Overview

In Don’t Janet E. Halley explains how the military's new anti-gay policy is fundamentally misdescribed by its common nickname, “Don't Ask/Don't Tell.” This ubiquitous phrase, she points out, implies that it discharges servicemembers not for who they are, but for what they do. It insinuates that, as long as military personnel keep quiet about their homosexual orientation and desist from “homosexual conduct,” no one will try to pry them out of their closets and all will be well. Not so, reveals Halley. In order to work through the steps by which the new law was ultimately drafted, she opens with a close reading of the 1986 Supreme Court sodomy case which served as the legal and rhetorical model for the policy revisions made in 1993. Halley also describes how the Clinton administration’s attempts to offer Congress an opportunity to regulate conduct-and not status-were flatly rejected and not included in the final statute. Using cultural and critical theory seldom applied to explain the law, Halley argues that, far from providing privacy and an assurance that servicemembers' careers will be ruined only if they engage in illegal conduct, the rule activates a culture of minute surveillance in which every member must strictly avoid using any gesture in an ever-evolving lexicon of “conduct that manifests a propensity.” In other words, not only homosexuals but all military personnel are placed in danger by the new policy. After challenging previous pro-gay arguments against the policy that have failed to expose its most devious and dangerous elements, Halley ends with a persuasive discussion about how it is both unconstitutional and, politically, an act of sustained bad faith. This knowledgeable and eye-opening analysis of one of the most important public policy debates of the 1990s will interest legal scholars, policymakers, activists, military historians and personnel, as well as citizens concerned about issues of discrimination.

Full Product Details

9780822323174

Table of Contents

Reviews

Janet Halley's extraordinary book shows us how political analysis, linguistic reading, and legal strategy and philosophy can work together at their best. She has stunned and moved her readers time and again by challenging the apparent oppositions that inform tactical thinking in lesbian and gay legal studies. Hers is a vision complex, learned, practical, brilliant, inspiring, and radical. Don't is something everyone must do! -Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor, University of California at Berkeley For more than a decade, Janet E. Halley's groundbreaking work in queer legal theory has made hers a central voice in law and sexuality studies. For anyone interested in understanding the rhetorical battlefield of the U.S. military's anti-gay policies, Don't is a must. -Kendall Thomas, Columbia University School of Law

Janet Halley's extraordinary book shows us how political analysis, linguistic reading, and legal strategy and philosophy can work together at their best. She has stunned and moved her readers time and again by challenging the apparent oppositions that inform tactical thinking in lesbian and gay legal stuudies. Her singular ability to conceptualize a complex array of strategies is matched in brilliance by her ability to mobilize that complexity in the direction of a politics at once shrewd and insistent. When we are most prepared to take the practical route, she shows us how our premises may well spawn consequences we do not desire; and when we reflect philosophically on our long-range vision, she reminds us of the practical exigences that must constrain our thinking. Hers is a vision complex, learned, practical, brilliant, inspiring, and radical. DON'T is something everyone must do! (Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor, University of California at Berkeley)

Author Information

Janet E. Halley is Professor of Law at Stanford University.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available