Into the fold: a contemporary history of LGBT-police relations in Victoria

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In recent times, the interrelationship between policing and sexuality has been reworked in significant ways. No longer solely a site for the reproduction of queer deviancy, pathology and criminality, policing now serves as a method for the production of respectable and innocent sexual and gender identities that are seen as deserving of visibility, recognition and protection. Through an investigation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)-police relations in the Australian state of Victoria from 1994 until the present, this research documents the incorporation of limited formations of sexual and gender diversity into regimes of policing and punishment. I conceptualise this as a process of bringing LGBT rights ‘into the fold of the state’ (Agathangelou, Bassichis & Spira 2008: 122). This thesis forwards the claim that modes of inclusion are always connected to forms of exclusion. Moving away from the idea of inclusion as inherently positive and desirable, I critically interrogate some of the possible costs, compromises, risks and benefits associated with the incorporation of LGBT rights into criminal justice frameworks. This study provokes concerns over the renewed legitimation and justification for regimes of policing and punishment that are gained on the backs of claims to LGBT protection. Using a qualitative methodology, informed by critical discourse analysis and genealogical methods, I examine a variety of texts in the archive that are generated by mainstream and LGBT media, government agencies, LGBT organisations, activist campaigns and other individuals. I provide three case studies to illustrate some of the different ways in which sexual and gender non-conformity are policed: the Tasty nightclub raid (1994); the participation of the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police in Pride March (2002); and hate crime sentencing reform (2009). In each case study I highlight dominant articulations of queerness used to garner popular support for anti-homophobic causes that, as I show, are imbricated in the politics of respectability, victimhood, consumption, and self-responsibility, whether resisting or affirming these categories (or sometimes both or neither). I investigate how police legitimacy may be enabled or constrained in their dealings with LGBT people by unpacking some of the techniques used to reproduce and fortify institutional legitimacy and create a positive police image within the LGBT community. I suggest that for police, their legitimacy has become increasingly bound up with appearing responsive to LGBT concerns.