Disrupting Dignity

Abstract

Dignity is having a moment. It pervades our cultural, political, and legal imagination and has become a basis for LGBTQ+ rights and visibility. How has the word been invoked? Who has done so and why? Should the recognition of LGBTQ+ people as dignified be a cause for celebration or, ironically, a cause for concern? Put differently, does this recognition foster equality, equity, and inclusion, or does it expand boundaries? Beginning with an episode in HIV/AIDS history—the shuttering of bathhouses in the mid-1980s—we trace dignity’s generative work as a rhetorical and neoliberal tool to police queer bodies and practices. We map the consequences of this practice for queer logics and worldmaking in contemporary LGBTQ+ life. We explore how the term is brandished by state and cultural authorities in public health policy, cultural representations, and law. While some understand dignity as an unalloyed good, we are skeptical of what dignity requires. Because it often demands sameness as the foundation for valuing LGBTQ+ life, some political and cultural authorities, as well as some LGBTQ+ people, denigrate the value of queer life and its position of difference. Despite this pressure, the queer penchant for difference has never fully dissipated. Instead of an adoption of sameness, contemporary LGBTQ+ practices and representations often reveal a dynamic tension between dignity’s seductive rhetoric of homogenization and efforts to reclaim a historical potential for transgression and a celebration of difference. This tension creates one possible pathway to understand who we have been and who we might become.