Lisa Duggan is a historian and cultural analyst at New York University whose work connects queer theory to the analysis of neoliberalism, political economy, and the history of sexuality in the United States.
Core ideas
- Homonormativity: in “The New Homonormativity” (2002), Duggan coined the term to name a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption. Homonormativity is not simply assimilation but the specific form assimilation takes under neoliberalism: the transformation of a liberation movement into a consumer market and a rights-bearing individual subject.
- The twilight of equality: in The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (2003), Duggan analyzed how culture wars over sexuality functioned as a mechanism for advancing neoliberal economic restructuring — how battles over “family values” provided the emotional and political energy for policies of privatization, deregulation, and welfare retrenchment.
Notable works
- “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism” (2002)
- The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (2003)
- Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (2000)
Related
- Homonormativity — the concept she coins
- Neoliberalism — the political-economic framework her analysis addresses
- Assimilation politics — the political strategy homonormativity describes
- Michael Warner — fellow critic of normative queer politics
- Queer theory — the tradition her work extends