APPENDIX IV.

 

 

BOOK-LENGTH SCHOLARSHIP ON LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER ISSUES AS REFLECTED IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY, 1972-2000

 

 

 

By Steven Epstein and David Ribes[1]

Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego

December 12, 2001

 

for the American Sociological Association’s Committee on the Status of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons in Sociology

 

 

 

Introduction

 

Contemporary Sociology (CS) is an ASA publication and the primary book review journal for sociological work in the United States. In addition to the reviews that make up the bulk of each issue, CS also publishes a list of all books received by the journal from publishers for potential review. Thus CS can be used to identify trends (for the U.S.) in the publication and reviewing of sociological books on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) topics. Specifically, the analysis that follows seeks:

 

• To quantify and analyze the history of publication of sociologically-relevant books on LGBT topics and the history of reviews of such books in CS.

 

• To assess the degree to which books on LGBT topics received by CS editors have in fact been reviewed in the pages of the journal.

 

 

Methods

 

CS has been published continuously in six issues per year since 1972. Volumes have been of more or less consistent lengths (about 600 pages per year for the first two years, then 800-900 pages in subsequent years), although the number of books reviewed per year has varied considerably (from 349 to 817). For each issue from 1972 through 2000, a graduate student research assistant performed the following counts:

 

• Total number of books reviewed
• Number of books on LGBT topics reviewed
• Total number of books listed under “Publications Received” at the back of the journal[2]
• Total number of books on LGBT topics listed under “Publications Received” [3]

 

In addition, a list was compiled of all books on LGBT topics either reviewed or received (by author and title). (The complete chronological list appears as Appendix 1.)

 

Criteria for deciding whether a book should be coded as “on an LGBT topic” were as follows:

 

1. Books substantially about gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, transsexuals, intersexuals, homosexuality, same-sex sexuality, or queer theory/politics/studies/issues were counted. (This includes books on LGBT identities, communities, movements, politics, etc.)

 

2. Books about sexuality in general, or about heterosexuality, were not counted for the most part. However, a few books that have been significant for the development of queer theory (for example, Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Butler’s Bodies That Matter) were counted.

 

3. Books about AIDS generally were not counted. However, a few that were recognized as having a substantial focus on LGBT communities were counted.

 

Clearly, books falling into the second and third categories involved judgment calls, and we considered them specifically. Still, it’s quite conceivable that others would have made somewhat different judgments in these cases. However, the great majority of books counted fell into the first category and could be coded unambiguously.

 

Two additional limitations of the methodology should be noted. First, because of the laboriousness of the task, decisions about inclusion were based simply on the titles of books, as listed in the tables of contents and the “Publications Received” sections. Any book with LGBT content not suggested by its title may have escaped notice, unless the coder happened to be familiar with the book. Second, since funding was available to hire only one research assistant to perform the counting in a single pass, there was no possibility of verifying the reliability of the coding.

 

 

Findings

 

From 1972 through 2000, CS published reviews of 18,445 books.[4] A tiny fraction of these books—117, or 0.6 percent—were on LGBT topics (including one review of a journal, GLQ). (Year-by-year breakdowns appear in the first block of columns in Table 1 and are represented graphically by the dashed line in Chart 1. Issue-by-issue breakdowns appear in the first block of columns in Table 2. A list of the 117 LGBT books reviewed, alphabetized by author, appears as Appendix 2.)

 

As Table 1 and Chart 1 demonstrate, reviews of books on LGBT topics were practically absent from CS throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The noteworthy exception is a single, lengthy, review essay of 11 books on homosexuality, by Edward Sagarin, that appeared in 1973, Issue #1 (Editor: Dennis H. Wrong). Rates in the 1990s have been somewhat better, and slightly more than half of the total number of books on LGBT topics reviewed in the history of CS have been reviewed in 1994 or later. The banner year of 1994 saw 14 reviews, 10 of which appeared in Issue #2, which featured a section on “Sexual Politics, Sexual Identities” that clustered several reviews of books on gender and sexuality (Editor: Walter W. Powell).

