ABSTRACT
This essay explains how queer criminalization has historically served larger interests of establishing/maintaining structural power relations along lines of race, gender, class, and nation, and also highlights resistance. It situates processes of criminalization in the logics and practices of settler colonialism, Indigenous genocide, chattel slavery, and exclusion of migrants on the basis of actual or perceived deviation from nonprocreative sexualities and rigid binary, hierarchical notions of gender. It then explores 1) sodomy law and the policing of gender in early America; 2) policing gender, sexuality, and national identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; 3) impacts of criminalization in the post-World War II era; and 4) growing twentieth- and twenty-first-century resistance to criminalization and the oppressive criminal legal practices that accompany it.
