize my front yard? I’m not referring to eminent domain, where my land is put to use for the good of my wider community; I’m talking about selling my land to someone who has greater financial resources than I have so that they can profit from it. (The notion that the benefit will eventually “trickle down” to me has lost its shine; even those who use the argument have become aware of its transition from a not-too-well-thought-out welfare strategy to a sly power ploy.)

As an example, the authors relate the case of Pinochet’s 1973 seizure of control of Chile’s government from legally elected socialist Allende. Supported by a US government fearful of a trend toward nationalizing natural-resource extraction industries (such as mining and oil), Pinochet authorized a group of young Chileans who had studied free-market economics at the University of Chicago to design and implement a new economic policy for Chile. The end result, write Whitlock and Bronsky, was “dismantling labor unions, reducing wages, making draconian cuts in public employment, and privatizing public holdings and services.” And, “the result was a highly effective engine of upward redistribution, transferring public resources to private hands and encouraging the accumulation of wealth by a few at the expense of others.

In this era when the redistribution of wealth is a major political issue, this term—upward redistribution—called my attention to the very important fact that redistribution is not just about taking from the rich and giving to the poor. There exists a mirror image. Seizing public assets with the supposition that people who already have more are better equipped to use it properly is simply taking from the poor and giving to the rich. It’s not a new notion, but rather somewhat reminiscent of the model of European colonization. During the nineteenth century, in search of more land for crops and pastureland to feed Western civilization, European colonists seized real estate in distant lands, where they systematically murdered the people they found living there and using it in common freehold. One such British “farmer” was reported to have said that exterminating the locals was a shame, but necessary since they didn’t know how to put their land to good use and interfered with those who did.

The solutions the authors propose suggest a balance that can be accomplished through mob accountability, or collective responsibility, as Whitlock and Bronsky term it—no small task in a litigious American culture, where admitting error or wrongdoing results in swift action to correct your sin by legalistic economic ruin.

Philosopher Hannah Arendt, they point out, wrote that our common humanity “has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men and that all nations share in the onus of evil committed by all others.”

“Responsibility must be separated from punishment,” these authors write. “To do so opens new understandings of collective moral engagement and agency rooted in an ethic of interdependence rather than of retribution. . . . Rather than emphasizing guilt and blame, public focus might usefully shift to such concepts as societal accountability, healing, and redress.”

Considering Hate is an important contribution to the body of literature that calls us to examine our thinking about violence and vengeance as a path to a better society—the notion that a bigger war is the remedy for war—and to consider the common-sense approach of abandoning revenge as a viable tactic in addressing injustice, poverty, and all the other ills of human society. show less

Truly remarkable. Whitlock and Bronski take on one of the more seething social issues of all time and attempt to solve it in under 150 pages. In my opinion they don't quite succeed, but this should not detract from the power or nobility of their effort.

The authors present a convincing argument that our knee-jerk tendency to frame certain violent acts as "hate crimes" obscures the larger picture: that existing power structures and pervasive human flaws engender, nurture and feed such acts -- show more and that what is needed in order to make things better is not MORE punishment, MORE incarceration and MORE suffering, but an emphasis on healing and an acceptance of our own responsibilities. This last will, I expect, be the most difficult to accomplish.

I particularly enjoyed how this book managed to be both dispassionate (on a passion-inducing topic) and razor-sharp. On the down-side, there are longeurs in Considering Hate, which is a bit odd considering its brevity, but I think this is due to the fact that the emphases are somewhat out of balance. The material on the depiction of hate in culture (and especially film) is interesting, but there is perhaps too much of it, and not enough of the "well, how do we change things?" -- at least on a practical level. Whitlock and Bronski all but hand things off to the reader and tell him/her to figure it out.

Make no mistake, though. This is a book to lend. I am just greedy, and wanted more. show less