 

Especially because Sagarin’s 1973 review essay (“The Good Guys, The Bad Guys, and the Gay Guys”) is the only essay in the history of CS to attempt a general survey of the field, certain aspects of its publication deserve notice. First, as Stephen O. Murray reports in a recent essay on Sagarin,[5] CS editor Dennis Wrong asked Sagarin to review only a single book,[6] but Sagarin kept getting Wrong’s permission to add books until the list had reached eleven and the review had taken the form of a review essay. Thus this “data outlier” in 1973 did not reflect any specific intent on the part of a CS editor to feature work on homosexuality.[7] Second, most of the books reviewed were not written by sociologists, in part because of Sagarin’s fascination with the question of whether homosexuality was a curable condition, which led him to select work by psychologists; Sagarin restricted to a list at the end other work on social and political topics that might have been featured more prominently, such as Laud Humphrey’s Out of the Closets: The Sociology of Homosexual Liberation (subsequently reviewed in 1994) and political scientist Dennis Altman’s seminal Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Third, Sagarin focused attention almost exclusively on work related to gay men. Finally and most significantly, Sagarin’s views on homosexuality were so prejudicial that his review, as Wrong recalls, “caused a furor leading several gay activists to petition the ASA to remove me as editor.”[8] Indeed, opposition to Sagarin helped to fuel the founding of the Sociologists’ Gay Caucus at the ASA convention the following year.[9]

 

It is worth emphasizing that Sagarin’s 1973 review essay and the 1994 “Sexual Politics, Sexual Identities” feature section[10] stand as the only two explicit clusterings of multiple LGBT-related books in the history of CS.[11]

 

Our findings concerning the scant representation of LGBT-related book reviews in the pages of CS over its history are mirrored by our analysis of the “Publications Received” sections at the back of each issue of the journal. From 1972 through 2000, CS listed 48,319 books as received.[12] Of these, only 215 (0.4 percent) were on LGBT topics. (Year-by-year breakdowns appear in the second block of columns in Table 1 and are represented graphically by the solid line in Chart 1. Issue-by-issue breakdowns appear in the second block of columns in Table 2.)

 

As with books reviewed, the number of books received on LGBT topics was negligible throughout the first twenty years of the journal’s history. From 1991 through 2000, however, the annual number of books received on LGBT topics ranged from 8 to 34. The number of books received in this latter period constitutes more than three-quarters of the total received in all years.

 

An important question to ask is whether books on LGBT topics received by CS are as likely to be reviewed as other books received by the journal. (Of course, whether a book gets reviewed depends on many factors, some of them outside the control of journal editors.) A precise answer to this question would require a side-by-side comparison of the 18,445 total books reviewed to the 48,319 total books received—a task well beyond our means. Instead, we approximated an answer by:

 

            -- calculating, for each year, the ratio of the number of books reviewed in that year to the number of books listed as received in that year;

 

            -- calculating, for each year, the ratio of the number of LGBT books reviewed in that year to the number of LGBT books listed as received in that year; and

 

            -- comparing these two ratios.

 

These data appear in the third block of columns in Table 1. Overall, the ratio of books reviewed to books received is 0.38. For books on LGBT topics, the ratio of books reviewed to books received is 0.54. Thus it appears that while the number of LGBT books received by CS has been small, the proportion of these books that have been reviewed is greater than the proportion for the full set of books received.[13]

 

We conducted further analysis of the 215 LGBT-related books received to determine which of these eventually were reviewed in CS. As shown in Table 3, 87 of these books (40.5 percent) were reviewed in a subsequent issue of the journal (or, in a few cases, in the same issue or even a prior one; see Note 2). Undoubtedly, some additional reviews of recently received books (especially those listed as received in 2000) will appear in 2001 and 2002, given the time lag in the generation and publication of reviews.

 

Appendix 3 provides a list (alphabetized by author) of the 128 books on LGBT topics that were listed as received but had NOT been reviewed as of the close of 2000. This list can be compared with Appendix 2 (the 117 books on LGBT topics that WERE reviewed).

 

Note that Table 3 shows 87 LGBT books received and reviewed, while Table 1 and Appendix 2 show 117 LGBT books reviewed altogether. The discrepancy reflects the fact that 3 of the LGBT books reviewed were never actually listed under “Publications Received.” [14] These 30 books (specially marked on Appendix 2) include many of those reviewed in the earliest years of the journal (10 of the 11 in Sagarin’s 1973 review essay, and all five of the remaining books reviewed in 1972-1976). In a few cases, such as the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, the prominence of the book may explain why a review was commissioned without the books having been received. One item, the journal GLQ, would not have been listed under “Publications Received.”

 

 

Discussion

 

Trends in scholarship:

 

Assuming that publishers have been diligent in sending review copies of books to CS, then the listings under “Publications Received” indicate that book-length, sociologically-relevant scholarship on LGBT issues has been sparse. However, there appears to be a significant increase in LGBT-themed book publishing beginning in the 1990s.

