Cyril Ghosh, "De-Moralizing Gay Rights: Some Queer Remarks on LGBT+ Rights Politics in the US" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

In his book, De-Moralizing Gay Rights: Some Queer Remarks on LGBT+ Rights Politics in the US(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Cyril Ghosh interrogates three arenas of debate over LGBT+ rights in the contemporary American landscape—debates over and critiques of pinkwashing, the recent US Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), and Kenji Yoshino’s concept of gay covering. Ghosh is associate professor of political science at Wagner College and was the original host of the New Books in Political Science podcast.

In each case, Ghosh identifies a tension in the promotion of LGBT+ rights, from both liberal and radical perspectives, demonstrating that these discourses often (re/)produce their own assimilationist logics. Drawing on queer theoretical frameworks, Ghosh ultimately argues for an approach to theorizing rights that takes seriously the project of resisting and dismantling assimilationist demands.

The podcast is co-hosted by Heath Brown and Emily Crandall.

Heath Brown is associate professor of public policy at the City University of New York, John Jay College and The Graduate Center. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown

Emily K. Crandall holds a PhD in Political Science from the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.

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