Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
2022
Abstract
Vice Patrol offers a novel history of the visibility trap. It integrates interventions in legal history, history of sexuality, and queer theory with remarkable ease. Lvovsky brings new insight to a question that has puzzled scholars across several fields: Why and how does cultural representation lead to increased state repression? Blending impressive archival research with sophisticated theoretical analysis, Lvovsky follows cultural knowledge into the legal system to offer a fresh diagnosis of the problem and how it develops. In her discovery of “epistemic gaps,” she uncovers a key mechanism of the visibility trap. Disagreements between the police and the courts, not internal consensus about the purpose and object of regulation, enable legal regimes to “maintain and even expand their power over policed groups.” On this account, epistemic gaps are the missing piece to understanding how the visibility trap actually works. Part I of this Book Review draws out the book’s primary arguments to elaborate this theory, offering additional context for non-specialists and pressing on a few of the claims. Part I also reveals a latent argument in Vice Patrol about visibility itself, showing how Lvovsky brilliantly disentangles the forms of cultural salience, stereotype, and self-representation that often fly under the banner of “visibility.”
In Part II, the Review tests Lvovsky’s visibility theory against contemporary transgender visibility politics. Reading antitransgender policing and transgender civil rights struggles through Vice Patrol gives us a new way to understand how regulated people can harness knowledge about their communities to influence its path through legal institutions. Recognizing the limits of visibility, Vice Patrol suggests that strategic unintelligibility can be an important tool to fight repression.
Disciplines
Civil Rights and Discrimination | Law | Law and Gender | Sexuality and the Law
Recommended Citation
Kate Redburn,
The Visibility Trap,
89
U. Chi. L. Rev.
1515
(2022).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4653
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Sexuality and the Law Commons
Comments
Vice Patrol by Anna Lvovsky, University of Chicago Press, 2021, 346 pages.
Originally appearing in the University of Chicago Law Review, 89 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1515 (2022). Reprinted with permission from the University of Chicago Law School.