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Exploring the Construction of Lgbt Political Identity and Interests in U.S

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BROKERING IDENTITY: EXPLORING THE CONSTRUCTION OF LGBT POLITICAL IDENTITY AND INTERESTS IN U.S. POLITICS, 1968-2001 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Zein Murib IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dara Z. Strolovitch August 2016 © Zein Murib 2016 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am thankful to many people and institutions for support as I worked to complete this degree. First and foremost, I thank my committee – Dara Strolovitch, Joe Soss, Andrew Karch, and Kevin Murphy – for intellectual, professional, and the occasional emotional support that created the best conditions possible for writing this dissertation. Many people describe dissertation writing as a fraught experience, and it is at times, but I have also found it to be a source of great pleasure knowing that this committee would read this work and pose provocative questions that would ultimately improve it and challenge me to develop as a scholar. I would like to give special thanks to Dara Strolovitch for the close readings and the comments she has offered on the drafts of this dissertation, as well as other recent writings as I have positioned myself to make the transition from graduate student. Her feedback and advice have been an education in not only how to be a political scientist who strives to pose timely and pressing questions about politics, but also how to mentor students. Thank you for sharing your expertise with me. I would also like to thank the political science faculty at the University of Minnesota for the education on political science as a discipline, comprehensive subfield knowledge, and fostering an intellectual environment where students are encouraged to take risks. In particular, I want to write huge thanks to Terri Caraway, Katherine Pearson, and Dara Strolovitch for the education on gender, sex, and sexuality in politics, specifically the prodding to critically approach these categories as they animate political science research. Theirs was a unique education in the sub-subfield of gender and politics, and I am very grateful for it. Thanks to Joanne Miller for early and on-going i mentorship. Andy Karch pressed me to refine the analytic framework that I introduce in this dissertation, and I thank him for being the voice in the back of my head as I am writing that reminds me to be as precise as possible with my language. Joan Tronto, August Nimtz, and Daniel Kelliher offered comments on this project at various stages of its development, and this final version is improved because of their interest and interventions. Joe Soss convened a dissertation group for the two years that I wrote this dissertation, and I would like to thank him and that group for helping to puzzle out various methodological questions as well as substantive issues. This dissertation was also greatly improved by line-by-line feedback that Joe provided for one of the earliest drafts of chapter five, which subsequently served as the model for how to convey the analysis in this dissertation; my many thanks to Joe. I have benefitted from help offered by faculty outside of political science as well. I thank Kevin Murphy for sharing his deep knowledge of the history of sexuality with me. I left several meetings with him energized by the conversation we just had and armed with a list of citations that proved invaluable as I attempted to educate myself in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history in the US. With respect to method, thanks to Annie Hall in Communications for detailed feedback and instruction in Critical Discourse Analysis and Ron Aminzade for the introduction to historical social science approaches. Jigna Desai from Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) posed challenging questions about coalitions when I presented a version of this research at a GWSS colloquium two years ago, and I thank her so much for setting me down that path. I owe many thanks to Kathie Hull in Sociology for help crafting the questions and methodological approaches during the early stages of this project. ii This dissertation was completed thanks to generous financial support from University of Minnesota’s Graduate Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and two semesters of dissertation fellowship provided by the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. I was able to conduct two summers of archival research thanks to a generous research grant from Cornell University’s Zwickler Memorial Research Fund, and I thank the archivists at the Cornell Human Sexuality Collection under the supervision of Brenda Marston for their assistance in navigating the collection. Colleagues and friends at the University of Minnesota warrant many thanks. Matt Hindman and Adam Dahl are my Seward buddies, and I thank them for their friendship and countless close and helpful readings of the many different versions of this project that contributed to its development tremendously. Charmaine Chua, Ashley English, Elena Gambino, Rachel Mattson, Emily Baer-Bostis, Chase Hobbs, and David Temin have generously read many drafts of each of these chapters and offered helpful feedback during our dissertation group meetings – my gratitude to them. Phil Chen, Maron Sorensen, Magic Wade, and Brooke Coe are dear grad school friends who I would like to thank for fun times that helped make coursework (especially MLE!), dissertating, and job marketing much brighter. I wrote this dissertation during a two year stint of living in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and I would like to thank the people there who offered support and chances for fun: Sara, Jeff, and Gina Frenette; Christina Berchini; José Alvergue and Stephanie Farrar; Pam Foreman and Ellen Mahaffy; and the queer students who came to dinner at our house or attended talks I gave at UWEC and generously engaged me on this project. Thanks are also due to the city of Eau Claire, itself, for being so “calm” that I had nothing better to iii do than write this dissertation. Last but not least, I have benefitted greatly from the advice and mentorship of my neighbor, Katherine Schneider, who is an emeritus professor and committed activist on issues impacting people with disabilities. Thanks, Kathie, for the chats over the fence and the encouraging words and wisdom that always gave me the extra motivation to go back to the computer and continue writing. I have a wonderful chosen family who were integral to the completion of this dissertation. I was lucky to meet Hillary and Caitlin Conboy during the first week of graduate school at a university sponsored BBQ. They are the greatest of friends, and I thank them for so many cocktails, dinners, Wilson/Common Roots writing dates, and dog walks, as well as advice and encouragement as I finished this degree. Rebecca Trinite and Jess Kutch are my DC friends who have always challenged me to balance my development as an academic with a commitment to activism. I thank them for that and I hope I do right by them in the classroom and beyond. I thank Jackie Burns and Shehab Jafari for helping to brighten the occasionally dull and trying moments of graduate school with their friendship and general love of life. Of my bonus family, the Detournays, I thank Emmanuel for sharing his expertise as a professor to offer invaluable career advice as well as the even more important education on single malt whiskeys. Thanks to Christine for really good pep talks! My gratitude to Charlotte, and her partner Nic, for beer and pasta and friendship in Chicago. Thanks to my immediate family are many. My parents left Lebanon because of civil war when they were young, and as a result I grew up in a family that was continually engaged in discussions about politics. I thank my parents for this upbringing that cultivated some of the sensibilities that have made the questions in this dissertation iv possible, in particular the insight that politics is not just what happens when people vote. To my dad: thanks for teaching me that framing an argument matters, no matter the subject. To my mom: thank you for showing me how to always ask tough questions and for being so incredibly tough yourself – seriously, thank you. I also want to thank my mom for extending her habit of asking millions of questions to taking the time to learn about my studies and this project. My brother actually does politics, and I thank him for being my best buddy and for being on-call to clarify some minute detail about the 107th Congress or electoral gerrymandering that I might be wondering about on any given Saturday afternoon. Beyond these lofty gifts, I would like to thank my family for the emotional and material support that made completing this degree possible. I always appreciate when people thank their pets so I would like to thank mine. Oscar receives gratitude primarily in the currency of dog treats, but it would be irresponsible if I didn’t make it publicly known that this dissertation would have never been written were it not for his constant company, snoring on the couch in my little office, and his perpetual excitement to go for a walk that always did the trick for clearing my head of writer’s block. Bidou is a cat and cannot read, either, but I thanked the dog so I would like thank him, too, for always alerting me when it was time to end my day of writing and feed him dinner. Finally, it is my strong opinion that every aspiring social scientist should have a critical feminist theorist to have dinner with at the end of the day. Mine is Diane Detournay and I owe her many thanks.
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