Emma K Russell: Queer Histories and the Politics of Policing
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Emma K Russell: Queer Histories and the Politics of Policing Abingdon, Routledge, 2020, ISBN: 978-0-8153-5490-1 Felicity Elisabeth Adams1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Queer Histories and The Politics of Policing is an emotive, reflexive and illuminating historical inquiry into queerness as a tool for regulation, governance, and policing in a contemporary age of increasing assimilation and ‘homonormativity’ (Duggan 2012). The author, Emma K. Russell provides a nuanced and rigorous analysis of police responses to queer events, identities and politics in Melbourne, Australia in view of the reconfiguring parameters of sexual citizenship and gender and sexual politics. As part of this, Russell effectively maps the complex nature of police and state interactions with queerness and LGBT rights. She evokes a number of fundamental questions in relation to the perils and underlying power dynamics involved within interactions between queerness and the police, as well as the legitimacy of a convergence between LGBT communities and the police in the present day. Russell centres the police’s evolving understandings of queer people within the text and contemplates the boundaries of these re-conceptions (6). She aims to examine how developing social attitudes relating to gender and sexual identities, violence and the state shape the relationship between the police and LGBT communities (7). Perhaps most significant of her objectives is her commitment to examining policing and queerness within the context of the shifting parameters of inclusion and exclusion. She demonstrates that “by interrogating the relationship between inclusion and exclusion, Queer Histories and the Politics of Policing explores what is at stake in the institutionalisation of queer histories and futures” (9). This focus is welcomed and is timely in light of the developing modes of policing, limited sources of accountability and the violence experienced by queer people globally. Russell combines her archival research of publicly available discourse about these topics—including news excerpts and campaign materials—with semi-structured interviews. She selects 11 key figures from the Tasty raid case and selected Victorian and South Australian activist groups and organisations to interview for her research (10–11). She is reflexive about her decision not to interview members of the police citing access, censorship, the police’s privileged position within these * Felicity Elisabeth Adams [email protected] 1
School of Law, Keele University, Keele, UK
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F. E. Adams
narratives, and the profound insights revealed by her selected interviewees as factors motivating her decision (11). She derives inspiration from Michel Foucault’s scholarship on genealogy (1988) and Stuart Hall’s (2001) work on archival research to frame her approach (9). From beginning to end, Russell emphasises the past, present and future as integral and mutually constitutive sites, which she seamlessly joins to co-produce fresh insights about queerness as both a histori
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