 

In terms of the character and content of this scholarship, a perusal of Appendix 1 suggests the following trends:

 

• Whereas scholarship in the early period reflected concerns with deviance, stigma, and “cures,” more recent scholarship covers a wide range of social, cultural, and political issues and emphasizes sites as divergent as the military, the church, the business world, biomedicine, the mass media, and social movements. It is now difficult to predict in which section of CS a review of an LGBT-themed book will appear.

 

• Of the 11 books reviewed by Sagarin in 1973, one was coauthored by two sociologists, and another (an annotated bibliography) was written by a sociologist and a psychologist. All the remaining books were by non-sociologists. By contrast, much of the LGBT-themed work currently reviewed in CS is authored by sociologists.

 

• In the early years, books on “LGBT” topics in fact mostly focused on the “G.” Lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders have received more attention in recent years.

 

• Recent scholarship is also more likely to feature parts of the world outside the United States.

 

The role of CS:

 

It is reassuring to find that CS has consistently appeared to treat the review of LGBT-themed books as part of its mission. Within the limits of the methodology applied here, it seems that books on LGBT topics received from publishers are at least as likely to get reviewed in CS as books on other topics. (It would be useful to repeat this study for other subspecialties, in order to compare the rates.)

 

However, both Chart 1 and Table 3 suggest that rates of reviewing may not be keeping up with the relative surge in publication of high-quality, LGBT-related books in recent years. This trend bears watching, both by CS editors and by ASA organizations such as the Committee on the Status of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons in Sociology, the Sociology of Sexualities Section, and the Sociologists’ LGBT Caucus.

 

To be sure, it is often difficult to say which books merit reviews, and a consideration of books listed in Appendix 2 (all those reviewed) and Appendix 3 (all those received but not reviewed) suggests that CS editors generally have made good calls in selecting important books of sociological relevance and finding people to review them. (As might be expected, there appears to be a certain amount of arbitrariness in the list of those books ultimately reviewed. For example, of six books authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited by prolific author Steven O. Murray that appeared as “received” before the year 2000, four were reviewed and two were not.) The current editors of CS have introduced a new section called “Take Note” that briefly describes books that are not reviewed; this feature may reduce the likelihood that worthy books on LGBT topics escape notice altogether.

 

Sometimes the lack of availability of a reviewer has been a significant obstacle standing in the way of reviews of LGBT scholarship. For example, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Barbara Risman attempted to solicit a mini-review of the collection edited by Peter M. Nardi and Beth E. Schneider (Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Reader), believing that the uniqueness of this volume (the only sociologically-oriented reader on lesbian and gay studies designed for undergraduate classroom use) outweighed the usual policy of the journal against reviewing course readers. But after two potential reviewers declined, the review ultimately was cancelled.[15]

 

Of those books listed in Appendix 3 (and leaving aside those listed as received in 1999-2000), it is easy to find worthwhile books that might reasonably have been reviewed, but difficult to find many that beyond question should have been reviewed. Any list is obviously subjective, though a few influential works from outside the discipline that do have sociological import[16] stand out as eminently reviewable, including:

 

John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities

Estelle Freedman et al. (eds.), The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs

Gilbert Herdt, (ed), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History

Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud

Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America

Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town[17]

 

 

Recommendations

 

JoAnn Miller, one of the current editors of CS, offered two obvious but important suggestions for increasing the representation of LGBT scholarship in CS: ensure that publishers send review copies to the journal (as some are lax in doing so), and encourage colleagues to agree to write reviews. Both of these strategies should be promoted by the Committee on the Status of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons in Sociology, by the Sociology of Sexualities Section, and by the Sociologists’ LGBT Caucus. In addition, Miller noted that last year she and co-editor Robert Perrucci sent letters to ASA section chairs encouraging submission of themes and ideas for featured essays. Obviously this also represents an excellent avenue for enhancing the visibility of LGBT scholarship.

 

It might also be a good idea for CS to include a member of the Sociologists’ LGBT Caucus or the Committee on the Status of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons in Sociology on the editorial board to assist in suggesting books to review as well as potential reviewers. Also, whenever a new editor is appointed, the Sociologists’ LGBT Caucus or the Committee on the Status of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons in Sociology might want to provide the editor with an updated list of reviewers and their areas of specialization within LGBT studies.

 

Finally, CS may want to consider soliciting a review essay on the state of LGBT studies, given that no such essay has appeared since Sagarin’s notorious one in 1973.

 

All of the above strategies presume a continuing increase in the generation of sociological books on LGBT topics. However, such an increase should not be taken for granted, given the subtle or not-so-subtle pressures against doing such work that may continue to be present in many academic departments. It is important, therefore, that analysis of the fine details of reviewing practices not preempt consideration of the broader question of how the ASA might better promote and nurture such scholarship.